Densification is not the answer - suburbia is the answer

This can't be said too often, as loudly as we can. Here's urban geographer Wendell Cox reviewing some research, Paying for Dirt, by Issi Romen at housebuilding specialist, Buildzoom:

"Stemming sprawl" while maintaining housing affordability through higher densities is a time-worn theory. The record seems to indicate that it is more likely Santa will come down the chimney than density will solve the problem. There are no virtually examples of housing markets (metropolitan areas) where increasing densities has restored affordability. This is not to suggest there is no value to increased density, but rather that it is an all too convenient diversion from solutions that have a chance of working.

The key to all this is, as Cox points out:

...to restore the competitive market for land, so that houses on comparatively small lots, such as one-quarter or one-fifth of an acre can be built at the historic land costs (including necessary infrastructure).

And as Romen concludes this isn't just about the economics of housing but about social justice:

"The disparity between the appearance of homes and their price tags is more than a home buyer’s gripe: it is a telltale indication of restricted housing supply. Such restrictions – rules governing land use, installed by incumbent residents or their predecessors – are exclusionary by nature and amount to the gating of access to opportunity. Hopefully, this study has helped identify where gates must be opened."

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Is our future suburban?

Interesting little article by Tyler Cowan:

As American travel infrastructure decays, and traffic congestion worsens, what we used to call cities and suburbs won’t be able to rely on each other so much, as trips become too exhausting and time-consuming. That too will encourage cities and suburbs each have their own mix of jobs, retail and cultural opportunities.

I suspect he makes the point more strongly that will be realised - elite culture (and other elite institutions) will remain in the cities as will the wealthy elite that populate them. But the everyday sort of leisure and pleasure, what most of us do mostly, will be more evenly spread especially in centre urban rents continue to climb.

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And you thought central London was crowded?

There's a new Atlas of Urban Expansion published and New Geography review it - including this piece of information:

Dhaka's urban density has risen three percent over the last 25 years, as much of the additional population has been housed in low-rise, unhealthful shantytowns (see: The Evolving Urban Form: Dhaka), where densities are reported to be as high as 2.5 million per square mile or 1 million per square kilometer (photograph above). This is 35 times the 70,000 per square mile density of Manhattan (27,000 per square kilometer) in 2010.

The writer points out that Dhaka is an exception - most large cities are getting less dense. But nevertheless - wow.



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Children in cities

I've observed before that cities aren't designed for children. And that this is something of a problem if we are to become a more urban society. Indeed there are some people out there trying really hard to rediscover play in our hard-edged and adult city spaces like Emma Bearman's Playbox in Leeds. There's still a problem, especially in the biggest and grandest cities, and this from Aaron Renn sets it out:

These global cities are where the culture is made, where the media are, etc. To the extent that they represent a very atypical demographic profile that largely excludes families with school-aged children, this only perpetuates the “bubble” in which America’s leadership class often lives. The values and priorities of people without children are different from those with children. One example is the value people put on space. In our central cities populated with largely people who have no children, a big obsession is changing zoning regulations to allow smaller units, including so-called “micro-apartments.” These kinds of developments would enable more upscale young adult singles to live in cities. That’s good in itself. Yet it is not paired with equal concern about creating more housing for families.

I've a feeling - it's just that as I've not dug around for evidence - that densification, the process Renn describes above, makes having a family less likely and more difficult. The successful, well-educated London couple living in a great little rented apartment in Shoreditch or Stockwell will have a pretty decent life - good money, plenty of social life and a plethora of little consumer pleasures. They know, however, that having a family means leaving the heart of the city. Here's Renn again - speaking as a new father in New York's Upper West Side:

...it’s hard not to notice that while there are lots of very young children here, there are far fewer school aged ones. I don’t have any desire or plans to leave, but I have to recognize that children have a way of changing your priorities. Realistically, most people with school-aged children still seem to move to the suburbs. Those I see raising older kids in the city are generally well-off enough to afford large apartments or even single family homes (in cities like Chicago). They can also either pay the premium to live in a high quality neighborhood school zone or pay the freight for private schooling.

In some of these great cities we make matters even worse because of the deliberate limitation of housing development through such things as zoning and green belt. Not only is raising a family in the city open only to the very rich (who have the cash) and the poor (who often have no choice) but increasingly the same goes for suburbia. This semi-detatched round the corner from where I was brought up now sells at about £450,000:



Maybe that's affordable to our hypothetical successful and well-educated London couple but I suspect the truth is that most of such people see this perfectly ordinary semi in an average South London suburb as beyond their means (not least because they'll probably need £45,000 cash deposit). So they stay right where they are putting off have children for another year, hoping for another promotion or a great new job that will make the family possible. And because there are fewer and fewer children, there are fewer and fewer facilities for those children. Why set up a ball park or soft play zone when there are no children to use it. Worse still those adults in the city without children resent the noisy intrusion and attention grabbing of children - even to calling for them to be banned from pubs and restaurants.

I don't want to change cities particularly. Central London was never all that child-friendly and I guess the same goes for Manhattan and San Francisco. But we create a problem if we see the great city as the model for everywhere - dense, crowded living, unsafe public spaces, congestion all leavened with 'culture'. Near every local planning document will talk about increasing housing density which means smaller gardens, more flats, less open space, narrower pavements and smaller rooms. All things that make bringing up children more difficult. The cities don't care - they're just importing the next generation of workers from other places and other countries - but, for all their finery and beauty cities like this are mistletoe, parasites on the productive, healthy apple tree of society. Good to kiss under but not not much else.

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Do cities need to be less conservative?

Aaron Renn asks (knowing, of course, that city government - especially large city government - is more-or-less a conservative-free zone):

Political conservatism is all but extinct in cities, but the conservative impulse is alive and well. That is, a desire to prevent change in the name of preserving something that people find of value is still a powerful motivating force.

Historic preservation is an example of the conservative impulse.

NIMBYism is an example of the conservative impulse.

Anti-gentrification advocacy is an example of the conservative impulse.

In fact, it strikes me that cities are more conservative now than they were in the past. Previous generations were much more willing to engage in massive, radical projects of change than today’s residents and leaders. Not all of those previous projects were good to be sure, but many of them are what created the very cities as they exist today.

I've a feeling - and I see this in my own city of Bradford - that the governments of cities are stuck in an old economy model and with the idea that what's here now needs to be preserved at all costs.

I also feel they're wrong and Will Alsop was right.

