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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Grenfell Tower: some writings

These are a set of sensibly written and essentially non-partisan pieces on the Grenfell disaster. I feel it's necessary to do this so we get away from wanting everybody's head on a stick before we've got to grips with what actually happened. This matters to me because I'm on the board of a housing association with 30 or so high rise blocks.

Airlines show safety and profit go hand in hand. Let's not learn the wrong lessons from Grenfell.

"The aviation industry may be highly competitive but it is also tightly regulated and permeated by a culture that views safety as paramount. Such is the sector’s success that a report last year found that the number of annual fatalities almost halved over two decades while the number of global flight hours more than doubled"

Grenfell Tower fire: Should this cladding be allowed?

From the technical editor of Building Magazine - so may be better informed than some commentary.

The terrible and sudden spread of the fire at the west London tower this week has raised questions about whether ACM cladding should be permitted on high-rise residential towers

Is Grenfell Tower a monument to the death of the ethos of public service?

Tessa Shepperson at Landlord Law Blog knows here stuff - this is a little polemical but raises some interesting points such as one that is a warning for Tenant Management Organisations:

There seems to be a general tenancy nowadays, in all fields, for people to disrespect knowledge and experience and assume that people with no knowledge and no experience can – with advice – do as good a job as the experts.

Tenants are just tenants, they aren't buildings management experts.

To blame “Evil Tories” is to miss the point spectacularly…

In which we learn that regulation of privately rented properties is quite a bit stricter than that of state housing:

A programme of inspections takes place to tackle high-risk HMOs to ensure that means of escape and adequate fire safety measures are in place and to identify unlicensed HMOs.

There is an overlapping fire safety responsibility between the Council and the London Fire Brigade (LFB). Owners are required to carry out a fire risk assessment and make an emergency plan. The fire risk assessment is a systematic examination of the premises to identify the hazards from fire which must be recorded.

The Grenfell High-Rise Fire: A Litany of Failures?

From Wendell Cox in New Geography - so a US perspective:

Worse, in a larger sense, the Grenfell fire may turn out to be one of the world's great planning disasters.

And from blogger Tim Newman:

I have no idea what the philosophy was in the Grenfell Tower, but it should have been to get everyone out ASAP in the event of a fire: you hear the alarm, everyone evacuates, the firemen turn up to see what’s what. From what I’m hearing, people believed they should stay in their apartments because the flats were designed to contain fires, or something like that. Even if they were designed to contain fires, you should still evacuate. Yes, it’s a pain in the arse standing in the carpark in your pyjamas at 1am, but it’s better than burning to death.

Suggests there's a need to review fire safety advice (staying put is pretty standard advice)

Or another well-informed blogger, Raedwald:

Around 6am, 5am UK time, last Wednesday morning I started watching Grenfell Tower burning. It was clear from the footage that the fire progressed on the outside of the building. "Cladding" I said to my plumber. A bit of digging about found the portfolio pics on the website of Studio E architects, of Tooley Street; they confirmed that an aluminium sandwich panel was specified.

There's still a way to go on this disaster. One thing that needs some urgent attention is the lack of preparedness from the Council. This echoes for us in Bradford since the Council completely failed in its response to serious flooding on Boxing Day 2015 - less serious for sure but a failure nonetheless. Is this pretty standard for Councils? Are we not ready for disaster - whether its a big fire, a flood, an outbreak of disease or a hurricane?

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Embracing disruption - why our approach to housing and transport regulation has to change

On the face of it, it's a good news story. Clever architects in Alabama have reimagined the house so it can be built for just $20,000. They're only small, not really so very different from that icon of American living space, the trailer, but these houses do represent some sort of progress.

Until of course you speak to a city planner, a banker, an insurance company. Then there's a problem:

"The most daunting problems aren't brick and mortar problems, they're these network and system problems that are threaded together and all intersect in the built environment," he says. "We're able to attack all these problems simultaneously—when we see a lever over here and wiggle it, we can very clearly see the implication it has on other systems down the road."

