Urban densification is bad for the planet

We're told, aren't we, that building more densely in our cities will be great for the environment. Cramming everybody into a smaller space means more bikes, more walking, more public transport and fewer of those terrible, evil cars. With the result that, hey presto, all our carbon footprints are ever so much smaller.

Hang on a minute though...



Hmmm. This graph comes from a study by the Australian Conservation Foundation and, echoing similar studies from Chicago and elsewhere, it shows that transport - all those cars - isn't the bad boy you think it is when it comes to our carbon footprint. High-rise, apartment living itself generates a per capita carbon footprint 50% higher than is the case for suburban living. Even with a higher impact from using the car, suburbs are less environmentally damaging than dense urban environments. And this is without us even trying to reduce its footprint.

All this reminds us that, far from eating beef and driving cars being the biggest culprits in terms of energy use, heating or cooling our homes is the baddie. And not only is our individual footprint bigger (largely as a result of unshared accommodation and the lack of families in dense urban environments) there's also that huge additional cost dubbed "operational" - everything from street lighting and traffic management through to lifts and managing communal areas in apartment blocks. The idea that cramming us all together is good for the planet doesn't stack up.

Despite this (and despite denisification being bad for health, congestion and housing affordability) we are still wedded to the idea of ever more dense cities and to the denigration of suburbs as ugly, planet-killing, car-choked hell holes. Time to change.

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Our urban policy is based on snobbery - time to change.

"Oh god we're going to get absolutely dreadful urban policy for five years, all targeted at the awful Britain of out-of-town shopping centres, massive car parks, Frankie and Bennys and giant cinemas"

This Tweet from Daniel Knowles, a journalist at the Economist who, as far as I know, lives in London, sums up everything that is wrong with the snobbish, anti-suburb urban policy beloved of planners and politicians trapped in Le Corbusier's planned, controlling city fetish. I'm sure we're not far away from a reference to agglomeration theory and extended quotations from Michael Porter and Richard Florida.

What strikes me most about this comment is the shamelessness of its snobbery. It's not that Knowles is simply criticising urban policies that reflect the realities of lives in towns across the UK but that he does so in the manner of somebody fishing out a soiled pair of someone else's knickers from the bottom of the laundry basket.

Some things, however, bear repeating again and again and one of them is that over 90% of journeys are done on roads and most of those are done in private cars. Railways, trams and other fixed line systems really don't provide a genuine alternative to the private car. We can shift a few people onto these systems where they track busy routes but they can never match the complexity of urban travel patterns. Buses are better but even then, given operating costs, it's difficult for a bus network to fully track the dispersed nature of travel.

In Knowles' world the answer is to deny people the flexibility of private transport - something less problematic for the city-dwelling wealthy than it is for the small town and suburban working- and middle-class. This restriction is justified by an anti-car ideology underpinned by an elitist disdain for the lives of these ordinary people. What does it matter, think such folk, if those people in small towns and suburbs can't get to out-of-town shops or cheap eateries the way they can now.

Given that the direction of technological travel for transport is towards zero emission vehicles, autonomous and digitally-enabled systems it still confuses me why we're so stuck in that early 20th century Le Corbusier model of urban containment and mass transit. These technological changes demand a different transport ideology, one that recognises dispersed populations, complex travel networks and human autonomy. The problem is caught in the snobbishness of the anti-suburb world view - these places are dullsville, filled with dreary people leading boring lives involving giant cinemas, chain restaurants and out-of-town shopping with big car parks.

The problem for these metropolitan snobs is that you can't base your national urban policy solely on a sneering dislike for towns and suburbs. So such people subborn the environment, friend to the NIMBY, as justification for an anti-car, inflexibility. The snobbishness is wrapped up as caring for the planet and allows arguments for more railways (which the visitors to out-of-town shops, big cinemas and Frankie and Benny's seldom, if ever, make us of) to dominate transport debate. It defeats me why this is the case since simple maths says this is the wrong strategy - if nineteen out of twenty journeys are on roads even doubling rail capacity barely scratches the surface of demand, assuming that we've built a rail system that meets actual journey needs.

Yes we need better transport systems, yes we need better urban policy but if what we get is elitist snobbery wrapped up in greeny-greeny saving the planet then it is not going to work and, worse, means ordinary people doing ordinary journeys in their ordinary lives will be made to pay more because those snobs don't like big car parks at out-of-town cinemas. These are the sort of people who don't like Christmas house bling - these are not good people.

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Opposition to urban sprawl is as much about snobbery as self-interest

The standard narrative about urban containment - the "green belt" as we call it in England - is that is persists because of the economic self-interests of homeowners in communities at the margins of urban conurbations. These are the NIMBYs and they have driven the policy of containment to the extent that large, growing cities - San Francisco, London, Barcelona, Sydney, Auckland - have their economies hobbled by the growing unaffordability of housing in these places. And its true that the politicised planning system - government telling people what they can and cannot do with their property - is too often captured by these NIMBYs. But there's a second bunch of people who are just as important, especially where the setting of national policy is concerned. Let's call them "urban snobs". Here's one of them quoted by Joel Kotkin:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I’m happy for them,” snarks Elizabeth Farrelly, urban and architecture critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. “Even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

What we're told we need is high rise living, a sort of urban wonderment of pokey little flats inhabited by the childless young (and increasingly not-so-young). Except for the fact that, contrary to the snobs argument, cities are not an environmental blessing:

Suburban detached houses, according to one Australian study, use less energy per capita than those of inner-city urbanites. California, the hotbed of climate lunacy and forced densification, has reduced its greenhouse gases between 2007 and 2016 at a rate 40th per capita among the 50 states. It has succeeded, however, in driving up energy and housing prices well above the rest of the country; the world capital of the elite tech economy also suffers the highest cost adjusted poverty rate in the nation.

So we have a rootless, childless, kidult population flitting around the big city doing achingly exciting jobs in tech or politics or law and pretending that this is the good life, far better than suburbia's boring, plain and predictable world. We will soon reach a point of confrontation between suburbia and the big city as those suburbs realise they have political power and can challenge the anti-car, anti-family agenda of the urban snobs.

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"We don't like cities, oh no. We love 'em"

One of the concerns emerging from Onward's research into the 'politics of belonging' was a concern about cities:

71% of people think that “more people living in cities has made society worse”

We could, of course, explore what exactly we mean by city here but the sentiment is an important one given that, as Onward showed in earlier research, we don't want new homes built outside the city. At the heart of the sentiment is that people really do yearn for community and, rightly or wrongly, consider that the city does not provide for such neighbourliness.

Despite this finding people continue to move into cities and the larger the city the more attractive it is to the migrant.

The United Nations in 2009 and the International Organization for Migration in 2015 both estimated that around 3 million people are moving to cities every week. Approximately 54% of people worldwide now live in cities, up from 30% in 1950. Sources estimate this will grow to 2/3 of world population in the next 15-30 years. More than half of urban dwellers live in the 1,022 cities with greater than 500,000 inhabitants.

