Soho is Britain's unhealthiest place? Jeffrey Bernard would be pleased!

Look how unhealthy it all is - drinking, eating. Shocking.

I don't know where the quote comes from but, as kids, we used to exclaim "give me temptation, brother" when confronted with something especially lovely - cream cakes, ice cream, warm pork pie. It would seem that the irresistible nature of these temptations - fast food, pubs and assorted other dens on iniquity - is the main reason for the UK's health inequalities:

Soho is the unhealthiest place to live in Britain...

I can hear a gentle chuckle from the grave of Jeffrey Bernard, legendary Soho denizen, at this shocking revelation - as Jeffrey put it:

"I've always been drawn to the things I was told not to do. Drink, sex. God! how I have loved sex and racing. They're against the rules and that's why I like them. I never liked anything that was good for me, like All-Bran and fresh air. I like the things that kill me."

So it is with Soho. But not, apparently, apparently with Great Torrington in north Devon. Probably because there's precious little to do (certainly in the category of "things that kill me") in Great Torrington. That being said, Torrington is a lovely little market town, especially if you like buying the crystal glasses in which to serve your champagne or malt whisky.

After Great Torrington, the remainder of the healthy places are in further flung parts of rural Scotland, not a thing to inspire folk who like a good time. Meanwhile, the really unhealthy places are mostly in central London. So how did the researchers arrived at the ranking:

Researchers analysed a range of lifestyle and environmental measures including levels of air pollution, access to amenities such as fast food outlets or pubs, and proximity to health services including GPs in addition to parks and recreational spaces.

It probably isn't so surprising that London fares poorly - it's densely populated, as a large city inevitably has poorer air quality than wide open Devon countryside, and - especially in the tourist magnet of the West End - is rammed full of pubs, bars and restaurants.

But why - given all the stuff about the 'heart of the community' and so forth - do these researchers cite the presence of pubs as an indicator of a place being 'unhealthy'? I'm guessing that the continued lie about drinking - any drinking - being bad for you sits at the heart of all this. The good news, despite the new puritans' best efforts to get them all closed, is that most people are still reasonable close to their nearest pub:

...on average, individuals in Great Britain are just as close to a pub or bar as they are to their nearest GP, 1.1 km [0.68 miles]

If we're talking about community then, frankly, having a pub people might visit once or twice a week is a darned sight more important than a GP surgery they might visit twice a year. And at least with pubs you can walk in when you need it rather than having to negotiate a complicated, unfriendly and unresponsive appointments system.

Our researchers (surprise, surprise - this is public health fussbucketry at its finest) also have an issue with gambling. They're shocked that most people live within "a short drive) - I'm surprised they're not agitated about folk having to drive there - of a betting shop.

What the research really shows is that things like fast food outlets, betting shops and pubs are more concentrated in densely populated urban areas. They also observe that lots of rural areas have a really lousy (on top of the deranged appointment systems and unfriendly hours beloved of GPs) access to primary heath care.

The premise for these researchers appears to be that the very presence of these bad things makes people ill. Unfortunately for our fussbuckets, either they don't make people ill or else people are resisting the temptations of booze, burgers and betting shops. The male life expectancy for Westminster (home to glorious Soho) residents is 81.4 years whereas those Great Torrington chaps down in North Devon peg it on average at a mere 79.4 years.

So it would seem that the effect of all that unhealthiness - pubs, bars, casinos, late night kebab shops and so forth - has precisely zero effect on the health of local residents. The research we're being sold here as "...an important tool for citizens and policymakers alike..." is pretty much useless as a guide to whether or not the environment in which people live is healthy (Shotley Gate, the little town across the estuary from Harwich gets fingered for unhealthiness which seems to reinforce the arbitrary nature of the model - I use this term loosely - adopted by the researchers).

And while we're about all this - central London lacks parks? Have these people never been there?

The green bits are parks. Massive parks. Soho is the redlined box.

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Davos and the flatearthers (or "Why Populism is Winning")

In 2005 Thomas Freidman said that the "World is Flat" where he argued that globalisation (or Globalisation 3.0 - the digital revolution) equalised the opportunities between different places:

“Girls, when I was growing up, my parents used to say to me, ‘Tom, finish your dinner—people in China and India are starving.’ My advice to you is: Girls, finish your homework—people in China and India are starving for your jobs.” And in a flat world, they can have them, because in a flat world there is no such thing as an American job. There is just a job, and in more cases than ever before it will go to the best, smartest, most productive, or cheapest worker—wherever he or she resides.”

There's a lot of truth in Friedman's contention (and in his observation elsewhere that communism is the best system for making people equally poor whereas capitalism has made people unequally rich) but there's a problem - flatearthers are a minority. Not just a minority in developing countries in Asia and Africa but a minority in rich countries too. In a book at least partly in response to Freidman, Dutch geographer, Harm de Blij made the case that location still matters and that the world divided into a core and a periphery with the core - big cities, expensive suburbs, grand university towns - inhabited by flatearthers.

The annual World Economic Forum shindig at Davos is, to use de Blij's argument, the time when those flat earthers are most evident to those on the periphery (and remember that a trainee hairdresser in Barnsley is as much on that periphery - at least psychologically - as the subsistence farmer in Tanzania or the kid in Sao Paolo's slums). The blanket media coverage of the shiny beautiful people in that expensive Swiss ski resort allows us to press our noses up against the glass of the flatearther bubble, to peek inside their splendid world.