The barrier to, in this case, housing affordability isn't the prosaic task of building a home but rather the collection of systems, regulations, controls and vested interests that have grown up in our sophisticated societies. All of those systems of control exist for a good reason - in the case of housing they make sure that what's built is safe, doesn't harm neighbours, protects heritage and has regard to the environment. Looking at building codes (or regulations as us Brits calls them - for once using a longer word than US bureaucrats) each element, whether it's about wiring, pipes or the depth of foundations was purposive, put there to ensure safety or quality. The problem is that these codes are (because to work they have to be) inflexible - if it says something has to be 3-5mm then it has to be 3-5mm even if technology now means it only has to be 1-1.5mm.

"They're built more like airplanes than houses, which allows us to have them far exceed structural requirements. ... We're using material much more efficiently. But the problem is your local code official doesn't understand that. They look at the documents, and the house is immediately denied a permit simply because the code officials didn't understand it."

The issue here - and it's a significant one given the current rate of technological change, much of it disruptive - is that regulatory reform is a slow and painful process filled with all sorts of obstacles. It took the UK government three years to conduct a review of housing standards that didn't even touch the core of building regulations (although it did prevent local councils dreaming up their own 'tougher' regulations especially around environmental standards).

None of this is to suggest that regulation isn't a good idea but rather to recognise that technological change moves faster than regulatory reform and that often the barriers to that reform are as much about protecting the current systems (and those who profit from them) as they are about ensuring safety and environmental protection. Although I've been talking about housebuilding, the same issues apply to other targets of technological disruption such as taxis, hotels and retail distribution - the regulatory environment is captured by the business and their public sector 'clients'.

Here's an example from Barcelona:

Like other big tourist destinations around the world (for example Berlin and San Francisco), Barcelona is struggling to cope with the influx of millions of tourists each year, many of them staying in short-term rental accommodation, which the local authorities say causes community strife, encourages speculation, and prices locals out of the city by driving up housing costs and limiting the supply of homes for rent.

Pretty straightforward - the city government in the Catalan capital is acting to prevent that community strive and guard against unaffordability. It isn't anything to do with collecting taxes or protecting the interests of existing providers. After all there's a housing shortage in Barcelona?

Barcelona has 283,155 vacant homes, 11% of the total, and 311,653 rented homes, 17.8%, while the defaults on leases have grown by 22.7% compared to the previous study, to stand at an average of 12,897 euros.

So, while rents in Barcelona are sky high and they're clamping down on Airbnb, there are quarter of a million empty homes. This isn't to have a go at Barcelona but rather to illustrate how protecting systems (precisely what that city's left wing mayor says she isn't doing) results in protection of existing interests - in this case hotel owners and landlords of high-priced city centre property.

Our problem is that what we already have in place - in its widest sense, infrastructure - is either vulnerable to digital disruption or else prevents that disruption taking place. And because the regulatory systems track that infrastructure and are difficult to change, other places without such constraints (or with autocratic governments) are able to move more quickly. Worse still, and this is very evident in housing and transport, those profiting from the existing system - or persuaded by politicians that its loss will harm them as we've seen in Barcelona - agitate for extending regulations to capture or prevent disruptive technology.

The new technologies - all that disruptive digital stuff especially - will eventually succeed because they meet consumer demand for things such as cheaper travel and accommodation. What's missing from our regulatory response is a preference for embracing that disruption. Instead, we seek out reasons not to allow a $20,000 house, a cheaper and safer form of taxi or a flexible low-cost means to stay in otherwise unaffordable places. And, as those empty homes in expensive Barcelona attest, our housing markets are crying out for disruption. All our zoning, building codes and planning rules act to prevent this change - making the land, the materials and the labour more expensive and forcing us to spend further billions in incentives and subsidy to stop the whole thing falling over again.

In Bradford we've acres of inner city 'development' land that's mostly just sitting there mouldering. We know there's demand - one local organisation had over 200 enquiries for a handful of new build properties for sale (but no buyers as once you've paid for the land and built the house the price is too high) - but the way we build and the cost of land makes it uneconomic. New approaches such as that $20,000 Alabama house or the prospect of 3D printed homes could work on this land if we purchased it and cleared it - perhaps that would be a better use of Community Infrastructure Levy and affordable housing commuted sums that sticking it into the existing system of housing development.

To make this work - and to make future transport systems work too - we need to design flexibility into regulatory systems allowing greater discretion for individual regulators. We also need to stop doubling-down on failed systems whether it's Barcelona's approach to holiday lets or Palo Alto's crazy planning system. The first question should be 'does this make most people's lives better' not 'can I find someone who doesn't like it' and to create regulations to match when the answer to that first question is 'yes'.