The reasons for this migration are primarily economic - the city is where the work is so you go to the work - but there are also a collection of amenity and social factors that perhaps get less attention. I had an unresolved conversation a while ago with former ASI research director, Sam Bowman about whether the wider amenity value of a place is factored into housing costs (there's more fun stuff in a city meaning that the value from the rent is greater). There are more social and business opportunities in a city making it more appealing as a place to live.

The problem is that this doesn't explain the disconnection between what people say they want (essentially suburbia) and what they actually buy (city living). There is probably a 'life stage' factor in all this with younger people and wealthy 'empty nesters' populating a largely child free city while those with families choose the suburbs but it also reflects how suburbia not only lacks the city's amenities but also lacks affordable places to live. In times past suburbs, even well-connected suburbs, were cheaper than the city (they were also cleaner and smog-free) but the virtual halt on expansion changed this pattern.

The policy challenge is, I suspect, less about housing than it is about the connectedness of housing to the city amenities and associated agglomeration effects. When we look at transport infrastructure we spend too much time calling for multi-billion investments connecting city to city rather than creating a more intensive network within a large urban area. When you have that connectedness (as London has) it is ridiculous to then have restrictions on development within easy access of that network (which London also has). Elsewhere the situation differs either because of dispersed populations or because of topography, fragmented political geography and underinvestment (Transpennine England is a good example here) - there is no network and without it less agglomeration effect and less successful cities.

The other part of the policy challenge relates back to people thinking living in cities makes society worse, to the lack of social capital in dense urban places, and to the transience of environments dominated by private rented property. Plus, of course, the persistent problem of affordability. The odd thing is that in a previous age we considered that as a principal means of providing housing, private renting was exploitative and we replaced it via municipal housing and the encouragement of home ownership. Today many urbanists seem to favour renting as an approach praising its flexibility and, of course, affordability.

Suburbia was our historical compromise between the city and the countryside - many of the amenities of the city and access to its agglomeration effect while maintaining a sense of space and an idea of community. We need to recognise that strategies to prevent the expansion of cities - for reasons of cohesion, environmental protection and snobbery - have contributed to a significant problem. Right now most of the land needed to accommodate expanding cities is non-urban and at the margins of the exiting built area. We are actively preventing development here - this needs to change. At the same time we need to look at strategies aimed at making the city itself more liveable - experimenting with flat pack housing and sky gardens or building more child-friendly environments within developments.

None of this precludes the need for more development land at the city margin or the requirement to spend money on the networks needed to integrate new development into the wider city but we need to get away from the rigidity of current plan-driven development models. We need to recognise that families need private outdoor space (and parks, while great, don't meet this need) and that cities do too little to make families welcome. This matters because families stay put for a substantial time - the demands of children (schools, childcare support and the activities of growing up) tend to keep people in one place for a long time, something that would allow for denser urban areas to develop the sense of community that transient singles really don't provide.

How our urban environments develop, whether or not we shape them in the manner of suburbia or as rabbit hutches for tomorrow's peons, is one of the big policy questions but sadly one mostly pushed aside by dominant obsessions with slaying perceived environmental demons. The decline in community is as big a problem as climate change yet we seem not to be thinking about how to restore trust, how to create stable neighbourhoods and how to get this without throwing out the social and economic advantages of the city.

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British and American suburbs are very different - we should remember this when doing housing policy.

 I am, as you know, a fan of suburbs. The best suburbs combine the attributes of the city - walkability, access to public transport (but not to the exclusion of cars), a variety of house styles and tenures build reasonably densely all combined with a sense of openness and access to clean, fresh air and even the countryside.

So it worries me when people write about housing development and, in doing so, repeat this sort of line:

“…sprawling communities of single-family homes that require a car to navigate are not what’s drawing people anymore. What’s popular now are places where people can live in mixed-use, multifamily housing—maybe an apartment building above a coffee shop—and walk, bike, or take transit to get around.”

Firstly this isn't true. Or rather it is in some places because that's all we're building. This quotation comes from Tracy Hadden Loh, Christopher B. Leinberger, and Jordan Chafetz - pretty much champions of dense, high-rise city development. My problem is that it's quoted in a piece about British housing issues. Plus is completely ignores what Americans say when they're asked about the place they want to live and the houses they prefer - and what they actually do when able to choose.

But first let's remember that British suburbs look and feel very different from American suburbs. You'll all be familiar with what American suburbs look like from just about every second thriller or romantic comedy - low rise, often single-storey, family homes built on large plots that feature huge garages, lawns and not much else. Often there's no pavement (as we Brits call it correctly) and the road space is wide.

You'll also know that, while there are some similarities, British suburbia doesn't look much like this. I was brought up in Beckenham which is pretty much an archetypal suburb and while there were some larger houses (and a few very large houses) most of it consists of three-bed semis or, in the older Edwardian parts, solid three-bed terraces.

Even in today's new build suburban housing, the style, size and spacing is completely different from just about anything you'll see built in US suburbia (and not just because we use more brick or stone and less wood). Yet the writings of US anti-suburb urbanists are taken as applicable to this completely different environment.

The development of Britain's suburbs did not sprawl out in an uncontrolled manner, nibbling away willy-nilly at the edge of the countryside. They were, from late Victorian times onwards set out in planned environments - visit the Cator Estates is South London to see how this worked before the first world war and any number of places from Shirley near Croydon to Pudsey in Leeds to see the product of the 1930s housing development boom. These suburban developments were connected to existing communities - helps sustain and expand the services those places provided and allowing for immediate access to public transport networks - and laid out to encompass open space, schools and those rows of local shops we all grew up knowing. The idea that these places weren't 'walkable' is manifest nonsense yet again and again we're peddled this myth that only crowed, dense "mixed-use family housing" can provide for this perfection of urban pedestrianism.

Finally can we just say 'no, not true' to this nonsense:

...because though city-loving hipsters tend to grow up, start families and even buy houses and cars, they’re not going to conform exactly to the lifestyles of their parents and grandparents

Whenever people are surveyed about their preferences, most plump for that familiar family home with a garden - ideally near good schools and not so far from a good link to the city. Perhaps with a good park nearby, a decent pub and some local facilities (post office, chemist, doctors). It remains the case that suburbia - the English sort of suburbia - represent best compromise between urban living and some sort of bucolic countryside idyll.

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Want to solve your city's housing crisis? Simple - build more houses, any sort of houses

So much angst is being expended on trying to solve London's (and other places too - Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester and so forth) housing problems. It seems that the solution is rather simpler than all the think tanks, planners and mayors suggest:

It is not some magical mystery as to why Sydney's rental prices are declining. And it's certainly not due to rent control. It's because Sydney's seeing a building boom. The size of Sydney's apartment market has doubled in two years, and landlords have had to drop rents in order to get tenants.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported over the weekend that the city has seen more than 30,800 multi-unit dwellings built last year, a record for any Australian city. And there still are nearly 200,000 additional dwellings in various stages of development. The city is seeing a glut driven by investors. And those investors are now leasing out the apartments.