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Writing elsewhere - on Bradford city centre

Guest blogging at Bradford Civic Society - here's a flavour:

The big question on my mind then, as it is now, is what’s Bradford’s problem? We can look at old photographs from the 1960s and 1970s showing a bustling, busy town filled with shops and shoppers. Talk to people who remember those times and they’ll reel off the shops that once were and are no more – Busby’s, Carter’s, Brown & Muff – and explain how all this was destroyed by a rapacious, greedy council run by useless councillors. I’ve a feeling that all this is, at least in part, meant to exonerate us residents for giving up on the city centre – deserting those shops for other places out-of-town, on-line and even, horror of horrors, Leeds.

Some people will tell you that Stanley Wardley’s dastardly plans for the city are to blame. “All the good stuff was knocked down,” folk will exclaim, “the Swan Arcade, Mechanics Institute, Kirkgate Market Hall – and look at the Odeon.” But is this really so? Did Bad Stan really kill the city or is this just another way of dodging the truth about us, the City’s residents? Go back to those photographs from the 1970s – the busy Arndale centre filled with shops, the old Broadway likewise. Was is really bad architecture and half a ring road that did for Bradford city centre or was it something else?

Do go and read.


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The pub, the cafe and the diner - the fraying of social capital

One of the features of society has been the shared social institution. Except this all sounds like some sort of terribly pompous concept in social anthropology. What we really mean is the sort of place that The Fureys sang about in the Red Rose Cafe:

Down at the Red Rose Cafe in the Harbour
There by the port just outside Amsterdam.
Everyone shares in the songs and the laughter.
Everyone there is so happy to be there.

Salesman, poet, dosser, docker, farmer and banker all enjoying the fact that they're sharing something - even something as mundane as a beer or a coffee. And, in a lot of places - perhaps even Amsterdam too - these 'shared social institutions' are dying out. Here's Aaron Renn on one of them - the American Diner:

But there are many other forces at work, including changes in the structure of our society. One thing the disappearance of diners illustrates is the loss of shared social infrastructure spanning across social classes.

Something I’ve always liked about diners is that they are the kinds of places that you could find people from all walk of life. There were cops and blue collar workers, college students, professionals grabbing breakfast, etc. It was the kind of institution that was broadly patronized across social groups.

These kinds of institutions are in decline. There has a been fragmentation of the shared American common culture that existed as recently as 1990 into a multiplicity of niche markets.

I touched on this when I wrote recently about the decline of rural Italy - every village with a tatty little bar at its heart serving up coffee, sweets and the occasional stiff drink. And plenty of people having been variously waxing poetic or raging with anger at the decline in the traditional English boozer. The thing here is not just that these places are going but that there are no new 'shared social institutions' replacing them, no new places that transcend barriers of class and age without it looking forced. Worse still we adopt a snobbishness about blue-collar institutions - either dismissing them as bad places, or else creating pretentious pastiches.

When McDonald's opens a new restaurant round the corner from St Peter's Square in Rome there's an outcry. I mean McDonalds - entirely the wrong aesthetic for such an iconic place. Yet the reality - as the video here reminds us - is that McDonalds is comfortable, welcoming and understood. The same goes for other places - the Pub Curmudgeon writes about those old estate pubs that only sell keg beer and what food they have comes in bags saying 'ready salted', 'salt and vinegar', and 'cheese and onion'. Not the sort of place you and I would ever go to, far too rough and common.

I've a feeling that, in places with fewer places to eat and drink, the sort of social mixing Aaron Renn sees dying in Manhattan still persists. But it's also true that richer folk have become more separated from their lower class cousins - not just the grandees who always lived a sort of sheltered life but all of what we'd call the better off:

There’s also been a gulf that has opened between the consumption and cultural practices of the upper middle class (the top 20% by education and income) and everyone else. They shop in different stores, eat in different restaurants, drink different beers...

I was in a restaurant in Shoreditch recently. Nothing too fancy just a bar-restaurant that has some live music. I joked to my wife that I was the only bloke in the place without a beard. I could also have said that I was the only bloke there over 50. Yet I'm pretty sure that, with a little effort, I could travel a short distance from that bar and find a pub where the reverse would be true - instead of well-off middle class thirtysomethings, I'd find poorer working class fifty- and sixtysomethings.

The problem for that traditional pub is that the agenda - social, political and cultural - is not being set by its customers. The agenda is set by that top 20% Renn refers too - a set of folk who are excited by trendy artisanship when it's done by their mates but not at all excited by the possibility of visiting the sort of place where those working-class folk are going (as an aside, the achievement of McDonalds has been to get beyond this class division despite the best efforts of food snobs to stop them). We tut a little at Wetherspoons, dismiss Pizza Express, and wouldn't be seen dead in one of those steakhouse type places run by regional breweries. But these places - chain restaurants and the like - work.

Does all this matter? And even if it does matter, do we care enough to do something about it? After all there's a little bit of romanticism in the idea of lords and peasants sitting down together sharing a foaming pint of ale. Those shared social institutions didn't remove class barriers but rather they permitted a little bit of understanding to trickle in either direction. And the traditional pub, those Italian cafes and many other such places were the haunts of men with the only women serving beer or filling up coffee cups. This probably isn't true of the American diner but even there we see a sort of rosy folk memory derived from old movies and TV shows more than from the reality (a lot of poor quality food served badly in a dirty environment).

What does matter, however, is that we think a little more about spaces and places where we're able to share something with whoever else is there. And that - like the pub, the diner and the cafe - those places contain the part of our culture that we all share. I've a feeling that those campaigns to save pubs are as much driven by that folk memory, the idea of the pub as the beating heart of a community, than by the reality of the pub being saved - a myriad of Vics, Rovers Returns and Woolpacks where the neighbourhood's shared events are mulled over, debated and laughed about.

There's a tendency to consider that bringing communities together requires some sort of publicly-owned place, yet the reality of cafes, diners and pubs is that they served this role (at least in part) while being straightforward for-profit businesses - and none the worse for all that. And a further tendency - I suspect Aaron Renn falls into this trap in his focus on Manhattan - for us to see the lack of social capital in densely populated cities as somehow the norm when, once we get out into suburbia, this starts to change to the point when we reach the exurbs of small towns and villages as see those very institutions we thought were dying actually thriving.

Yet again the thing that is driving the collapse of these social institutions, that is fracturing brittle social capital, isn't people no longer wanting these things but rather the brutal necessity of urban densification and the rejection of the suburb. Planners, designers, developers and cultural pundits see everything as a stark divide between urban and rural - it's either a city filled with breathless, high velocity living or else a bucolic rural idyll, gentle and somnolent. The death of the shared social institution is its death in the city where people quite literally don't have the time for such things and the nearest we get to such interaction is in the queue at Starbucks - assuming we're not the sort who goes to that really special coffee bar round the corner run by a bloke with a splendid beard.