The problem is that something has changed in how we see these splendid people. Before we were slightly envious of their jet-setting lives and were engaged with the fawning attention given to flatearthers by the media (whose top folk are, of course, all fully part of the flat earth life). Now many people can't see beyond the irony of wealthy and powerful people sitting in an exclusive resort to, they tell us, discuss the challenges facing the world including how they can help the majority of the world who aren't part of their flat earth. This loss of reverence for the rich and powerful (even when it throws up ghastly leaders like Donald Trump) is, I suspect, one of the driving forces behind what those flatearthers have chosen to call "populism".

Where once people saw important and intelligent people brainstorming solutions to the world's problems, they now see instead rich and powerful people doing deals. Davos seems to be about who gets the grand jobs in UN agencies, international NGOs and big business, more to do with politicians handing out favours in return for future riches, and the opportunity for those in charge of economies to close doors for those people outside the flatearther bubble. We see a line of fifty private jets parked at Davos's nearest airport and then wonder at the chutzpah of those jets' owners sitting down to talk about climate change (including taxes on air tickets, petrol and other stuff that ordinary people rely on for their mundane lives).

The problem is that the reaction to the preening arrogance of Davos is now to reject globalisation, to engage with the sort of anti-trade, anti-migrant agenda that we see from Trump. Some see this agenda as deflection - "we're doing something but not so much that it damages our shiny world" - but whether or not this is the case, the policies being promoted are popular. What too few people are doing is making a different populist case, one that says international trade, globalisation and migration are good things but that the technocratic mindset of Davos reinforces the myth that these things are somehow the gifts of powerful people who control government.

I commented on Twitter that Davos is the Oscars for crony capitalists - it's all about the fix, about a get-around for the problems of democracy. This is the world of David Cameron's 'Global Race' where business, media, entertainment and philanthropy mix and plan (without having to bother with those pesky voters) how the world will be better. Plus of course who gets the big contracts, the cushy jobs and the consultancy on whatever boondoggles are proposed.

None of this is to say that the World Economic Forum is a bad idea or that nothing good comes of it but perhaps its organisers need to take a step back and ask whether the impression the event gives is, given those populist pressures, the right one. Perhaps a spoonful or two of humility might help as well as perhaps a less opulent location. Above all we maybe need to drop the hubris, get away from the idea that the grand people gathered in Davos are the only ones wise enough to make the right decisions for the planet. There are over seven billion humans across the world and every single one of them is just as important as the few hundred gathered in that posh Swiss ski resort - if the Davos crowd can't get what that means then the populists will win and the world will be worse for it.

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Like medieval citadels, great cities fuel social disharmony and division

I've talked before about how the big cities that, at present, drive economic growth, act to exclude people. Or, to put it another way, prevent people from being anything other than 21st century peons trapped in small, crowded apartments that eat up £4 in every £10 they're paid. And worse, unlike the past's rural peons, these new urban serfs cannot settle, opt out of having a family and live a sort of 'kidult' existence that is filled with ultimately unfulfilling fun.

The problem is that, when people travel away from the city so as to have a stake in the nation, settle down and raise a family, they find is difficult to maintain the work they had before and quickly discover that (outside the specially privileged world of public sector professionals) the opportunities in affordable places aren't there. This brings me to this quotation from French geographer, Christopher Guilluy:

All the growth and dynamism is in the major cities, but people cannot just move there. The cities are inaccessible, particularly thanks to mounting housing costs. The big cities today are like medieval citadels. It is like we are going back to the city-states of the Middle Ages. Funnily enough, Paris is going to start charging people for entry, just like the excise duties you used to have to pay to enter a town in the Middle Ages.

Guilluy uses this, in part, to explain the "gilets jaunes" protests in France but also transfers the effect elsewhere - to the UK's Brexit vote, to the election of Donald Trump, and to the new Italian government. While, Guilluy speaks most commonly of the working class, it's clear that the protest movements (whether on the streets as in France or in the voting booth as in Italy) extend to a wider group of those excluded from what I once called "The Great City of the West":

There's no actual reason, other than our sociable nature, for us to live in those 'Great Cities of the West'. Indeed, they're filled with untypical humans. There are the brave few who upped sticks and travelled thousands of miles to live poor quality lives on the fringes of the gleaming, sparkly city hoping for a lucky chance. We've the fortunate beneficiaries of inheritance or beauty who can skim across the surface of the city enjoying its lights and pleasures while affording the means to avoid its darkness. And there's a vast mass of clever, skilled, hard-working people who turn the wheels of the city's economy but can't get a stake in the city, can't find the means to settle and have a family, and who justify this on the basis that they can get to see the beauties in their plays, galleries and stadiums.

Out in the provinces - sneered at by the grand city folk - there's a different culture emerging. In part this is fuelled by anger at the denial of opportunities but it is also about the reforming of community and of a hope that politics will bring the cities to their senses and allow the idea of an inclusive democracy back into our culture. Meanwhile the wealthy elite call for the over 75s to have their vote removed or for people to have to take a test to earn the right to vote - the desire is to exclude the less educated, the old, the working class from power, to return us - in the name of progressive politics - to a world before the extension of the franchise to workers in 1918.