So it's easy. Allow more development. And to do this you have to encourage speculative investment:

About half of Australia’s apartments are likely to be owned by an investor. And lending to investors in NSW, rose sharply a few years ago, fuelling a real estate investment boom that created this massive rise in rental stock, Ms Owen said.

There are risks here but primarily (as connoisseurs of Spain's 2000s housing boom will know) for the investor not the renter or the taxpayer. So why is it that governments are stopping things that drive this investment (foreign buyers, Airbnb, liberal planning regulations) and then complaining that there aren't enough houses? Or, worse, blaming high rents on those investors - look at Barcelona's Airbnb protests - rather than on the failings of mayors and local councillors.

I appreciate that mayors want to placate the NIMBYs (remembering that current residents have votes while possible future residents don't) but if, in doing so, those mayors propose counterproductive ideas like rent controls, foreign investment controls and height limits then they should be bundled out of office for being dangerous fools.

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Whose idea of beauty is it? Thoughts on why new homes don't look great.

My friend and former colleague, Huw Jones is your go to man for knowing about back-to-back housing and, in particular, the plethora of such housing in Leeds. It looks like this:



Most of these homes were thrown up to house the poor in Leeds and over 20,000 of them remain. Outside West Yorkshire (Bradford, Calderdale and Kirklees all retain them albeit not so many as in Leeds and stone not brick) all the back-to-backs have gone except for a few specially preserved historical relics in Liverpool and Birmingham. Leeds, however, is the only place to have back-to-back housing built after 1909 (indeed the most recent of Leeds' back-to-backs date from 1937). There's a reason for this, of course, because the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 prohibited the building of back-to-backs. Leeds found a loophole by claiming that the homes already had approval at the time of the Act.

When we look at these homes and especially those built, as in the picture above, in long streets, we see the classic image of England's inner city slums - narrow streets, homes opening straight onto the pavement, shared middens and little fire safety. But as Huw Jones was wont to observe, as a built form, these homes use land efficiently, were built well enough to last longer than many homes built more recently, and provided a not unattractive street scene.

This isn't an argument for us building back-to-backs again but rather a chance to raise a question as to what constitutes beauty in housing and to ask further why so many of the homes built today by mass house-builders are at best boring and at worst downright ugly. Here's some built, unlike the back-to-backs in Leeds, to house people well enough off to afford to live hard by the RHS gardens at Harlow Carr on the edge of Harrogate:



When I posted this image and asked these questions on Twitter, I received a variety of responses pointing to potential causes - greedy developers, planners and the planning system, the clunkiness of building regulations and that consumers care little about beauty preferring functionality. The thing for me is that, for all that these things might be causes, there is a depressing similarity between cheap homes for the poor built using a loophole in regulations and new homes for the middle classes in North Yorkshire.

Just as some people look immediately to the supposed greed of these developers, my instinct is to look at our planning and land supply systems. Builders cut corners (my Twitter question produced a lot of 'forget what they look like, look at how badly they're built' responses), use cheaper materials and have 'cookie-cutter' designs because it's the only way they can build the homes at a low enough price. Most of the development cost is sunk into buying the land, getting planning permission, paying exceptional costs demanded by planners or regulations and coughing up for the new development tax, Community Infrastructure Levy.

But there's another thing here - what we're told is beautiful (or great architecture or brilliant design) is what we believe is beautiful. And beauty matters because, as Richard Florida says, beautiful cities are more successful. But what is beautiful?

I go on to explain that they’ve been so propagandized to see it as the quintessential work of art that they never really look at it. “Do you know what ‘sfumato’ is? What makes La Gioconda (what its called in Spain) better than this (I toss up a portrait by El Greco) to you?” The classroom usually breaks out, mildly, into chaos, as students actually begin to think about what they are seeing.

Our aesthetic judgements are, like so much else, guided by received wisdom. And the received wisdom for the design of cities isn't the anonymous developers who built Parkside Terrace in Cullingworth:



No, our urban aesthetic is set by architects and those who write about architecture. Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and the Smithsons - advocates of pragmatic, functional, utilitarian buildings. This approach - most obvious in America's ubiquitous 'prairie style' housing - is what we're seeing in those houses built in Harrogate: functionality, utility, value. To return to our example, it's not that the Mona Lisa is objectively the greatest painting but rather that we've all be told (over and over again) that it is the greatest painting.

The article with that Mona Lisa comment goes on to argue that places (Rational Urbanism uses is Springfield, Massachusetts) need to argue for their own beauty not simply try to copy the received idea of beauty. We're told that New York is more beautiful and that the weather's better in Florida but never step back and ask if this is really the case.

So perhaps the reason for those Harrogate homes is that design guides, the architects and planners beliefs - that received wisdom - lead us to this look: pragmatic, functional, utilitarian homes intended to meet the needs of middle-class homeowners in terms of parking, storage, heating, room layout and garden space. The consumer is not buying frills and don't worry about there being no chimneys, no bay widows and a more-or-less eaves free (and therefore sparrow and swallow free) roofline.

The way in which building design evolved in the 20th century led us to this place. It is driven by the manner in which Le Corbusier and others took an entirely functional view of humanity - folk to be stored, moved smoothly from workspace to homespace. The aesthetic wasn't scaled at a personal level but with reference to masses - how do we house millions efficiently, how do we make workplaces for thousands, not how do we make great homes for Mr & Mrs Smith. The result of this is our obsession - straight from Le Corbusier's soulless authoritarianism - with density and the sacredness of the countryside. Even when, as is the case with those homes in Harrogate, we take a small part of that sacred green belt, it's done as a minimum and as densely as possible to meet the dominant aesthetic yet cater to actual human desires.

The irony in all this - and the failure of the utilitarian approach - is that, given a choice and the opportunity, most people don't want to live in dense, crowded, impersonal spaces:

...the main finding of nearly every survey on the subject is that millennials mostly want to live in suburbs, and as they grow older that preference increases. There’s hardly any evidence at all suggesting that there’s a huge pent-up demand for city living that’s going unmet.

To better meet human needs and to repersonalise housing and development, we need to look again at the dominant aesthetic and perhaps to step away from the internationalist, skyscraper style that dominates our ideas of urban goodness. We need to stop speaking about sprawl and ask again how we build suburbs - you can call them garden cities if you wish - that work with the natural environment as well as with most folk's desire for a house with a garden somewhere nice. And that somewhere nice will, in our minds, look and feel more like those Leeds back-to-backs or Cullingworth terrace (for all their lack of outside private space) than it will resemble the great modernist towers that are their modern equivalent.

If you've to consider beaty in the built form, does it have to look like this?

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Are NIMBYs killing your city?

We've been told - are still being told - that the big city is the future. From the proponents of agglomeration theory to advocates of green economics, the dominant argument is that we need to pile everybody up in rabbit hutches. This is either to save the planet or else because such cramming will give them access to many more shiny experiences under the fabulous city lights.

The thing is that, as they get to the point of wanting to settle down (how dare they want to give up on the endlessly unfulfilling lifestyle of the big city), maybe have a family, the sheer expense and inconvenience - yes inconvenience - of city life (plus its noise, dirt and crime) switches a switch in folks' minds. Move to the suburbs it says. Buy a house with a decent sized yard (or garden if you're civilised). Get near some good schools. Spread out a bit.