If we're to have the strong society we always say we want, we need to pay heed to what these changes tell us - the decline of the pub, the cafes that close, the deserted Italian village, all send a message that the bindings of community, the relationships that make society real, are fraying. And on-line messaging, international travel and facetime don't begin to repair the tears in those bindings. We talk a great deal - or those of us in and around local government do - about how everything is local and how we need to build community. Yet the truth of our polity, culture and social approach is quite the reverse, geared to serving the economic needs of the great city rather than the lives of people in those communities.

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Expensive cities will eat themselves...

Here's a chunk from a review of the US cities creating the most high-wage jobs - looking at at "which metropolitan areas are gaining the most professional and business services jobs and the trends that are driving some to pull ahead while others fade":

Looking at the 70 largest labor markets in the country, the clear winners are affordable, business-friendly locales – and their momentum is growing. These span an array of regions, from the Midwest heartland to the Deep South, Texas and the Intermountain West.

Our number one metro area for professional and business service jobs, Nashville, Tenn., epitomizes many of the characteristics that drive high-end employment today. Since 2011, Nashville’s job count in professional and business services has expanded a remarkable 42.6% to 160,300, easily the highest growth rate of any major metropolitan area. Management and technical consulting, architecture and related services have led this growth.

The flip side of this is that the big coastal economies of the US are growing more slowly, people are 'cycling out' by returning to their roots from adventures in the big city economies. And the driver of this is living costs and primarily housing. Just watch this happen to London (and get blamed on Brexit).

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Are there too many VCS organisations?

OK it's the USA but Aaron Renn hits a chord with me:

When I look around older cities, I frequently see that they’ve got a veritable armada of non-profits. Rarely do I see these making a huge difference in the trajectory of the city.

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Try to do anything in a city and you’ll be told to meet with all these “stakeholders”, a large percentage of whom are non-profit leaders who claim to speak in the name of some constituency or cause but too often represent their own personal fief.

Anyone wanting to do things in a city has to run this gauntlet of non-profits and find a way to placate them.

Of course, here in the UK we call them the 'voluntary sector' or 'VCS' or 'Third Sector' but the same applies. There are brilliant organisations out there doing fantastic work but for each one of these there seems to be at least one other best described as a 'grant farmer' - sustaining itself and its staff by chasing grants to 'deliver' projects created and designed by local, regional or national public bodies.

As Renn concludes:

In cities, the Pareto principle likely applies to non-profits as it does everywhere else: the top 20% most effective non-profits deliver 80% of the public benefits.

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Welcome to the 'Great City of the West' - mankind's dead end

In the opening chapter of 'Starman Jones', Robert Heinlein sets the scene with the young hero, dreaming of space, watching the Chicago, Springfield & Earthport Ring Road - essentially a high speed inter-city transit:

"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."

In this short chapter, Heinlein not only sets the scene for 'Starman Jones' but describes the chasm that divides rural and urban America. It's true that, in American Dream style, Max Jones, Heinlein's hero does escape from his rural isolation such that the book closes with Max on one of the trains. But we need to be interested in the rest of Max's world, in the people who stay on the farm. These people, rednecks, provincials, the "left behind" have suddenly become important folk. Not individually but collectively.

The election of Donald Trump, the UK's vote to leave the EU, the growing support for France's Front National and similar trends in Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Germany all focus on people who aren't living in the shiny world of what Ishaan Tharoor in the Washington Post calls "the West's major cities". And the world beyond the cities is filled with reactionary forces aimed at stopping the glorious people in those shiny cities from dominating the world - there's even an "if mayors ruled the world" group that says this:

“These reactionaries,” Barber said, “are the last wave in a series of political attempts to pretend that sovereign states still work.” The nation-state isn't about to disappear, he cautions. But Barber envisions a future where there'll be a “rebalancing of the relationship” between nations and cities that will enable greater local governance across the world for the benefit of all.

By greater local governance, Barber doesn't mean a local municipality at some sort of human scale but rather grand 'city regions' ruled by elected but autocratic mayors. And some places will be left outside these 'Great Cities of the West' struggling in rural decrepitude or small town decline. Other rural places will tag themselves onto the great cities, stretching their boundaries so as to get some small crumbs from the mayor's table. Soon these latter places will realise they've the worst of both worlds - higher taxes, more regulations and the envious sight of money pouring into super-rich inner suburbs and city centres. Places the residents of the city region's remoter outposts seldom visit and that's often merely to gawp at the beautiful people as they enjoy their playground while shrugging at the unaffordability of all this stuff.

Since the West's population is increasingly concentrated in cities, we've come to assume that the city is the demographic and, therefore, political form of the future. There's a hankering for the idea of the city state - essentially autonomous places within a weak state - and, in this, with the idea of strong, enlightened leaders elected by those cities' wise and enlightened electorates. The result - or rather the objective of the 'Mayors Should Rule the World' advocates - will be a fragmented, divided polity dominated by the needs and preferences of those ruling mayors (or rather those with access to these mayors).

Returning to 'Starman Jones' for a second, we see the manner in which the human world's design intentionally favours the city as a form. It's not just that the train swished through Max Jones' rural America but that the design of such systems today is creating such a world - England's HS2 is designed to connect London to Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester. What lies between the cities is irrelevant except as a place filled with ghastly NIMBYs who oppose the railway for spoiling the countryside. But why should someone in an old mining village like Havercroft or Fitzwilliam look kindly on HS2? Like Max Jones they'll be watching the fast trains whoosh by while wondering where their children and grandchildren will get a job that's better than in a warehouse or serving on at a cheap restaurant (assuming that the robots and minimum wage rises haven't killed those jobs).

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.

If this - 'The Great City of the West' is the future of mankind then it isn't a future, it's a 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. But this is a false perspective - even the gradual rising of economies results in reduced birth rates so the city cannot win if it does not breed.

And cities are, in everything they do, anti-child:

...localities with higher densities and higher prices — the two are often coincident — have considerably lower birth rates than areas with lower prices. This becomes even more evident when one considers the segment of the population between 5 and 14 years old, when children enter school. In 2012, urban areas with the highest percentage of children are predominately lower density and lower cost, including Houston, Dallas-Fort Worth, Riverside-San Bernardino, Atlanta, and Phoenix. Urban areas with the lowest percentage of people in these age groups were also the New Urbanist exemplars, such as Boston, San Francisco, New York, and Seattle.