Just as, before the trade unions and their socialist and social democrat party offspring, workers lacked a voice, today people in small town England, in la France périphérique, rust belt USA and Italy's crumbling industrial cities lack a voice. Yes they are working class but it is broader than this, as Guilluy describes:

They tend to be people in work, but who don’t earn very much, between 1000€ and 2000€ per month. Some of them are very poor if they are unemployed. Others were once middle-class. What they all have in common is that they live in areas where there is hardly any work left. They know that even if they have a job today, they could lose it tomorrow and they won’t find anything else.

If the establishments of the west want to avoid upheaval, they need to find a way to respect - listen to, heed - the voice of these people. Above all we need to stop patronising them as the "left behind" or worse and to realise that the great cities of the west will need them. The great and good must stop making the city such a barrier to having a real, cash stake in society.


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The pre-Copernican fallacy of planning and transport policies

In their research, Lee and Gordon showed that as early as 2000, no major metropolitan area (over 1 million population) in the United States had a monocentric employment pattern. Indeed, they showed that US metropolitan areas were already more polycentric than monocentric. That includes New York, where more than 75 percent of employment was outside the monocentric core (the central business district or CBD) and other major subcenters.

This is one of those facts - and it's no different in the UK - that most urban planners choose to dismiss or ignore. All the geographers brought up on central place theory find it difficult to appreciate that the motor car (and, in a few large cities, intensive urban transit) meant that employment dispersed. This misunderstanding was described as "...analogous to the pre-Copernican fallacy that the earth is the center of the universe, and everything revolves around the earth" by urban geography, William Bogart.

This is the reason why the basic justification for the 'city region' in the UK is almost entirely fictional since nearly everybody (near 90%) doesn't travel to work in the central business district. I know it doesn't feel that way for those who do commute - crowded trains and buses, thousands of purposeful people off to work - but even in a city with a centre as strong as London - most people travel far shorter distances to work much more locally.

Wendell Cox whose quotation heads this article, takes the argument even further by also rejecting polycentric models of urban form saying that "...the real momentum is beyond polycentrism, to dispersal outside of even suburban business centers". And this dispersal results in some beneficial outcomes such as less congestion and shorter travel times (and let's note that consistently the shortest travel times are by car):

Among the largest commuting modes (excluding working at home with its commute time of zero), driving alone takes the least time, averaging 28.2 minutes for urban core residents and 26.6 minutes for suburban and exurban residents. In both cases, car pools travel about three minutes longer. Transit takes much longer, 46.4 minutes for urban core residents and 55.3 minutes for suburban and exurban resident...

The UK's planning policies and, especially, transport planning policies are completely at odds with the actual choices and behaviours of residents. We have plans to connect big centres to big centres by expensive and intrusive heavy rail, most city authorities are bending over backwards to find ways to prevent ride-share systems like Uber from disrupting existing public transport (Uber probably has as much impact on bus patronage as it does on taxis), and policies are developed to make car travel less easy or more expensive. In development terms, even free marketers like the Adam Smith Institute argue for planning relaxation but only around "transport hubs" (essentially rail or urban transit stations). This ignores the inconvenient fact that people who buy into the developments built near these exurban hubs will have cars that they plan to use to get to work nowhere near the CBD that the transport hub serves.

All of this questions the manner in which local plans are drawn up and, in particular, what is meant by sustainable locations - mostly defined through access to urban centres and public transport networks. We should perhaps focus on how to make individual homes more sustainable - microgeneration, grey water and electric charging points - rather than try to force (almost certainly without success) people to shift transport modes by switching to over-capacity urban transit and rail systems. The future direction of transport - self-drive cars, drones, driverless buses and trains - and social changes driven by technology should be determining planning policy but we seem trapped in a world of policy-makers' obsession with trains, urban density and modal shift. None of these things meet emerging needs or go with the grain of consumer behaviour.



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Putting on the postman's uniform - a return to local leadership

In David Brin's book, The Postman, he describes how a man in a post-disaster USA dons the uniform and, as if by magic, is transformed into that same reliable and trustworthy working-class public servant. In exploring the importance of connections between places, Brin (in common with many other writers exploring a post-disaster world) touches on different forms of organisation. We wander from self-reliant little homes with tough but loving families through suspicious and fearful villages or towns to the most dystopic world of the Big Man and the warlord.

In all the book's places we see what many would see as a crisis of leadership. In some places there is no leadership beyond the family, an entirely independent pseudo-pioneer world - a sort of Farnham's Freehold without the casual racism. In others we see safety and security achieved at the cost of compliance with oppression - Zamyatin's We with tatty leather jackets. Elsewhere we glimpse the entirely lawless where, in a world of scarcity, the utility function drives human decisions to their logical conclusion. Here's Deirdre McCloskey in "The Bourgeois Virtues":

"The economist and historian Alexander Field has based a similar argument on biology. He notes that on meeting a stranger in the desert with bread and water that you want, you do not simply kill him. Why not? Sheer self-interest implies you would, and if you would, he would, too, in anticipation, and the game's afoot. Once you and he have chatted for a while and built up trust, naturally, you will refrain."

Or perhaps not if the utilitarians are right? In their world the task of the leader, or so it seems, is to decide - by whatever means - what is the greatest good for the greatest number and implement that good. Such, for all the deal-making, fancy words, thought leadership and opinionating, is the core purpose of those gatherings of great and good - Davos, Bilderburg, summits, conferences and think tanks. Such things are the manifestation, the logical conclusion of a philosophical tradition running from Plato through Mill and Bentham to A C Grayling: leadership from the wise.