As the evidence tells us:

By contrast, the biggest winner is Houston, a region many plan­ners and urban theorists regard with contempt. The Bayou City gained nearly 15,000 millennials (net) last year, while other big gain­ers included Dallas–Fort Worth and Austin, which gained 12,700 and 9,000, respectively. The other top metros for millennials includ­ed Charlotte, Phoenix, and Nashville, as well as four relatively ex­pensive areas: Seattle, Denver, Portland, and Riverside–San Bernardino. The top twenty magnets include midwestern locales such as Minneapolis–St. Paul, Columbus, and Kansas City, all areas where average house prices, adjusted for incomes, are at least 50 percent lower than in California, and at least one-third less than in New York.

And the same goes for the UK as the Centre for Towns recently mapped - leaving aside the churn to other large cities, the move out from London into its suburbia is accelerating. Some of this - Canterbury, Thanet, Tendring, Colchester - is a long old haul if you're going to commute back into the big city but people are moving there, leaping the under-developed and over-priced green belt areas and populating places previously seen as too far to travel from.

We have to find a way to ensure that we are protecting the things we care about - community identity, heritage, wildlife and environment - while allowing for people to escape the trap of the city and the city's rent. Suburbia is much maligned but it is not less 'green' than a dense city and it offers other things - calm, tranquillity, community and child-friendliness - that the big city doesn't offer. If, like most people, you eat out occasionally (and at a selection of two of three preferred places), visit the theatre or cinema two or three times a year and museums or galleries once in a flood, then the supposed advantages of the city diminish besides the desire for safe streets, places to play, god schools and, above all this, a home with a garden.

Right now, supposedly for the sake of 'open' countryside, we are allowing the NIMBYs to kill your city. From being places populated by the full range of economic classes, cities are increasingly places where only the richest and the poorest live - in the USA the most unequal places aren't in Trump-voting flyover country but in the great progressive cities, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York. The ordinary middle classes - teachers, nurses, firemen, cops as well as the clerks and administrators - can no longer afford to live in the city and social housing, such as it exists, is filled (quite rightly) with the least well-off, minimum wage earners and the vulnerable.

Despite this progressive (as well as conservative) city leaders still pretend that this inequality can be resolved without new suburbs - listen to Andy Burnham, Mayor of Manchester:

“Whilst it is not possible to develop an ambitious 20-year plan for Greater Manchester without losing green space, it is clear that many communities feel strongly that the plan as currently drafted is unfair and disproportionate.

“As a result, it could diminish quality of life in some communities and restrict people’s access to good air and green space. The plan needs to be rebalanced to respond to these concerns and demonstrate a commitment to sustainable development.”

The NIMBYs have won - build more densely, pile up people into the sky, cram cheap housing onto former industrial sites, anything but allow new suburbs, new places for a new generation to breathe more freely, escape the harshness of the city and bring up a new generation.

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Government's deal with the public is broken - education, effort and achievement no longer guarantees you a real stake in society

I've felt for a while that the deal that successive governments did with the public - get educated, work hard, raise a family and you will be rewarded with a real, cash stake in society - has broken. And nowhere is this clearer than in our housing markets:

“Young people,” wrote Montesquieu in the mid-eighteenth century, “do not degenerate; this only occurs only after grown men have become corrupt.” By endorsing policies that restrict suburban development and home ownership, planners, investors, and the media are asking the next generation to accept conditions that their predecessors would never have tolerated.

This, says geographer Joel Kotkin, is a new feudalism where, despite the trappings of a good life and the promises of equality, we become little better than the peons of powerful oligarchies. For some, being part of the team is fine, the bread and circuses work - as Kotkin puts it, the oligarchs preferred solution is "...to have the state provide housing subsidies as well as unconditional cash stipends to keep the peasants from rising against their betters."

Elsewhere though people are looking for different answers - some see them in a cuddly green socialism that doesn't rock the oligarchs' boat too much but attaches faith-like to heterodox theories of government and economics as the basic for a planned utopia. Despite over 100 years of socialism's consistent failure its appeal persists. The oligarchs don't fear these middle class socialists because they know they can control them - America's tech billionaires are the main funders for progressive causes and for Democrat candidates, they also control the flow of political communication (the main reason why Mark Zuckerberg is such an enthusiast for online media regulation), no democrat will win a presidential election without this support.

Outside the wealthy halls of the dense urban centres, there's a different story with people in red baseball caps, yellow hi-vis jackets and check shirts asking - often angrily - why they are excluded from the society the urban elites have created. As I've commented before, the opening chapter of Robert Heinlein's 'Starman Jones' captures the sentiment:

"The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would."

A high speed train swooshing through Max Jones' world - not stopping just barrelling through carrying the rich and beautiful between the oases of urban wonder. And people who can leave the places inbetween do just that, decanting from Barnsley and Telford, South Bend and Flint to cram into overpriced and tiny rented apartments while working for the businesses those oligarchs own. For the rest, all the get is patronising articles about "the left behind" and kindly curated glimpses into the world of the city.

What we have isn't sustainable, the great cities of the west are parasites, humanity's dead end:

Because the great mass of the city dwellers can't afford a family, the only way to provide the services is to import more people from elsewhere. But what happens when those elsewheres don't provide people any more? The city grinds to a halt when economic growth in other places reduces the imperative to migration. So perhaps this explains the enthusiasm of the great and good of such places for elsewheres to remain poor - not starving but just poor enough for the stream of migrants not to dry up.

At the heart of all this is the idea that to maximise utility, we need denser cities and to get denser cities you have to stop people building suburbs. We know active regulatory intervention is needed by the city fathers because, left to their own devices, people will chose to live in suburbs, will prefer a family home with a garden, and will opt for comfort, safety and good schools over the excitement of a city's nights. What we're doing by stopping this happening is making such a life - once available to near all in society - something only the rich and powerful can afford.


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Planning policy has caused "massive economic harm"

Great article from Sam Dumitriu at CapX:

By ignoring land prices, planners have tried to restrict the expansion of major cities, causing massive economic harm. There is an assumption by planners that large cities grow at the expense of smaller towns and create regional imbalances. This approach is mistaken because it fails to understand why people move to cities in the first place.

As Bertaud put it in a recent interview: “Sometimes when I read the papers of my fellow urban planners, I get the sense that they think cities are Disneyland or Club Med. Cities are labour markets. People go to cities to find a good job.”

Sam's core argument is that planning is a less effective means of determining and meeting housing need than a market. It's true that we've decided there are other considerations (primarily environmental) but, by placing restrictions on the ability of large urban areas to meet the housing needs of workers, all we have done is harmed the economy and made living in those cities a deal more unpleasant.

One concern, however, lies in the economics only view of housing supply as mere dormitaries for workers. I see this quite often from admirable campaign groups like the YIMBY movements. We really do - as happened with the growth of suburbs in the 1890s, 1930s and 1950s - need to allow for family life not merely pile up boxes for 21st century urban peons.

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Without affordable suburbs cities fail...