And who would - without necessity or accident - have children in a high-rise environment featuring fug-filled air that causes asthma, streets filled with rushing vehicles, public spaces designed for adults, and places dominated by strangers. In San Francisco and Berkeley over 70% of households are childless. And we're supposed to see dense urban living as a better model than the sprawl or the suburbs, the comfort of the small town or the community of the village?

The problem isn't just that the rural and small town West has rebelled against the city but that the city is a failing model - at least the idea of the concentrated, centralised, mayor-led city. These things are parasites, sucking away all the good from small towns with the promise of riches, opportunities and better bars while giving little back when it comes to the long-term quality of our lives. Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.

Planners rejected suburbia as somehow too naff, 'not our sort of place' and then justified their rejection with tales of sustainability, sprawl and the curse of the motor car. Yet suburbs - at least the one I was brought up in - were liveable, open and child-friendly. They might have been a bit boring for childless, young adults but they weren't boring for children and, mostly, weren't so for grown ups with sheds to do hobbies in, gardens to keep and associations to join.

So no, the city is not the West's defence "against right-wing nationalism" but rather one cause of that right-wing nationalism existing in the first place. If your billions of infrastructure spending excludes most of the country they won't thank you for it. If every policy you espouse is designed for the child-free world of the city, the provincials will hate you for it. And if your attitude to people who don't live in the 'Great City of the West' is sneering, dismissive and patronising don't be so surprised when they kick out at you.

This idea of a the city as a place piled on top of itself, crowded, expensive, frantic, is a dead end. It is a model that will fail and in doing so may threaten what we choose to call western civilisation. The lesson in all this is to understand that, as one commentor obeserved, cities come with a huge barrier called "cost of living", a barrier that far from making the city a solution sets it up as a parasite.

Right now the only route to success in the city for the likes of Max Jones is still to borrow your uncle's space suit and save humanity. And given that few provincial folk have uncles with space suits (or other opportunities to save mankind come to think of it) they'll stay in declining rural and small town communities sneered at by people in cities who think the future of humanity is having shiny things but no children. It won't end well.

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Building tomorrow's suburbia - some thoughts and connections

I'll start with this blog from Orwell Prize winner, Graeme Archer - perhaps the best conservative writer in Britain.

But what – to quote a character in an early Ruth Rendell novel – is supposed to be so wrong with suburbia? A desire for a nice bit of garden and good (selective! free!) state schools; the desire to be unsurprised, should one hear English spoken on a bus; the desire for one’s country to have its own bloody passport, for God’s sake – to list just a few Mayist-Tory objectives which leave the Left spluttering with saliva-specked fury – these aren’t desires, shall we say, uncommon to those whose grandparents were in service, whose working-class parents went out on shift or opened their cornershop before dawn, so that their tiny “bought hoose” was warm and that their own children – I’m talking of myself, of course – had enough time and encouragement to study. So that they - I - could end up in suburbia, from where I commute, despicably, to and from work.

There is still, however, a desire in suburbia to make that place less affordable for the rising sons and daughters of today's working classes. Giving us this sort of commuting:

A study by online estate agent Emoov seen exclusively by City A.M. has found it would be cheaper to buy a house in seven of the UK's largest cities, fly down and stay in a budget hotel for a week, then fly back at the weekend than it is to live and work in the capital.

This isn't about rent controls, densification, or even finance - it's our bonkers planning system that's created an oligopoly of builders in an over-regulated environment of deliberately restricted land availability around the UK's golden goose of London. And it will kill that goose before long.

In the meantime the plight of high rents brought about by urban containment policies with continue to generate angst-ridden social commentary - most of it nonsense:

When they return to Britain, they face the near impossible task of buying a home without help from the Bank of Mum and Dad. I have earned more from my move up the property ladder than all the money I have earned at the Guardian in the past 17 years. This exponential increase in property values relative to incomes, particularly in parts of the south-east, will not be seen again, for a generation at least. Why aren’t the younger generation rebelling? Maybe they simply can’t afford to.

Truth is that, housing aside, the coming generation will be better off than we are - the rise in technology will see to that. And we could solve the housing crisis too if we stopped trying to plan our way out of it. Starting with embracing new ideas - not the crushing of good space standards that our housing minister (he's from Croydon which explains a lot) wants but real ideas:

London’s biggest housebuilder Tony Pidgley, boss of Berkeley Homes, has been experimenting with kit homes. “It’s a culture change but there’s a compelling case for modular,” he says.

He has committed 20 per cent of his output to factory-built homes, and plans a bigger amount in future via its own modular housing factory.

The first “Urban Houses” for the company’s 5,000-home scheme in Kidbrooke, south-east London, are already rolling off a Midlands production line, creating good-looking town houses with roof gardens.

And while we're about all this we need to think differently about transport. The days of the private car are coming to an end. Not only is there little need to own a car in a city like London but autonomous systems and digital connectivity mean that we can summon transport when we need it rather than have it sitting there doing nothing for most of the time. OK it's a couple of decades away but, for transport and transport infrastructure that's the timescale - we should be thinking about our cities accordingly. Meaning more space for this sort of initiative:

Toronto has more than 2,400 publically owned laneways, covering more than 250 linear kilometres of public space. This offers a huge amount of untapped potential for multi-purpose public space. Consisting of planners and urban designers, The Laneway Project works with city officials and community groups to green, beautify, and breathe life back into these back alleys in the city.

Or for making new use of redundant infrastructure:

Anders Beremsson Architects (ABA) have been commissioned by the Kungl Djurgårdens förvaltning (Swedish Royal Court) to investigate the potential of repurposing twelve power towers. The towers are located in the urban national park, Norra Djurgården, in central Stockholm. ABA has proposed transforming one or two of the power towers into sky-high picnic towers.

Or more space for the increased leisure time the robots will give us:

The idea for the project emerged in 2010. Every year, a so-called cultural capital is named by the European Parliament, and in 2010, the city of Essen in the Ruhr region was designated the European cultural capital. We launched a project called Still-Leben (Still Life), during which the most important highway in the Ruhr region, the A40, was closed to car traffic for a day. The A40 is a highway with six lanes. In one driving direction, we set out a long picnic table and on the other side, in the other three lanes, people could circulate as pedestrians, on their bikes, rollerblades, or whichever way they chose, between the city of Duisburg and the city of Dortmund, which is a distance of approximately 50 miles. That day, I biked from Essen to Dortmund and for the first time in my life I was in a traffic jam caused by bikes — a completely new experience. 3 million people came out for the event.