The problem today isn't that we are entering some sort of dystopia but rather that the most essential part of leadership - that someone has to follow - has been lost in our desire to perfect the manner in which leaders lead and the things that they lead on. Here from the Millennium Project:




I haven't got the Davos agenda but, while the words may vary, this 'conscious leaders' agenda' pretty much covers what they'll talk about (other than how to get themselves more power and money of course - that's not on the official leaders' agenda). What we have here is the agenda but the problems for those leaders in Davos is that, especially for the political ones - plus those pompously titled thought leaders - it's the lack of followers that is the agitation. This is the 'populism' that is troubling so many of the great and good - for them it is, indeed, better characterised as 'unpopularism'.

The problem here is that these leaders, for all that they seem secure in their power, are uncertain how long this will remain the case. We were all pretty certain that Donald Trump wouldn't win the US presidential election - and we were wrong. We were less certain but assured by our leaders that the UK wouldn't vote to leave the Euorpean Union - and we were wrong. Elsewhere we've seen the President of France become so unpopular that he withdrew from any prospect of seeking re-election. In Spain and Greece social democratic parties are being replaced by radical parties of the left and the big losers to left and right in Holland, Sweden and Germany aren't conservatives but rather Europe's once dominant centre-left.

And the image above of the world and its problems? That is an image constructed by the centre-left - a reflection of big state, big government models for the future. It's not that the content is wrong but rather that the model assumes that the wise - Philosopher Kings - will provide the leadership and this leadership will be global. These are the people who Harm de Blij says live in a flat world, flitting effortlessly from place to place across the world and inhabiting a community where they genuinely feel like Tom Paine's citizens of the world. The problem is that 99% of the worlds population aren't in this flat world - they're, in de Blij's words, either locals living in the global periphery or mobals trying to get from that periphery to the core where they can have a better life.

"From the vantage point of a high-floor room in the Shanghai Hyatt, the Mumbai Oberoi, or the Dubai Hilton, or from the business-class window seat on Singapore Airlines, the world seems flat indeed. Millions of world-flatteners move every day from hotel lobby to airport limo to first-class lounge, laptop in hand, uploading, outsourcing, offshoring as they travel, adjusting the air conditioning as they go"

Such 'flat earth dwellers' understand the locals and mobals. After all they've listened to a thought leader speak, they've read a precis of the current academic research and they reviewed documents from a UN agency or two plus, for balance, Oxfam or some other NGO. The right noises about poverty, economic development, humanitarianism and growth drop from their lips. But they do not know these locals and mobals. Those people, the ones they see from the limo window, serving them tea in the hotel and marching angrily about how their livelihoods are threatened - they've stopped following these Philosopher Kings. Our 'flat earth dwellers' are no longer leaders but rather a bunch of folk who can see a lot of locals and mobals pushing against the glass of their bubble. And they are scared.

None of this is to say that enlightenment liberalism is wrong or a problem. After all, despite the best efforts of some to suggest otherwise, capitalism has made us richer and is doing the same for those locals and mobals de Blij worries about. Rather it's to suggest that we need to rethink the model of leadership that is revealed at Davos and to recognise that this approach - consultative, knowledge-focused but still globally focused and top down - no longer fits what's needed.

At a board away day recently (from where I pinched that image of the world's agenda) a couple of almost throwaway comments struck me as important. The first of these was that we're moving to a self-service world, quite literally through the power of the smartphone in our pocket. Want to know where something is? Phone. Need a picture? Phone. Want to buy some car insurance? Phone. I forget where I read it but if your business idea doesn't work on a phone, don't bother.

Many of the presumptions about public services, transport, retailing and decision-making no longer apply. It's not that we don't still need leadership but that that leadership needs to be more dispersed, connected and local than what we see today. The economics writer, Tim Worstall taked about Bjorn's Beer Effect:

Instead they have what I call the Bjorn's Beer Effect. You're in a society of 10,000 people. You know the guy who raises the local tax money and allocates that local tax money. You also know where he has a beer on a Friday night. More importantly Bjorn knows that everyone knows he collects and spends the money: and also where he has a beer on a Friday. That money is going to be rather better spent than if it travels off possibly 3,000 miles into some faceless bureaucracy.

In a self-service world we need to look more at local considerations than at the systems needed to deliver services - the phone in your pocket can deliver those services and you can work it out for yourself. But you still want advice, help - dare I say it, leadership - but this should be at your scale: local, responsive and focused. Most of the world's problems - pretty much all of them with the exception of that huge asteroid - don't require a global response but require us, at most, to change our personal behaviour. This needs dispersed local leadership rather than grand gatherings in nice cities.

The second throwaway from my meeting was about how people work - specifically Generation Y and Z but I suspect this applies much more broadly - in a world where access to knowledge (and fake knowledge) approaches being universal. We heard a description of a noisy, confused room of young people discussing the task at hand, phones being consulted, everybody talking, groups forming and unforming - there's leadership here but not in the traditional, dominant, top-down manner that our Philosopher Kings would want. And the leader on one task is different from the leader on another task - all a bit like The Apprentice!

This again reflects the manner in which connectivity - something that mobile technology is bringing to de Blij's locals - now forms the core function in leadership. The leader is no longer in that high castle and, tomorrow, may step aside because a different person has stepped up to lead. All this suggests that the established power structures of representative democracy and bureaucracy serve less of a purpose - if we self-serve we don't need that big bureaucracy and, therefore, its great leader. And if we're connected, involved and engaged we have less need to choose someone else to do the connection, involvement and engaging.