Cities are great places to live if you're very rich. Cities also put a lot of effort into provision for the poorest. In between these poles - nah:

From 1990 to 2010, the number of low-income neighborhoods in Chicago rapidly expanded, high-income neighborhoods expanded and stayed strong, and middle-income neighborhoods almost disappeared. An economic neighborhood map of Chicago was the perfect way to begin the conference. It was the foundation of a subtle theme expressed throughout the day. Middle-income neighborhoods are the most fragile, the most difficult to create, and the most important to a city. It is the middle class neighborhoods that are the lobby for schools, parks, services, and amenities, areas often ignored by those in the poor and rich neighborhoods. Middle income neighborhoods are made up of people that make a city run: shopkeepers, small business owners, tradespeople, school teachers, firemen and police.

Without those dull middle-class suburbs - and by middle-class I mean folk like I was growing up not people with nannies who go on skiing holidays and pay school fees - cities don't work. Yet the policies we follow - densification, building a mix of very expensive housing and social lets,urban containment, restricting permitted development rights - are destroying those suburbs.

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"Be Different" works for consumer brands - it'll work for cities too

Aaron Renn comments:

In a much-discussed New York magazine essay, Oriana Schwindt dubbed this “the unbearable sameness of cities.” Traveling to the city nearest the geographic center of each state, she described how she constantly kept seeing the same Ikea lights in coffee shops she’d visit. “And it wasn’t just the coffee shops—bars, restaurants, even the architecture of all the new housing going up in these cities looked and felt eerily familiar. Every time I walked into one of these places, my body would give an involuntary shudder. I would read over my notes for a city I’d visited months prior and find that several of my observations could apply easily to the one I was currently in."

We all want to be Shoreditch or Brooklyn (or indeed a load of other successful places - it used to be Barcelona or Montpelier), to capture that hipster vibe that transformed these places from declining slums into funky suburbs. But we never ask about the fundamentals and we never set out to be different.

The fundamentals are about jobs, investment, levels of consumer disposable income. And if you're (like Shoreditch and Brooklyn) right next to a place - New York or the City of London - that hoses out that money, your chances of success are a lot higher than is the case for the place 250 miles from those centres.

And being different means just that - if you're Bradford you focus on your Pakistani heritage population and their culture, if you're Blackpool you funk up "kiss me quick". We don't do this because we think that these cultures (loud brash British Pakistani bling and working class holidays) are negative, that the people with money will reject them for the comfy edginess of hipsterish irony. The problem is that trying to be like everywhere else doesn't work.

One of the fundamental mantras of brand marketing is 'differentiation', making your brand stand alone, unique and distinct. It's odd that, when it comes to branding cities, we do the opposite focusing on sameness, on being like another place (but not really as good). But surely is "Be Different" works for consumer brands it'll work for cities too?

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Modern cities - creations of humanity's selfishness

Joel Kotkin writes about the sex recession and, in doing so, provides this striking statistic:

The most extreme cases of libidinous decline are in Asia. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, this had expanding to 43 percent. A quarter of men over 50 never marry.

Kotkin points to technology and a millennial generation who find personal interaction troubling or stressful ("...a survey of American millennials found 65 percent don’t feel comfortable engaging with someone face-to-face, and 80 percent prefer conversing digitally...").

Some of the outcomes from this de-sexed society are probably a good thing - fewer teenage pregnancies, for example - but it does give us another example of the prurience of modern youth culture, a puritanism embraced with enthusiasm by a generation of helicopter mums and judgemental fussbuckets.

The main reason, however, probably isn't culture change but rather the consequences of economic circumstances. For sure, employers like kidults - university educated millennial sorts who probably aren't going to do anything inconvenient like settling down to have a family - but the circumstance of people's lives also matters - people can't afford the risks of sex (also known as children). Here's Kotkin again:

High property prices and rents associated with dense cities correlate closely with low marriage and fertility rates. The places where child-bearing has plunged towards historic lows, are generally those with the highest house costs — including Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco.

This utilitarian urban culture represents, as I've said before, a dead end for humanity. Cities and the life of dense urban civilisation is anti-child. Such places are designed to entertain young adults (a definition now extending to adults into their 40s) rather than the old-fashioned purpose of our presence on the planet - having a family. The environmental argument about population provides cover for such indulgence - having a family is portrayed as more selfish than living an essentially unattached life in one of civilisation's urban wonderlands.

Perhaps, in thinking about our society, we'll one day wake up and realise that two generations of anti-family public policies did not represent a liberation but, instead, were a period of spectacular selfishness on behalf of humanity.

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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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Imagining the city as a garden (without cars)

Most of us will have paid a visit to one of England's stately homes and wandered round the gardens. Many of these gardens are designed as a set of distinct spaces - 'rooms' - each with a different sort of planting. This allows for (given enough space) everything from formal box hedge gardens though ponds and cottage gardens to the walled kitchen garden or the long vista of a herbaceous border. As you move round these gardens you'll see that each 'room' is designed to give the visitor a tantalising glimpse of the 'room' beyond.



We need to begin thinking of our urban spaces in the same way. Not just to see these spaces as places of leisure and pleasure rather than work and commerce but to play the game of tempting the visitor from space to space using the same design ideas as the gardeners who laid out the attractions of our stately homes. Urban designers have already grasped the importance of water - fountains, pools, river banks - but the idea that city spaces should be intimate but linked is too often drowned in what are seen as essential, pragmatic things like bus access, traffic controls and the panoply of instructions beloved of the urban manager.

Part (but not all) of the problem is the car. We live in a world where people want to drop their child off right next to his school desk, where the prospect of walking 400 yards says "we won't park there", and where swooshing dual carriageways bang in the centre of town are seen as essential features of the civilised city. Now I understand the psychology of all this - we're lazy animals - but I don't see why we should make so much else less pleasant just to indulge this laziness. Especially when that laziness, combined with the mobile phone, is killing the traditional role of the town centre.

Kracow, probably more by luck than judgement, has most of the old city pedestrianised and surrounded by a circular park marking the route of the old walls. Visit Lucca (with walls designed by Leonardo da Vinci that form a strolling park around the city) and, although there's some cars, the bulk of the city is pedestrianised and blessedly free from the need to give over huge spaces to buses. Why do so many cities - like Bradford - persist in the myth that you can't get traffic out from the centre because then people won't visit. If you move the bus stops to the purpose built bus station, all of a sudden folk will stop coming because they've to walk that extra 400 yards?

If you get rid of the roads in a place like Bradford, you create the chance to start thinking of our city as a garden, as a set of rooms each offering a different experience - some formal, some laid back, some for kids, some for the old or cool, all for everyone. Right now - just as with so many other places - the visitor is put off by huge roads filled with buses, taxis, delivery vans and cars all that have to be negotiated. Let's stop all this and make our city and town centres places where people can dwell a little, stroll, meander, smile and relax; a urban version of the gardens at those stately homes.

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The North's biggest assets are not its big cities - they're its problem

Most analyses of England's "North" start and finish with industrial decline and the ever-deepening divide between North and South. I fear that our analyses suffer from a fatal flaw in that they focus on the idea that the future for The North lies in those former beating hearts of industrial England and especially the transpennine cities - Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield.