Town planning is mostly about stopping things from happening not making places better. We should change this to allow a bit of inspiration - everywhere we look there are fantastic projects hacking their way through thickets of bureaucracy. Helping these projects should be the priority for planners rather than dreaming up some sort of perfectly zoned and balanced utopian city. Help us build tomorrow's suburbia.
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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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How Jaywick and West Texas tell us the Intergenerational Foundation's research doesn't say what they think it says

The Intergenerational Foundation has done some research - it's pretty good and you can read the full report (pdf) here. The IF look at 'intergenerational segregation' - the extent to which people of different ages tend to concentrate in the same areas. And both the IF and also the media has focused on how the increasing geographical segregation of young and old in England is a consequence of housing problems such as lack of choice and affordability.

Here's the BBC's 'OMG this is terrible' report on the research:

Young families are being "ghettoised" in inner city areas by the housing crisis while older homeowners become isolated in the suburbs, a report says.

The Intergenerational Foundation study says the number of areas dominated by over-50s has risen sevenfold since 1991 as young people move into the cities.

Even within urban areas, older people, children and young adults are living increasingly separate lives, it adds.

I'm sure this pattern will be repeated across other media and will be reflected in reports on similar research in the USA and continental Europe. And the argument that it's all about housing costs will be repeated again and again without question or criticism. Put simply we are more age segregated as a result of older people being unable to move to more 'age appropriate' accommodation because there isn't enough of that housing so young people aren't able to cycle out from the cities into the suburbs. And young people are renting in the city because they can't afford to buy the limited number of houses that come available in those desirable suburbs.

The problem here is that this really doesn't match what the IF's research is saying. Here's a chunk of those findings:

...places with the highest median ages are predominantly in rural parts of the country, particularly around coastal areas, while urban MSOAs stand out for being more youthful.There is also evidence of a north-south divide, as the broader south east surrounding London contains a number of lighter MSOAs – which represent comparatively youthful smaller towns and cities in the region such as Watford, Milton Keynes and Cambridge – whereas the MSOAs which are outside the large northern cities appear to be shaded darker. This pattern supports the finding from previous studies that there is a substantial net inflow of internal migrants who are in their 20s from northern towns and cities to London, while the out-flow of former London residents in their 20s and 30s tends to be to other towns in the south east.

I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem with housing supply (in general or specific to particular needs or demands) but rather that the IF research doesn't really provide an argument supporting the typical description of that housing crisis - young people unable to afford to buy property and, therefore, trapped in rented accommodation. Nor does the work really tell us that these affordability and supply issues are the reasons for England's 'age segregation'.

To understand this, we should note that the highest median ages are 'around coastal areas'. Other than for parts of the South Coast like Brighton and Bournemouth, England's coastal towns are pretty affordable and characterised by high levels of multiple deprivation:

An Essex seaside village is the most deprived neighbourhood in England, according to official statistics.

The community east of Jaywick near Clacton-on-Sea has again topped a list that measured deprivation in 32,844 areas across the country, the government report found.

But all of the local authorities with the highest proportion of deprived neighbourhoods are in the north - Middlesbrough, Knowsley, Hull, Liverpool and Manchester.

And of the top 10 neighbourhoods, Blackpool, the ‘Vegas of the North’, has five in the list, and eight in the top 20.

We see this pattern repeated in other seaside towns - Great Yarmouth, Skegness, Bridlington, Minehead - where an ageing population doesn't have the sort of characteristics popularised by those who want to blame all our problems on 'Baby Boomers'.

John Byford, 48, councillor for Skegness South, said: “Opportunities around here are few and far between. There’s no industry. People like it that we don’t have the fast motorways, but that’s also a problem because it means we don’t get the industry.”

The recently released movie 'Hell and High Water' features two brothers robbing banks so they can pay off the debts on their late mother's ranch. Based in West Texas the film is a contemporary Western nodding to the themes and storylines we're so familiar with from the traditional genre. One thing that strikes you watching is the utter, abject poverty of West Texas with shacks and shuttered shops frequented by tired, old people. These are dying communities without young people and kept going only by the fortune of oil and gas, at least until that runs out too.

So where have those young Texans gone? To the cities:

Texas’s spectacular growth is largely a story of its cities—especially of Austin, Dallas–Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio. These Big Four metropolitan areas, arranged in a layout known as the “Texas Triangle,” contain two-thirds of the state’s population and an even higher share of its jobs. Nationally, the four metros, which combined make up less than 6 percent of the American population, posted job growth equivalent to 30 percent of the United States’ total since the financial crash in 2007. Within Texas, they’ve accounted for almost 80 percent of the state’s population growth since 2000 and over 75 percent of its job growth. Meantime, a third of Texas counties, mostly rural, have actually been losing population.

Why would you stay in a dusty, isolated West Texas town like Post or Brownfield when there's no work and no prospect of work? Same goes - perhaps a little less starkly - for England. Young people are leaving what might be called secondary communities in the North - places like Oldham and Burnley as well as those coastal towns we've already mentioned. And if you've made up your mind to head elsewhere for work you're going to go where those prospects are best which in England means you head to London. It's this pattern of migration that the IF are picking up in their research not merely the consequences of England's failing planning and housing policies.

And the problem is that, while we can do something to make London less age segregated by housing policies, we'll struggle to respond to the desire of older people to live somewhere slower, quieter and more communal than a great big city. Or for that matter the wish of single, fun-loving young folk to live in big cities with great nightlife and loads of other young people. The problems IF identify are as much a consequence of wealth and choice as they are of sclerotic housing policies.

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Legacy transport and housing systems - barriers to better cities

Cities are changing. Or rather cities should be changing but most of them aren't because local (and national) governments plus attachment to legacy transport systems means that this change isn't happening.

West Yorkshire - by world standards a pretty wealthy place - is consulting on its transport strategy for 2016-2036. Illustrating the lack of ambition is that the chair of the transport committee thinks it'll be a stellar achievement if we have an integrated ticketing system in place by 2036.

I'd like us to talk about Olli and his friends:

Meet Olli, Local Motors’ 3D-printed, autonomous, electric shuttle bus. Designed to streamline shared transportation systems around the world, this self-driving car could be the answer to public transportation issues. On top of it all, Olli is partially recyclable.