We'll still need the public servant but that person won't be a president, chief executive or civil service mandarin. Rather that servant will be Bjorn having a drink on a Friday with his friends and neighbours or Claire playing Lego with the kids in the local pre-school. Someone who, to return to where we started, has put on the postman's uniform.

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Heathrow and the house where I was born - why boundaries matter

Let's start by looking at the importance of boundaries. This is where I was born:



The little arrow marks 174 and 176 Beckenham Road, Beckenham, Kent. This address is located in the London Borough of Bromley. The Bromley Adult Education Centre used to be Cater Park School (alumni including Rachel Reeves, MP for Leeds West and my mum - although back in mum's time it was Beckenham Grammar School for Girls). The school is in London SE20 not Beckenham, Kent with the boundary between Kent and the London post code following the line of Royston Road and Kent House Road.

Back in 1961 all of this was in the County of Kent meaning that I was born a Kentish Man rather than a Londoner. The London Government Act of 1963 changed all this by creating the 32 London boroughs including the incorporation of Beckenham and Penge Urban Districts into the new borough of Bromley. By the stroke of a pen, my birthplace had shifted from Kent to London (although by the borough's creation we'd moved to Shirley, Surrey another bit of the new London).

All this came to mind from a little video posted on the Londonist website that showed the different boundaries of London - political, transport and postal geography are not, as the saying goes, co-terminous. The idea of London is pretty fuzzy - the futher you get from the original London (the Square Mile of the City itself) the more other place associations become important to people. Not just the distinction of North or South of the river or whether you're on the tube but identity with old towns or villages as well as the old county geography of Middlesex, Surrey, Essex and Kent.

So where I was born is variously in London, Kent, Beckenham, Bromley and, at a pinch since it's the nearest town, Penge (we lived later at 186 Beckenham Road where we knew we were in Beckenham because there was a sign outside the house saying so). Any or all of these answers would be correct for a particular question but equally that answer would be open to question. If I say "I'm from Kent" someone might retort with; "nonsense, you're from South London". And the same goes for all the answers - I'm pretty clear about my identity (it's all of these things) but defining it to someone who doesn't fully understand the relevent history and geography can get a little long-winded and confusing.

And I can hear you muttering "oh, shut up Simon, it doesn't matter". Except it does - Heathrow Airport tells us it does. Or rather the decision about airport capacity "for London" tells us why this argument about places, boundaries and history is important. Here's the current Mayor of London:

Mr Khan said the government's announcement was "the wrong decision for London and the whole of Britain".

He said ministers were "running roughshod over Londoners' views", and that the new runway would be "devastating for air quality across London".

There's more but this is enough for my point. As is remembering that both of Khan's predecessors opposed expanding Heathrow as did the man he beat to become Mayor of London. Now there are many arguments for and against different options but these are not the things determining the position of the Mayor of London. It's the bit about Londoners' views - Sadiq Khan, like Boris Johnson before him, is elected by those Londoners and they want more airport capacity but not actually in London.

Khan's argument in support of expanding Gatwick is about politics. The people affected by its expansion don't live in London so don't enter into the Mayor's calculations - there are a lot of votes to lose in supporting Heathrow but few, if any, votes lost by backing Gatwick. Yet had past spatial decisions beeen different - say a London limited to the old London County Council area or a different location (Croydon, maybe) for the airport - the Mayor might has been gung ho for supporting the third runway at Heathrow (or Croydon).

It seems that the bitterly contested (there were huge petitions from Bromley and Croydon opposing the changes) London Government Act of 1963 is largely responsible for the problem with deciding about an airport for London. That Act created the current boundaries making the new authority (as fans of Horace Cutler and Ken Livingstone can explain) politically marginal - those votes in West and South-West London really matter - and it placed Heathrow Airport within the boundary. So long as the outcome of London's mayoral election was contested, making a decision in support of Heathrow was fudged. The same thing that made me unsure about whether I'm a Londoner or a Kentish Man has also meant three decades of dither over the development of airport capacity that's right for the World's greatest city.

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Finding joy in the journey - the importance of maps

“A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.” (Reif Larsen)

One of the problems with satellite navigation systems is that they are pretty linear - we agree a route with the device and the system takes us along that route (without deviation or hesitation, as they say on the radio). Now while this is a pretty welcome and very useful innovation, it alters our relationship with maps. This dawned on me when I arrived at a destination for a meeting but had little real awareness of where I was (other than, very broadly, at a hotel in Yorkshire).

When you look at a map, you get a sense of the relationship between places that you don't achieve through listening to a pleasant voice instructing you to turn left or right, to take the third exit from the roundabout. You'll understand that Warrington is North of the Mersey and that Macclesfield really is in Cheshire. You might follow the route of a river as it winds and weaves its way to meet another river or, for the fortunate few, to arrive at the sea. Looking at a map helps explain local rivalries (except the strange one between Crystal Palace and Brighton) and why there's a town at one confluence but not at another.

Like so many things we take for granted, maps are more complicated, sophisticated and culturally-tied than we give credit. In the UK we give directions (or did before most of them closed down thanks to unhelpful government regulation, cheap booze and the smoking ban) using the often eccentric names of pubs. And names stick - people in Bradford still refer to the Ring O'Bells roundabout at Eccleshill despite it being many years since that pub existed.