The result of this analysis is a false imaging of The North as a peculiarly working-class place - once of flat caps, whippets and tea from chipped pint mugs while sitting on a box at the allotment, now of urban wasteland, sportswear, obesity and despair. Here's Phillip Blond concluding his analysis:

The more that the North escapes its working-class monoculture by bringing back the people who left, the more the working classes will benefit, because a diverse social mix is exactly what will create opportunities for the young people currently and cruelly being left behind.

Now I live in The North, in a lovely village an hour from Manchester and 20 minutes from Leeds and Bradford. It's a short drive to Skipton and beyond to the Yorkshire Dales. I simply don't recognise Phillip Blond's caricature of Northern culture or believe that this is the reason why people leave The North. You need to have a spectacularly narrow view of The North to say this:

The North has to become deeply attractive to the people it needs to bolster its technical, entrepreneurial and educational reach. And culture in its broadest sense is the pull for such people, as it is what makes a place worth living in. But educated families and skilled people won’t remain in, or relocate to, the North unless it has the institutions and culture they expect to enjoy.

And then to suggest that the reluctant move of a bit of Channel 4 to somewhere outside London is how you resolve this void. It all reads like "there's nothing do do in The North", it's a cultural wasteland dominated by Blond's conception of a "working-class monoculture" stretching from Sheffield to Carlisle. And, of course, working-class people don't have the sort of culture that would appeal to Jeremy and Jocasta!

This concentration on the city and failed urban places is, I think, where our analyses of The North go wrong. Airedale, where I live, is doing OK - not brilliantly but pretty well. It has decent enough schools, work ranging from traditional manufacturing through to modern financial services and tech business. And it's a short train ride into Leeds or Bradford. What it isn't is some sort of modish caricature of "working-class monoculture", quite the reverse, it's increasingly full of regular middle-class folk not so very different from those in Cheam or Epping. We'd welcome Channel 4 in Bingley - it might become a little less achingly leftist - but we don't need it because we lack culture.

A decade ago we drew up an Airedale Masterplan and Strategy, an ambitious vision of the valley and its communities. At the heart of this vision was the idea that we'd been ignoring our biggest asset for 100 years - the hills, moors and woods that dominate every vista. It's this realisation that changed how we saw our place and, on a larger scale, it's what The North should do. Forget about that "working class monoculture" for a minute and ask whether The North's biggest asset is is countryside, its market towns, its villages and its hills? When we talk about the Northern Powerhouse it's about how fast we can get from Liverpool to Manchester to Leeds, how these cities should be "economic hubs", and how we should throw money into universities, inclusive growth strategies and strategic rail systems. But this is how every struggling region, every challenged city, talks - from the US mid-west, to the Po Valley and Naples. With the same results - no change followed by another strategy, another place marketing campaign, another complaint about the lack of investment.

Perhaps The North should turn itself round, face away from its inner urban places and look instead at those hills, rivers, coastlines, lakes and forests. When rich tourists talk about Tuscany, they don't talk about Livorno with its high unemployment, declining industry (and probably an Italian version of a working-class monoculture), they talk about Siena, Chianti and San Gimignano. Maybe, when we talk of The North, we should stop trying to pretend it's any more working-class than say Crawley, Harlow or Sittingbourne, and instead point out that with York, Ripon, Whitby, Durham and the Lake District, we have a cornucopia of fantastic heritage and culture as good as anywhere in Europe.

I realise that this doesn't get rid of the issues that many places face - lack of good infrastructure, poor schools and something of an image problem - but it would shift the narrative from "please Mr London but something in our begging bowl" to "Hey you southerners get a slice of what we've got - and check out these house prices". Our biggest assets are not the big cities, they're our problem.

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Cities, housing and the new serfdom

I am more and more convinced that cities and the fandom surrounding urban densification is the biggest threat to a fair, equal, open and decent society. Yet even the YIMBY movement seems to be trapped in the idea that we should cram more and more people into a tiny part of our land area leaving overprotected rural areas affordable only those fortunate to inherit, rich enough to buy or trapped in a marginal life renting one of the vanishing numbers of such properties outside the city.

The problem is that the idea of cramming more units into already dense places (and central London is, by almost any standards bar urban Spain, very population dense) simply doesn't resolve the affordability problem. Here's an illustration from California:

Dense housing is about three to seven times more expensive to build. Combined with the very high cost of land zoned for high-density development, market prices inevitably end up beyond the means of nearly all Californians. New publicly subsidized “affordable” apartments in one dense Bay Area development are estimated to cost upwards of $700,000 to build—more than the cost of two-thirds of all homes in California, according to our analysis of American Community Survey data for 2016.

The beginning of understanding our housing problems comes when we ask what kind of homes people want rather than asking how many 'units' we can shoehorn into the limited land supply local councils allow for building.

The suburban house is the idealization of the immigrant’s dream—the vassal’s dream of his own castle. Europeans who come here are delighted by our suburbs. Not to live in an apartment! It is a universal aspiration to own your own home.

And it's not just the immigrant into California - such as the man who the above comment, Edgardo Contini  - who want to live in suburbia, it's most families everywhere. Not because they're selfish ingrates who want to spoil the environment driving their cars but because they want space, openness, light, air and land, all the things they can't get in the confining, claustrophobic inner city. It's something like this from geographer Anne Snyder :

“There is a growing craving for life to be lived offline, for human contact to be enjoyed with real handshakes, real meals around real tables, and real care for neighbors, knowing that in a pinch that neighbor will watch out for you in turn.”

Cities are exciting places filled with experience - everyone should perhaps have a go at living in one. For some, it is everything but for most there comes a point where the thrill of having the buzzing cultural brilliance of the city at their fingertips begins to pall - it's too ephemeral, insubstantial and, while great for grown-ups, no place to raise a family. Yet so many people are trapped - great jobs, fantastic social life, but no way to have a stake, to put down roots, to join a real neighbourhood. And this didn't use to be the case, in times past (and not really all that long ago either) people could have those great years in the city and then follow them with great years raising a family in a welcoming, neighbourly suburb. So you aren't going to have a family (or, rather, you keep putting it off):

Recent Harvard econometric research associated bloated house price increases with a reduction in birth rates among households that do not already own a home of their own. Similarly, high housing prices were cited as a cause to delay having children in a recent Bankrate.com survey. In places where housing prices remain around historic levels, such as Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, Orlando, and Houston, birth rates are much higher.

Maybe you think us not having children is a good thing (over 70% of Inner London households are childless) but I've a feeling it's short-sighted, requiring the city to suck in more migrants from elsewhere just to sustain its appetites. And who is going to look after you when you need it? Cities are creating a society that sees short-term economic advance and personal utilitarian gratification as the only good. Community can be replaced by service contracts, neighbourhood by professional networks or 'corporate internal communities', and real social capital by the ephemera of social events.

“Zero” is also the most common response when people are asked how many confidants they have, the GSS data show. And adult men seem to be especially bad at keeping and cultivating friendships.