As long as you have a smartphone, where ever you are is a bus stop. And wherever you’re going is the next stop. The Olli app puts control into the palm of your hand. App accessibility allows users to find existing routs, share an Olli, or charter an Olli of their own. Set pick-up and destination locations, ride from point to point, then pay through the app. Much like Uber, just call Olli through the app and it will show up to take you to your destination. Plus it talks to you!

If you're saying that autonomous vehicles aren't a central part of future urban transport systems then you're trapped in those 19th century legacy systems - trains and buses (at one meeting that same chair talked about using canals more). Mind you we've the same problem with housing where innovative solutions using new technology aren't getting the attention they deserve:

Italian innovator Massimo Moretti launched WASP with the goal to “create a means for affordable fabrication of homes, and provide these means to the locals in poverty stricken areas.” WASP’s affordable housing solution combines 3D printing with biomimicry, drawing inspiration from the mud dauber wasp that constructs its home from one of the world’s oldest building materials: mud. The choice of clay and mud inputs for the portable BigDelta was a conscious choice; although many 3D printers use cement, Moretti chose earth because of its low environmental footprint, local availability, and natural insulating benefits. Based on previous prototypes, the BigDelta will presumably build full-size houses using open-source software and a mixture of mud, clay, and plant fibers for reinforcement.

So you think folk won't want to live in a mud hut?

Atelier Koé’s mud home will be built in Ghana at the beginning of 2016 and the Nka Foundation are calling out for participants to come and join the build. The process of building will give participants (many of whom are professionals or architecture interns), a deep insight into the possibilities of local African materials.

And it'll look like this:




The same goes for other materials - if we're to get unviable city sites recycled as housing we have to change the model, to forget the problems of 1960s system-build and look at non-traditional materials.

The problem is that our urban design, building, transport and infrastructure planners are still working with those 19th and 20th century legacy systems. The result is that we respond to the challenges of housing and moving growing urban populations through a combination of regulation, price fixing and subsidy. We'd rather subsidise commuter fares or impose rent controls than plan for the space to allow markets to meet need affordably.

There are plenty of other opportunities - from pop-up housing to taxi drones - that need to be looked at in our city planning. But I'll be surprised if any local plan from a UK council even allows for these ideas to be explored. These local plans as well as the economic plans, housing strategies and transport plans simply assume that there won't be any technological change and proceed accordingly. Yet a glance at both house building and transport suggest this is absolutely not the case. We're on the cusp of an autonomous vehicle revolution that will completely change urban public transport, free up space currently dominated by parking and allow more public space as a result. Yet the only response from city authorities appears to be the ramping up of regulations to protect the taxi industry.

In housing new building approaches and technologies might see self-build made simple and easy. Yet building regulations are used (some might say with the connivance of the housing building industry) to resist experimental approaches and planners stick with their clunky approach to land allocation and urban design.

It's time city leaders started to change their thinking and, instead of simply following the tramlines laid by urban planners, started requiring those planners to develop space for different approaches to housing and transport.

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Diversity and the metropolitan diaspora

OK we have to accept a more-or-less economic definition of successful here (which I'm guessing will be fine for most folk) but the evidence tells us that more diverse places - that is places with lots of people who weren't born there - are more successful:

One of the most important ways for cities to get connected is through migration. Jim Russell and his collaborator Richey Piiparinen at Cleveland State University’s Center for Population Dynamics have been documenting how Cleveland has been getting more connected to the global world through this process. This includes foreign immigration but isn’t limited to that. A key part of it is the influx into places like Cleveland of people who have lived in major global cities like New York, then cycled out.

Now diversity isn't an absolute guarantor of success but within this work lies the germ of an economic development strategy that might rebalance England (bearing in mind that my country is, compared to most places, a pretty small place). This isn't about attracting skilled migrants from the other side of the world - or even from Paris - but rather to look at how you provide the opportunities for people to 'cycle out' from an increasingly expensive and intolerable London.

We've seen some of this 'cycling out' with the success of Brighton, Reading and now Bristol - all places close enough to London to allow for folk to scuttle back and forth. Other places may well begin to fit this pattern - Whitstable, Canterbury and even Margate. As London overheats the result is that innovators and creators relocate, taking the risk of a smaller pool against the certainty of greater affordability. In the USA this is now noticed - here's an article about chefs in New York:

Bret Thorn, senior editor at the trade publication Nation’s Restaurant News, agrees. “We are experiencing a serious brain drain from New York City,” he says. “Chefs leaving to move home to Cleveland (Dante Boccuzzi) and Minneapolis (Gavin Kaysen). You don’t have to put up with the exorbitant rents or deal with the general cost of doing business or the difficult community boards. You can go to Oklahoma City and have customers who are interested and will marvel at what New Yorkers might be bored with.”

We've yet to hit this point yet in England but it gets closer with each rent hike and each new regulation. Intemperate actions like the shutting down of Fabric don't help and neither does the understandable preference of local authorities for order and the interests of residents. London's fantastic - yes seriously Londoners, fantastic - public transport has helped the city keep these innovators as it's possible to move further from the expensive centre without losing connectivity.

The question for us to ask is what drives the success of these out-of-London places - why Margate and not Hastings, how come Bristol but not Leicester. Some of this is about access - good road and rail links - but this isn't the only factor. And looking at the evidence from the USA it's tracking the pioneers who go back home - the creator who decides to sell the overpriced two-bed flat in Greenwich and head back with the proceeds to Birmingham (or wherever) or the new entrepreneur who thinks success is more likely in their lower rent home town than in London.

Places like Bradford need to invest some time on their diaspora, in the connections that already exist. We moan and mither about the brain drain but simply ignore those brains once they've left. Perhaps part of the strategy is to talk to these exiles - most will have a soft spot for home (if only because of friends and family) and can be relied on to put in a good word. But maybe the big benefit comes when those people decide to take their well-gotten gains and head somewhere cheaper - if they've been loved by the home town even though they left, surely the chances of them returning are greater.

Of course, for me, the home town is London. And I can't afford it.

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What obesity strategies - if we have to have one - should look like.

I'm not sure we need an obesity strategy but I also know I'm in a minority on this issue. The cohorts of fussbucketry have crowded out much that is sensible (by which I mean informed by evidence) in public health so we're going to have such a strategy. And in Bradford it's going to cost you £2 million or so each and every year.

So, in the interests of getting a strategy that isn't infomed by nagging the hell out of everyone, here's how the Mayor of Oklahoma City did it:

On January 1, 2012, five years after he received national attention for challenging his city to go on a joint diet, he announced they’d hit their weight loss goal: A total of 47,000 residents had together achieved the mayor’s goal of shedding 1 million pounds, registering their achievements on the campaign’s site, "This City Is Going On A Diet."