It's not just pubs but other institutions that stuck. Growing up, if I wanted to get off the 54 bus at the bottom of Beckenham High Street, I asked for 'the Regal' despite the fact that it had been an ABC cinema since the mid-1950s. There are whole places where the name is taken from something long gone - Queensbury, a town on the hills above Bradford, was originally known as Queen's Head which was, of course, the name of the inn (long gone) just up from Black Dyke Mills.

All this makes the map exciting in a way that digital systems don't - here's mapmaker Tom Harrison on the subject:

When we look at a paper map, Harrison told me, we see more of the surroundings and less of ourselves, whereas digital is the other way around. A digital map, downloaded onto a phone or found on an app, can be revised quickly and cheaply but eliminates the need to locate yourself in the landscape. The premise is that you are the center of everything; there is no map without you.

With a map spread out in front of us - whatever its scale - we've a sense of place, a picture of towns, hill, railways, roads and rivers that captivates. I remember looking at a map of Tristan da Cuhna, tracing the road, the settlements (there's only one really - called Edinburgh) and wondering about the experience of living there. The same pleasure could come from a street map of Bournemouth or a classic Ordinance Survey Landranger of some part of England.

On the wall part way up my stairs is a copy of the original OS survey map of Cullingworth and surrounding areas - it is replete with the history of where I live in a way that can never be the case with a text history. You can trace your finger across the map - look at the buildings that have gone and the ones that survive. We're reminded that the village was much smaller despite having four mills and that what population we had was mostly crammed into back-to-back terraces in the centre of the village - now, bar for one or two, all demolished in the 1960s.

So next time you're going on a trip, for pleasure or business, take a minute or two to get out the map and look at where your going. Before you tap the postcode into your satnav, trace the different routes on that map, look at the places you'll pass, the sights you might see. Take a chance to name the hills you'll drive pass, to know which rivers you'll cross and why the towns you'll pass by or through are there. As you drive, little triggers of memory will prompt you to remember those few minutes of research and the things you learned. Above all you'll have a sense of the place itself not merely the line between where you started and where you'll finish.

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Megacities and the Dick Whittington Principle - agglomeration versus central place

The world's most powerful drivers of change - economic, social, cultural and political - are large cities. We don't have to like all this change - Mike Bloomberg's fussbucketry being a case in point - to appreciate that this dynamic is very real. I'm not saying that everything is invented and every innovation takes place in developed world megacities but the evidence does suggest that disproportionately this is the nature of modern development.

I noted this a short while ago in observing that the 'London Problem' isn't really a problem just of London - it started with this Peter Thiel quote:

“If you are a very talented person, you have a choice: You either go to New York or you go to Silicon Valley.”

The same, of course, goes for London - let's call it the Dick Whittington Principle where ambitious, clever people go to where there are lots of other ambitious and clever people because they're more likely to succeed. This Dick Whittington Principle is at the heart of the idea in economic geography of 'agglomeration' where a critical mass of people (or resource availability) drive innovation and through this economic growth. The result is the idea that we need to use attractors for those people - given that, these days, most growth is driven by people not by the availability of other resources. These attractors include universities and research institutes, high technology businesses and cultural industries.

Now this approach produces problems - it runs counter to the idea that growth needs to be inclusive and results in some places being, as it were, left behind. It is this concern that sits behind the RSA's 'inclusive growth' work and the alternative economic models promoted by advocates of new localist approaches such as this from New Start Magazine:

But this agglomeration model – the dominant local economic model for UK cities – creates as many losers as winners and is an outdated approach to city economies that are currently experiencing huge social, technological and environmental change. This dominant model favours city centre economies, skilled workers and high-end jobs. It starts with the physical – buildings and infrastructure – rather than the needs of people. It encourages people to move or commute to areas of opportunity rather than creating jobs close to the neighbourhoods in which they live.

The result, so these people argue, is illustrated by a place such as Greater Manchester where a successful centre in Manchester and Salford contrasts with slightly tatty and declining mill or mining towns like Oldham, Rochdale and Wigan. The success of the city centre simply isn't delivering growth on the periphery of the Greater Manchester urban agglomeration. This same pattern will be seen in West Yorkshire, in Birmingham and on Tyneside.

This displacement - a sort of negative hysteresis - doesn't just create problems for economies but also underlies social disconnection. Although the debate about the 'left behind' and populist politics is a little overblown, the spatial distribution of support for such campaigns is hard to dispute.

The issue, however, is that whether we adopt the leftist approach of New Start or the sort of populist approach of Trump, Farage or Le Pen, the solutions on offer result - assuming we accept agglomeration theory - in a sub-optimal outcome. We get lower rates of growth because we want to equalise that growth across every community - preventing (if we can) Dick Whittington from going to London doesn't just mean Dick has less opportunity but, by not bringing together others like Dick, society as a whole is poorer.

Here is what the populists are sadly getting wrong: While cities and rural areas are — and have long been — politically competitive, they are in fact economically complementary.

This thesis - that rural areas (and suburbs for that matter) need cities and vice versa - draws on another central idea of economic geography: central place theory. Here's the basics:

The German geographer Walter Christaller introduced central-place theory in his book entitled Central Places in Southern Germany (1933). The primary purpose of a settlement or market town, according to central-place theory, is the provision of goods and services for the surrounding market area. Such towns are centrally located and may be called central places.

Now leaving aside that Christaller was quite an enthusiastic Nazi, we can see that the central ideas of his work remain perhaps the dominant thesis in modern spatial planning. Anyone close to the UK's local plan process will be familiar with concepts like 'settlement hierarchy' and 'rural service centre' that draw directly from European location theories. It is perhaps time, in economies dominated by services, to start questioning the use of central place theories based on economies dominated by trade in goods. And rather than trying to shoehorn agglomeration theory into the same box as central place theory, we should be seeing them as competing views of modern regional development.