Our home is at the heart of all this and what matters here is that it's our home not some rented flat on a rolling short term lease. Yet so much of the debate about housing is stuck in an obsession with numbers rather than a discussion about needs or wants - all coloured by a cod environmentalism exploited by those who benefit from land values artificially inflated through the deliberate restriction of supply by government (a restriction eagerly supported by politicians with their cant about our "precious green belt"). And it gets worse - urban containment, densification and its consequential gentrification results in poverty:

High rents are leaving many at the brink of poverty. Adjusted for housing costs, California has the largest share of its citizens living in poverty—well above the rate for such historically poor states as Mississippi. And homelessness has surged in the priciest places, particularly in Los Angeles and New York City, which account for about 4 percent of the national population but 25 percent of its homeless population.

Our housing policies (and please let's not pretend the the UK's problems are so very much different from California's) are making us poorer, less happy, more dependent, tied to work and the work environment - a new bunch of serfs, highly educated with what seem great jobs, but with no stake in society beyond delivering the production business and government desires - serfs. As Wendell Cox and Joel Kotkin conclude (and you should too):

The shift to an ever more unequal, congested, and feudal society is not inevitable. We have the capacity to expand housing opportunities for future generations. There is no reason that we need to surrender the universal aspiration that for so long has defined our society.

Build suburbs.

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Smart Tech Cities - the new company town

This is a vision of the urban future in which the tech companies’ own workers and whatever other people with skills the machines haven’t yet replaced are a new class of urban serfs living in small apartments, along with a much larger class of dependent persons living on “income maintenance” and housing or housing subsidies provided by the state.

So suggests geographer, Joel Kotkin in a critique of how the tech world is shifting from the dull and prosaic world of engineering to the far more exciting - and disturbing - game of designing cities and social environments. Kotkin suggests that we are entering a world akin to Aldous Huxley's 'Brave New World' with a scientific caste system dominated by elite engineers. For me the comparator is Yevgeny Zamyatin's 'We'. Most folk assume the novel was a critique of Soviet Russia but, in reality, it was an attack on Taylorism (an idea very popular with the Soviets, so they banned the book anyway):

We is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which assists mass surveillance. The structure of the state is Panopticon-like, and life is scientifically managed F. W. Taylor-style. People march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by logic or reason as the primary justification for the laws or the construct of the society. The individual's behaviour is based on logic by way of formulas and equations outlined by the One State.

In the tech dystopia described by Kotkin, we see the concept of engineering turned into an ideology - everything can be planned, organised, directed if only we have enough data, the right algorithms and the proper systems. It is, as it were, the logical direction of scientific management, of the utilitarian idea of science and engineering.

Thus we see utilitarian, socialist (at least in the 'ordering of life' rather than the 'owning of assets' sense) and management science combined to create a sort of interventionist sociology underwritten by experts and controlled through surveillance. The giant tech enterprises seek to build company towns populated no doubt by sleeker and geekier versions of the man in Tennessee Ernie Ford's "16 Tons":

I was born one mornin' when the sun didn't shine
I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine
I loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal
And the straw boss said "well, bless my soul"

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

It is not government's job to indulge this corporatism, yet the tech god kings seem able to control:

In Google, the longstanding idea of the corporate family, traceable to Peter Drucker’s “The Concept of the Corporation” (1946), may reach both its modern peak and its creative limit. Can one work in a giant lizard tank while doing acute, innovative work that serves the world outside the glass? Every family leader wants to build a generous homestead, but imaginative life is more often at home in walkups, in the messy parts of town.

The idea of business management as sociological experiment - social engineering, if you prefer - begins with folk like Peter Drucker and, for much of its time, has taken the form of seeking to shape corporate culture and values, drawing away from the mere number-crunching utilitarianism of Taylor. Instead this new corporate utilitarianism sought to shape the attitudes and outlook of the worker in anticipation that this would better meet the corporate objectives of the firm. Ideas like happiness and embeddedness arrive from social psychology as means of securing greater commitment from workers to the objectives of the firm. It is a short journey from here to the sort of world Zamyatin describes of lives ordered and directed towards to production and a managed life:

This “smart” urbanity revolves around surveillance and relentless data-gathering. Swarms of monitoring sensors inside and outside buildings and on streets will be constantly on duty. Google would collect data about everything from water use to air quality to the movements of Quayside’s residents, using that data to run energy, transport, and all other systems. In this controlled environment, consent over pillaging personal data “goes out the window straight away”...

Kotkin goes on to observe that the workers within the literal corporate bubble will find encouragement to be content (games, relaxation, approved food and drink, entertainments) but not to be distracted from the purpose of their lives - production for the corporation and the government measured in GDP, GVA and other tools of scientific economics. Above all this means that the environment will be antagonistic to the idea of children:

“Sometimes I’ll be walking through the city and I’ll see a child and think, ‘Hey, wait a second. What are you doing here?’” said Courtney Nam, who works downtown at a tech start-up. “You don’t really see that many kids.”

Cities respond by tarting up parks - even putting in some new ones - and talking about being child-friendly but the truth is that, for the corporate behemoths, children are a nuisance. And, for the foreseeable future, these corporates can import the people they need to do the work - ship 'em in, given a shovel and point them at the coal mine without worrying about providing childcare, schools or the expensive paraphernalia of bringing up families. Some other place, the rural mid-west, India, China, Mexico, will do the crappy distracting job of education and the tech biggies can float into the universities and select the very best and brightest to come and work in their shiny tech centres.

We need to change how we think about cities and local economies. Instead of seeing them as, so to speak, producers of producers, we should see them first as places to live and play, to do the things beyond the day job. Above all cities, suburbs, towns should be run by people not corporations - even if that corporation comes with the badge "city council". As Kotkin concludes:

When a city manager suggests that changes are dictated by data collected by the smart city operators, rather than popular sentiment, democracy itself has been unplugged.

This is the time to reclaim cities suited to human aspiration. We need to do this before control is ceded to a small tech elite that profits by shaping our future, stealing our privacy and nudging us toward a new era of mass serfdom.

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"What's the point of a Secret Club if it doesn't have a Secret Fort?" Building child-friendly cities.

Or at least the rose-tinted suburbs of my youth. As a seven-year-old, I walked with my sister to the bus stop at the end of The Glade, got the 54 bus across town and walked up Foxgrove Road to school. On our own. When I wasn't at school, we'd tramp cross country (if you call the allotments, Monk's Orchard Primary playing fields and Elmers End Cricket Club 'country') exploring all the exciting things that a boy could find in that little chunk of South London suburbia.

In the other direction were Long Lane woods and what we called the golf course (it used to be one but was just open land between Bywood Lane and Addiscombe). Across the Main Road were the old sewage works - we weren't supposed to go in there but we did - that are now South Norwood Country Park.

They were happy days. The world - at least this child's world - was a happy one.