The success came because of a massive public awareness campaign that educated and encouraged citizens to eat fewer fried foods and more fresh produce, and more importantly, a collective goal that spurred competition among local employers and businesses. The mayor, whose weight once fell in the obese range, lost 40 pounds himself. The CEO of Taco Bell even flew in to discuss how to steer people to the low-fat "fresco" side of the chain’s menu.

And this successful approach is being followed up with a strategy that aims to promote physical activity - not sports but just moving around more:

Partly using proceeds from a one-penny sales tax passed in late 2009, it’s now in the process of making a slate of improvements, including a 70-acre park that will link the city’s downtown with the Oklahoma River, a new streetcar line and river kayaking facility, a senior wellness center, and hundreds of miles of jogging, walking, and biking trails. It’s also making sure there are gyms in all grade schools and is narrowing all the downtown streets to add trees to wider, more pedestrian-friendly sidewalks.

Much better than banning fast food shops, soda taxes or obsessing about weighing five-year-olds.

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Interesting stuff I found down the back of the sofa (plus a comment on grammar schools)

Trade is good.

Clearing out my pockets - here's a few things (other than lint and misformed paperclips) I found:

Big cities are bad for health (this sort of reminds us what public health really is about):

Dr. Seth Berkley, CEO of the vaccine alliance Gavi, points to the recent increase in the scale of densely populated urban areas, many without adequate sanitation, as turning containable illnesses like Zika and Ebola into pandemics. Dense urbanization may not have created Zika, which causes newborns to have unusually small heads, he notes, but it has accelerated its spread from a mere handful to a current tally of 1.5 million cases this year.

Tokyo doesn't have a housing crisis - because it has sensible (aka laissez faire) planning rules:

Here is a startling fact: in 2014 there were 142,417 housing starts in the city of Tokyo (population 13.3m, no empty land), more than the 83,657 housing permits issued in the state of California (population 38.7m), or the 137,010 houses started in the entire country of England (population 54.3m).

Ideology presented as fact - the curse of economics (here's a good example of the genre):

Is there a good economic reason why Brexit in particular should require abandoning austerity economics? I would argue that the Tory obsession with the budget deficit has had very little to do with economics for the past four or five years. Instead, it has been a political ruse with two intentions: to help win elections and to reduce the size of the state. That Britain’s macroeconomic policy was dictated by politics rather than economics was a precursor for the Brexit vote. However, austerity had already begun to reach its political sell-by date, and Brexit marks its end.

And globalisation (meaning free trade and immigration since you asked) is good for the working class:

There isn't an economy in the world — now or ever — that could have endured such massive blows without a major hit to its people. But the worst that has happened in America is stagnant wages. Remarkably, our quality of life has continued to improve.

They never tell you how fast Africa is growing (or that it's down to capitalism - also socialism was what made Africa poor):

Some of Africa’s growth was driven by high commodity prices, but much of it, a McKinsey study found in 2010, was driven by economic reforms. To appreciate the latter, it is important to recall that for much of their post-colonial history, African governments have imposed central control over their economies. Inflationary monetary policies, price, wage and exchange rate controls, marketing boards that kept the prices of agricultural products artificially low and impoverished African farmers, and state-owned enterprises and monopolies were commonplace.

The rise of the far-right is down to the EU (prize for spotting the huge factual error in the article):

All “civilised” politicians in the founding EEC nations agreed nationalism must be overcome. Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Socialists, Euro communists, all the mainstream Continental political groups agreed that old-style patriotism was at best embarrassing, at worst dangerous and wicked. This meant that ordinary Frenchmen, Germans, Dutchmen, Belgians who wanted to stay French, German, etc had no-one else to vote for but extreme nationalists. Anyone wishing to oppose ever-closer union had no other home than among the xenophobic fringe parties.

It's not just technology but finance that's changing car ownership:

With the rise of companies like Uber and Lyft, it’s clear that we will need to see advances in new ownership models to support tomorrow’s transportation landscape. In fact, Uber recently received a $1 billion credit facility led by Goldman Sachs to fund new car leases. Uber (and Wall Street) are also recognizing the need for more flexibility with this deal — especially at a time when Americans are making larger monthly payments than ever on their cars and taking out record-size auto loans.

The impact of Brexit on projections for housing requirements (sexy stuff I know):

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 brilliant article - essentially a film review - on small town poverty and decline in the US mid-west (and a glimpse of why Trump):

In Medora we see not only poverty, but nearly complete social breakdown. I don’t recall a single player on the team raised in an intact family. Many of them lived in trailer parks. One kid had never even met his father. Others had mothers who themselves were alcoholics or barely functional individuals. They sometimes bounced around from home to home (grandmother, etc.) or dropped out of school to take care of a problematic mother.

Finally I can't resist a comment on grammar schools. They really aren't the answer to educational challenges but at least the Conservatives are looking at system reform rather than saying the solution is putting more money into institutions - big urban comprehensives - that are failing children.

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If London is a truly world city then Brexit shouldn't matter...

So goes the cry from London's mayor - what's happening is bad news for London, for the jobs of Londoners and the prospects for the city. And all this, as urbanist Aaron Renn points out, rather questions the idea of a world city:

Yet most of the London establishment – and 60% of Londoners themselves in the vote – strongly supported the Remain option. They warned of disaster for London if it lost access to the EU single market.

This more or less demolishes the arguments for the city-state. If London, the world’s ultimate global city, can’t thrive without access to a continental scale de facto state in the EU, there’s little prospect anyone else can either.

It’s telling that so many city leaders hate their state or national governments, but love supra-national governments like the EU. The shows that their real desire isn’t to go it alone in the marketplace, but to create replacement governance structures that are more amenable to their way of thinking, that constitutionally enshrine their preferences, and are insulated from democratic accountability.

For all the talk of London being the 'world's capital city' and so forth, what we see here is a great fear that maybe, just maybe, this isn't true. Renn goes on:

...if London can’t recover from the inevitable turbulence around Brexit, this would show that not only do cities need to be part of states, they need to be part of very large and powerful ones.

We don't know the answer to this question - at least not yet. London is without question a great city, perhaps the greatest city in the world, but does that status - in finance, in law, in the arts, in advertising - require that privileged market access or is the truth that the big hinterland needs London a darn sight more than London needs that single market.