The presumptions that underpin the European single market (and other customs unions) are that central place ideas are correct. By granting the megacities (and Europe really has only one - London) a place on the top of a classic hierarchy of settlements with each dependent on the settlements below, we acknowledge that removing barriers to trade in (primarily) goods results in more economic growth.

If, however, agglomeration theory is correct then this requirement carries less weight. The megacity - London, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo - is divorced from its hinterland. It may be convenient to trade with that hinterland but it is neither necessary or contributing to the success of the megacity. In this model, London's success isn't connected at all to its position at the top of a settlement hierarchy but rather to its capture of the modern world's most important resource - ambitious, clever people. As a global city, Europe needs London but London doesn't need Europe.

It's probably more nuanced than this and the question of what happens in the rest of England remains but, from the perspective of economic geography, the answer to agglomeration or central place gives you the answer to that other question: will Brexit work? And partly this is about the theories in question and their relevance but it's also about policy choices. Regardless of trade deals the UK government has to work out how to capture as much of the modern economy's key resource - human innovation - so as to ensure we get the greatest benefit from agglomeration.

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We'd be a better world with a little more geography and a little less economics.

Two things happened recently that reminded me of how we have pushed geography to the margins of learning. And that this is pretty much a disaster.

The first is a comment on my blog from by sister, Frances Coppola:

On a larger scale, the same thing is happening in the EU periphery. Whole countries are becoming ghettos of the elderly, sick, disabled and those trapped by low skills and lack of money, while the young and skilled migrate to the core in search of better-paid work. I wrote about this a few years ago. I won't post the links here, but if you want to look the posts up they are called "the creeping desert", and (rather more upbeat) "in the countries of the old". You might also like to look up Paul Krugman's work on social geography. He won a Nobel for it, if I recall correctly.

The point Frances makes isn't relevant to what I'm saying here as what interests me is the last two sentences. Paul Krugman is, of course, a Nobel Prize winning economist. There are no Nobel Prizes for geography.

Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.” He has developed models that explain observed patterns of trade between countries, as well as what goods are produced where and why.

Now I'm not going to start an argument about what is geography and what is economics but I spent my childhood reading (well more than was healthy) Stamp's Commercial Geography - the 1935 edition. And it was and I guess still is about "the location of economic activity". These days, however, it's so much sexier to call yourself an economist even if what you're doing is geography.

The second event was a visit to a book shop. Indeed to perhaps the best looking book shop anywhere in the world, Waterstone's Bradford:



Filling in some spare time usefully by wandering around this wonderful shop I noticed that while there's a politics section, a history section and a social science section there's no geography section. OK there's some shelves labelled travel but these are almost entirely guides. What there isn't is any attempt to bring together books about geography - the modern day descendants of that Stamp's Commercial Geography.

Our problem is that, while we festishise history and drool over economics, geography's mainly treated as either shopping studies or quiz questions. And the result of this is that it's not taught enough (and perhaps not well enough):

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and National Geographic have commissioned a survey to gauge what young people educated in American colleges and universities know about geography, the environment, demographics, U.S. foreign policy, recent international events, and economics. The survey, conducted in May 2016 among 1,203 respondents aged eighteen to twenty-six, revealed significant gaps between what young people understand about today’s world and what they need to know to successfully navigate and compete in it. The average score on the survey’s knowledge questions was only 55 percent correct, and just 29 percent of respondents earned a minimal pass—66 percent correct or better.

In know this is America, famous for not knowing any geography, but I'm pretty sure we'd find a similar ignorance were we to survey students in European universities. We gleefully proclaim the importance of 'location' (even 'location, location, location') but then allow children to leave school knowing next to nothing about their world, barely able to comprehend a map, and incapable of seeing the connection between culture, economics and the physical world.

There's nothing new in this - the first edition of the National Geographic (published 128 years ago today) included this grumble:

Davis also takes time to bemoan the lack of geographic knowledge among the public: "It makes one grieve to think of the opportunity for mental enjoyment that is lost because of the failure of education in this respect."

I remain of the view that we'd be a better world if we focused a little more on geography and a little less on economics.

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A few urban thoughts worth reading (plus a little planning grump)

Let's open with Centre for Cities who've published their latest report. As usual it is pretty mainstream urbanism - all agglomeration and clusters - but still worth a read:

The report suggests that to be successful, local economies need to grow their ‘export base’ – those businesses that sell goods and services outside of their immediate area, be that to regional, national or international markets.

This is the regional economics version of thinking exports are more important than imports. And centre for Cities (just like their inclusive growth 'opponents') still seem a little obsessed with the local multiplier. Which is pretty dodgy economics if you ask me.

Meanwhile, James Gleeson has spotted one of the reasons for the UK's (or more specifically London's) housing problems:

In 1911 England reached ‘peak North’ as its population centre of gravity rested at Stoney Stanton, after which began the great movement south-east that has continued to this day. For the last couple of decades England’s population centre has travelled at a rapid pace on a route pleasingly parallel to Watling Street, the Roman road that connected Wroxeter with London and the coastal ports beyond.

The problem is that, since we're not snails or gypsies, the houses don't move with the people. And it reminds us that we need more geography and less economics.