So yes, let's start building cities for children not childless, boring grown-ups:

Everyday freedoms refer to children’s ability to travel safely on foot or bike and without an adult in their neighborhood—to school, to a rec center, to a park. The “popsicle test,” in which a child can walk from their home to a store, buy a popsicle, and return home before it melts, is one way to measure this ability. Children’s infrastructure means the network of spaces and streets that can make a city child-friendly and encourage these everyday freedoms.

And let's remember this isn't just about parks and playgrounds but about the marginalia of suburbia, the little bits of scrub land, the borders between schools and playing fields, the paths of streams - places to explore, discover and adventure. Remembering that child wants you only when they want you - this was the best line is a very bad film I watched recently - "What's the point of a Secret Club if it doesn't have a Secret Fort?"

Right now we're cramming ever more 'housing units' into ever smaller spaces, recreating the hard, grazed-knees world of back-to-back terraces facing straight onto cobbled streets. We're forgetting the importance of the child's world, forgetting that it starts close to home and spreads as far as that child is brave enough to venture:

The most effective interventions are implemented at the hyperlocal level. Think front yards and neighborhoods. “On average,” the authors write, “[spaces in front of homes] make up at least 25 percent of a city’s space and have the greatest potential to encourage everyday freedoms and social interaction.” Focusing on the very local also means that more children can access the interventions.

Definitely. Make cities child friendly. Or maybe, I dunno, build suburbs again?

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Can smaller cities thrive? Only if they've good suburbs

Paul Krugman (who is, of course, a secret geographer) writes about small cities:

Some localized industries created fertile ground for new industries to replace them; others presumably became dead ends. And while a big, diversified city can afford a lot of dead ends, a smaller city can’t. Some small cities got lucky repeatedly, and grew big. Others didn’t; and when a city starts out fairly small and specialized, over a long period there will be a substantial chance that it will lose enough coin flips that it effectively loses any reason to exist.

This is a fairly utilitarian take on city economies - that small places can't afford so many losing bets - but it does raise an important question about the optimum (or maybe sustainable minimum) size for a city. Now Krugman doesn't answer the question except to make the depressing observation that Christaller's central place theory no longer applies in a world where land, and more specifically agricultural production no longer determines the location or purpose of cities.

This idea of the service centre still persists. UK planning policies include the idea of a settlement hierarchy (pretty much straight out of central place theory) that ranks places according to their significance - small village, large village, local service centres, district service centres, towns, cities - with this ranking determining certain decisions about land use and related planning decisions. The idea behind this is that larger places meet needs that can't be met by smaller places. We all, sort of, recognise this idea because we will use it in our own choices - travelling to the big city for important gift purchases or big nights out because we expect the choice to be wider and more interesting.

This is the premise behind the 'megacity' - the agglomeration of all those services not only meets more needs successfully but also result in service innovation thereby meeting unanticipated or new needs. Such activity results in economic growth and betterment. Ergo the 'megacity' is a good thing.


Or is it? Here's a quote from Saskia Sassen who studies the megacity trend:

“These types of urban economies need other major urban economies more than they need the standardized production economies of other cities in their country,”

As, Emily Badger, the author quoting Sassen notes, the implication is that San Francisco and London need each other more than they need the smaller cities in their domestic hierarchy of settlements. Indeed the international recruitment base (despite the obstacles of immigration controls) for high end skills and the dominance of 'megacities' in housing those skills means that the demographic profile of the megacity becomes less and less like the other cities in the hierarchy. On a personal emotional note, I certainly feel that, as a Londoner who left the city thirty years ago, it is a very different place - better in many ways but certainly different in style and feel. I suspect - on the boiling frogs principle - you have to leave and come back to see how places have changed.

So our question - when is a city big enough to sustain itself in a world of 'megacities' where the pull of such places on the best and brightest is huge. How big does a city have to be to have an economic gravitational force big enough to resisit all (or maybe just enough) of the force from the megacities?

Aaron Renn at New Geography gives us a start in a review of the US mid-west:

The clear dominance of the successful list by state capitals. This is so pronounced that I have put forth what I call the "Urbanophile Conjecture", which is that if you want to be a successful Midwestern city, it helps to be a state capital with a metro area population of over 500,000.

The thing is that, by successful, Renn means 'not declining' and he focuses (good geographer that he is) on population rather than on economic measures like GVA. It's likely - given Krugman's gambling analogy - that 500,000 is nothing like big enough for a city to be sustainable, at least in economic terms. We have to get past the problem where one bad roll of the dice - a corporate bankruptcy, a crazy government decision or the decline of a given industry - cripples the city's economy and economic prospects. A city probably needs 1.5m to be sustainable (so Leeds and Bradford should, on this basis, become Britain's twin cities).

Tyler Cowan, in a commentary on Krugman's article, makes a couple of important points that help further. The first relates to the fact that people are not solely driven by economic considerations (a curse on Max U and all his works):

The very fact that smaller cities are used to consume non-pecuniary amenities suggests their inhabitants are more diversified than it may appear at first. The shift of gdp into services further enhances this diversification, and the new crop of semi-small cities may be more resilient than the older lot dependent on manufacturing.

Those megacities are great - theatres, museums, restaurants, loads of young (and as some would say available) people, and economic opportunity galore - but what happens when what you want is a family, the wind in your hair, space to grow vegetables or fly kites? Cities struggle to offer these things and the bigger they are the less they do (unless you are very rich indeed).

Cowan's second significant point is another geographical point (one Krugman notes too) - while the cold, damp mid-western cities decline, America's sunbelt is booming:

A significant and enduring trend is the move into warmer and sunnier climates. So while Rochester and Flint decline, Chattanooga and Birmingham are on the rise.

The original contention that smaller cities aren't sustainable because they don't generate sufficient chances for economics success begins to weaken despite those megacities sucking up the brightest and brainiest. Partly because they fail to offer services suited to a full human lifecycle - big cities (other than for the very richest) are not suited especially for children or the elderly and the process of settling down provides an opportunity for those mid-sized cities - if you're big enough to have some decent theatres, a few good restaurants and a range of cultural amenities plus near enough to green places and comfortable suburbs then you've a chance.

For me the answer lies in three things - dispersal, connectivity and development friendliness. The thing with megacities is that they are concentrated and want to concentrate further, they are intra-connected but only inter-connected to other megacities, and they are opposed to human-scale development preferring the grand, spectacular and tall. If you're a smaller city - say a sensible 1.5 million population with businesses in the modern economy - then urban containment, expensive mass transit systems and grand projets are the wrong strategy. You're not going to turn your town into London, Tokyo or New York and trying to do this could be a disaster (ask Barcelona).

There's no right answer to city size (indeed it's quite a deep wormhole in academic geography these days) but there is a case for being comfortable with being liveable and interesting rather than chasing the megacity rainbow. For smaller cities there needs to be more focus on suburbia, on family life and on amenities that allow for these things to thrive. Suburbia gets a bad press but the truth of the matter is that it's where most of us want to end up - house, garden, kids, good schools, safe streets, recreation grounds with youth football, family-friendly restaurants, a decent pub where you can sit down and chill. It you want your smaller city to work, these are the things you need and the life you need to sell - it's easier if you've decent weather and a beach but even without these things you can help develop a place people love and where folk want to come and live.

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