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Local protectionism is no way to raise economic growth in poor places - a critique of inclusive growth

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The RSA, that trendiest of slightly left wing think tanks, has launched a thing called the 'Inclusive Growth Commission':

Chaired by former BBC economics editor Stephanie Flanders and building on the success of the RSA’s City Growth Commission, the Commission will seek to devise new models for place-based growth, which enable the widest range of people to participate fully in, and benefit from, the growth of their local area.

The core of the Commission's argument is:

Public services and welfare remain fragmented; economic and social policies often seem to pull in opposite directions. Although growth is happening and unemployment falling, large sections of the population are not benefiting. Big wealth gaps and large numbers of economically inactive people have negative impacts on local economies, life chances and social cohesion. Costs to the state remain high, growth is low and prosperity the privilege of a few.

It seems an entirely noble idea to look more closely at how, to borrow a phrase, the proceeds of growth can be shared. The focus - entirely right for a geographer like me - is place-based, stressing the uniqueness of a particular town or city and seeking development solutions that resonate with that locality. The problem is that the RSA, like many other such organisations, has taken as its text the idea that inequality is the cause of poverty in places like Manchester, Liverpool and Bradford.

The worry I have with this place-based model, especially when coming from a centrist, 'government is good' ideology, is that we fall easily into the ideas about resilience, the local multiplier and social models of business. Here's Neil McInroy from the Centre for Local Economic Studies (CLES):

Overall, the plans to build a more inclusive growth model faces a choice. On the one hand the commission can add a stronger social face to an economy which works for the few, not the many. In this, they will reveal some of the problems of growth and this will prompt some policy changes. However, will the commission’s recommendations alter the longstanding frame to local economic activity – where productivity and growth has a pre-eminent position and is viewed as having much higher importance than that of inequality and poverty?

McInroy sets out a 'critique' based on his organisation's position - alongside the New Economics Foundation, Transition Towns and the New Weather Institute - as advocates of what I call local protectionism. For McInroy there is a dominant regional growth model - agglomeration - that needs to be challenged if we are to get an inclusive economy. Essentially in the critique the place-based model means that growth has to be spread across a region rather than being focused on city centres and 'growth hubs'. McInroy will point to the success of Manchester city centre and then to the fact that, despite this success, the metropolitan area of Manchester still contains many of England's poorest places.

It also has losers – city region peripheries, smaller towns and the low skilled. We must look at areas beyond city centres to outer boroughs. We must focus much more on local supply chains and ensure investment to local small businesses is on an equal footing to global corporates and global investors.

In here we have the problem - that reference to 'local supply chains' will be familiar to anyone reading the output of CLES, NEF and NWI. It refers to the view that local supply chains keep more money within the community than supply chains based on the national economy. The idea of the local or regional multiplier is central to this assertion - NEF make a good living from plugging their LM3 model to all and sundry (despite it having no real theoretical basis or any robust empirical support). The problem is that the local multiplier is something of a myth - the impact of excluding national supply chains is, in effect, the same as any act of protectionism. So any gain from having the money circulate within the community for longer is lost in that community having to pay higher prices.

The second element here is the persistence of the view that welfare payments somehow contribute to a local economy. It's true that the very poor places in Manchester and Liverpool receive large amounts of the money we redistribute (giving the lie to those who say there is no dispersal, no 'trickle down') but it is also true that, however valid that welfare payment might be, it still carries an opportunity cost. If the money wasn't raised in taxes it would have been used in another way - perhaps on consumption, maybe invested.

No-one disputes the objective - we'd like more of those people dependent on benefits not to be dependent on benefits. I'm guessing that's what the RSA mean by inclusive growth. The issue is how we go about this - do we run the risk of a slower rate of growth by insisting that large sums are redistributed in some way. If we reject the idea of agglomeration as a driver of growth, then we have to put something in its place. The problem is that the alternatives on offer from the likes of McInroy will act only to futher damage local economies by raising prices and decoupling them from the more successful national economy.

In the end local economies thrive because government does not direct them - the vanity of the RSA position and the stupidity of the CLES outlook is that there is some magical role for local or regional government in delivering both economic growth and a less unequal society. For me the reduction of actual poverty is more important than endlessly fretting over measures of inequality (or 'relative poverty' as folk like to call it) and this is brought about by government not obstructing the drivers of growth. It implies lower taxes when often poorer places have high taxes. It demands less regulation and intervention when the preference of big city governments is to intervene more. And it requires that we connect poor places to the rich places making it possible for people to travel - economically and physically - from the former to the latter.

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Millionaire migration...

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When we think of people moving, we tend to focus on the traditional sort of economic migration or the terrible consequences of war, oppression and terror. There's another collection of mobile people who don't get talked about - millionaires.

In a fascinating article for New Geography, Joel Kotkin looks at where there millionaires are moving to and from. And he starts by reminding us how important the spending power of the rich people is to many urban economies:

Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has suggested that today a successful city must be primarily “a luxury product,” a place that focuses on the very wealthy whose surplus can underwrite the rest of the population. “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend,” Bloomberg, himself a multi-billionaire, said toward the end of his final term. “Because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.”

You don't have to be comfortable with this dependency on the very rich to understand the realpolitik of Bloomberg's observation. And Mayor Mike knew it is an issue because the very rich aren't moving to places like New York, nor are they moving to London:

The biggest winners are not the elite global cities, like New York or London, but ones that are comfortable, and boast pretty settings and world-class amenities. The leading millionaire magnets in 2015 were Sydney and Melbourne, gaining 4,000 and 3,000 millionaires, respectively, many from China. In third place is Tel Aviv, a burgeoning high-tech center which is attracting Jews fleeing Europe, notably from France.

Dubai ranks fourth, luring many Middle Easterners seeking a safer, cleaner business locale. Then comes a series of some of the most attractive cities on the planet, including Seattle (seventh) and Perth (eighth). In many cases these cities are gaining from “flight capital” from Asia and the Middle East.

Kotkin observes that the migration of millionaires seems driven by two factors - the safety of money and the safety of the millionaire. As a result millionaires leave Russia and China where property rights are weak and leave France because they don't feel safe (the big French exodus is of Jews and it's striking that they feel safer in Tel Aviv than they do in Paris).

Countries and cities need to worry about the exodus of millionaires - here's the impact of just one individual switching US states:

The movement for example of one billionaire — hedge fund manager David Tepper — from New Jersey to Florida could leave the Garden State with a $140 million hole just from his change of address. Overall New Jersey depends for 40 percent of its revenue of income taxes, one-third of which is paid by the top 1 percent of the population.

And the two top destinations for millionaires? The USA and Australia.

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