All of which makes the cost of building houses pretty important. And, land costs aside, all sots of reasons contribute to making this price higher and higher. Here's Canadian urbanist blogger, Urban Kchoze on the subject:

Now, much has been written about the planning reforms that we need to achieve more affordable housing. But not much has been said about what affordable housing actually looks like. Sometimes, it feels like some people think that affordable housing is run-of-the-mill housing, just cheaper, and that's not how it works. You wouldn't expect a KIA subcompact to be identical to a Cadillac large sedan.

Really interesting (with some interesting Japanese stuff - they're closer to having this cracked than most places) and relevant wherever you're thinking about for your housing.

Joel Kotkin at New Geography previews a report - Geographies of Inequality - that aims "to unpack some of the prevailing assumptions that routinely define, and often constrain, Democratic and progressive economic and social policy debates". And there's a telling conclusion:

To address the rise of ever more bifurcated regions, we may need to return to policies reminiscent of President Franklin Roosevelt, but supported by both parties, to encourage dispersion and home ownership. Without allowing for greater options for the middle class and ways to accumulate assets, the country could be headed not toward some imagined social democratic paradise but to something that more accurately prefigures a new feudalism.

We need to stop thinking that owning your home is some sort of offence against those treasured "progressive" ideals. Asset ownership is one of the most liberating and empowering things going.

And it's the attitudes of BANANAs and NIMBYs that makes this liberation more difficult:

The CLA has outlined a number of proposed reforms they say will contribute to the rural economy.

They recommended farmers be granted the right to erect small buildings (up to 458sqm) without prior notification of the planning authority in order to reduce costs and delays.

The campaign group also called for it to be made easier to convert agricultural buildings to homes. They said this is being held back by the ‘obstructionist attitudes’ of local authorities, who have refused half of all applications.

The construction of between one and nine affordable homes in rural villages would, the CLA also argued, help to address the acute shortage of homes for those who want to live and work in rural communities, as well as create income opportunities for local landowning businesses.

None of this will make a bit of difference to the 'openness' of the Green Belt or the integrity of rural communities and is more sensible that daft policies banning second homes and so forth. Yet the anti-development lobby still bangs on as if a few houses in rural areas will somehow destroy the entire culture of such places.

Finally: have you registered for the Antarctic Biennial yet?

"The Antarctic Biennale is not just another art event. It is a utopian effort to get artists, architects, writers & philosophers to think about the last pure continent on this planet."

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Some geography stuff - mostly not about Brexit - to read...

Free to a loving owner - the declining villages of Southern Europe

US Gun Ownership 
 

"According to the survey, which was conducted among 1,001 Americans in the aftermath of the Orlando nightclub shooting, 36 percent of U.S. adults either own a firearm personally, or live with someone who does. That's the lowest rate of gun ownership in the CBS poll going back to 1978. It's down 17 points from the highest recorded rate in 1994, and nearly 10 percentage points from 2012."

Not quite what we take from the news about guns in the USA.


 
Sluggish European economies - a long view
 

"First, in 1900, European countries were not only the world’s economic and military powers. They were also among the most populous countries in the world. By contrast today, Russia is the only country in the top 10 most populous. Then Germany is 16th and France is 20th. More importantly, some of the new demographic powers, India, Nigeria, Egypt, Mexico, the Philippines and Indonesia, are growing at a healthy clip, as can be seen from their Total Fertility Ratios (TFR, see table) whereas European countries are growing very slowly at TFRs that will ensure stagnation or shrinkage in the sizes of their population."

Always good to see geographers taking a long view (unlike most economists) of the reasons for Europe's sluggish economy. Also reminds us why we need immigration.


Brits still think they're working class
 

"Despite a long-term decline in the size of the working class to just 25%, the proportion of the public who identify themselves as working class has remained stable over time, says the survey. Significantly, it finds that with middle class occupations who still regard themselves as working class are more likely to be socially conservative on issues such as immigration."

Some more demography - and yet again a reminder that geography is just as (perhaps more) important as economics.


How left and right miss the point about unaffordable housing
 

"But I soon discovered, after looking past the cultural distinctions, that both conferences had the same message. Speakers and attendees at each recognized, whether they were predisposed or not towards free-market ideology, that the lack of a true market in cities was causing the affordable housing crisis. That is, existing residents buy homes in destination cities, and then utilize land-use regulations and anti-growth public officials to prevent new construction. This creates artificial shortages, driving up prices and pushing out poorer demographics."

And again we're reminded that too much debate about housing simply ignores the spatial realities - that pesky geography.


Brexit doesn't mean we'll need to build fewer houses
 

"In summary, the current basis for UK estimates of housing need are already predicated on a 45% drop to total net-in-migration by 2021, so for Brexit to have any downward pressure on planned housing targets in Local Plans, it would need to be assumed that Brexit resulted in European net-migration to the UK falling to virtually zero over the medium to long term. This seems unlikely."

A reminder that not only are OAN housing numbers mostly rubbish but Brexit won't change this fact!


The slow death of Southern Europe's villages
 

"In the southern Italian medieval village of Sellia, local mayor and paediatrician Davide Zicchinella published a decree forbidding locals from falling ill and dying. While Zicchinella has admitted that he cannot fight the laws of nature, he’s hoping that his action will prompt elderly residents to take up healthier lifestyles."

The sad tale of how Southern Europe's ancient villages are, quite literally, dying as demography, migration and crap planning leave them as places filled with the old and poor.

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