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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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A note on Slovakian planning...

I've written about Slovakian planning before (a niche subject I know) but this is a reminder that when you've few land use planning controls stuff gets built pretty quickly:

Recently, I returned to Slovakia. One day, while driving through the capital of Bratislava, I noticed a brand new suburb that covered a hill that was barren a mere two years before. The sprawling development of modern and beautiful houses came with excellent roads and a large supermarket. It provided a home, privacy, and safety for hundreds of families.

How was it possible for a private company to plan, build, and sell an entire suburb in less than two years, but impossible for a communist central planner to build one small building in almost a decade?

The article's actually a cautionary tale for young people explaining the evils of communism. But for me this paragraph stood out because there's no way that you'd get a new suburb built in the UK within two years from scratch including roads, buses, supermarkets and schools. Perhaps we need to learn some lessons in liberty from the now free Slovaks?

The clue, after all, lies in that word 'planning'. And it's the main reason housing markets don't work properly.

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Building more houses...(probably not)

Hardly a day passes without some politician, activist, think tank or journalist announcing that we have to build more houses. Mostly our response is "like duh" as we all know that, for about twenty-five or thirty years, we've failed - every year - to build enough houses to meet the demand for them. There are lots of reasons for this most of which have the words "planning system" somewhere within them.

"But we used to built this number of houses, you know back in the 1950s."

We did and, in the 1950s and 1960s we also built a lot of council houses. In the main these were either built on land cleared as a result of damage caused during WWII bombing or else as a result of slum clearances. In my more-or-less home patch of Penge, the roads around where my grandparents lived (in a house thankfully untouched by the bombs) are filled with blocks of flats built on the land cleared by the Luftwaffe in its failed attempts to destroy the rail infrastructure at Norwood Junction.

In Bradford, where I am now, you'll see a similar load of mostly 1960s housing where decrepit, poor quality terraced housing once stood. Typical of the 1960s this council housing features tower blocks (there are over 30 in Bradford), what are called 'walk up blocks' being lower rise flats and maisonettes in blocks without a lift, and the familiar family three-bed semis often with good gardens.

Which brings us to the latest promises:

Jeremy Corbyn has pledged that a Labour Government led by him would build one million homes in its first five years, including 500,000 council houses.

The Labour leader has said that he would “reverse a generation of underinvestment in housing” that has led to a crisis in the sector. “Decent housing is a basic human need” that successive governments have failed to provide.

Exciting stuff - a dynamic government meeting real social need (and all that guffle beloved of left wing politicians). Except for one small problem, one spotted by planner and blogger, Andrew Lainton:

Whilst welcoming expansion of social housing and council house building what evidence is there that councils and housing associations have a landbank of ‘shovel ready’ sites with planning permission to hit this?

Councils have sold off most easily developable land and most projects by even the most progressive council involve intensification of existing land such as council estates – which take time. Faced with difficult financials and cuts in funding housing associations have run down their land banks.

The fact is such targets could only be hit through private land and there is a huge risk of a public spending induced land price bubble blown up by slow progress on local plans.

This policy is introducing a 1950s level of social housing spending to a teenies level of public sector landbanks, a recipe for disaster.

From a standing start this programme would need to identify land for building, secure public ownership of that land, draw up plans, obtain permissions, contract builders and complete the homes. There really is no way that this is going to happen in five years, especially given that there isn't anything close to the capability or capacity to deliver such a building programme within local authorities and housing associations - let alone national government. And this is assuming there are the workers around to dig the foundations, lay the bricks, dry line the walls, plumb the bathrooms and install the plugs and wires a modern home requires.

Just as with the promises being made by the new Mayor of London - ones he has backed rapidly away from - these promises of rapid increases in rates of house building are not tenable. We need a more open and flexible planning system before we even start talking about accelerating the building of houses. And we need to stop treating private developers as if they are denizens of Hell's lower planes - these are the experts who are going to deliver the housing we need.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finally: have you registered for the Antarctic Biennial yet?

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

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Stuff to read: Driverless buses and trucks, night parks, stupid planning rules and Tokyo's housing

Driverless buses in Finland:

Residents of Helsinki, Finland will soon be used to the sight of buses with no drivers roaming the city streets. One of the world's first autonomous bus pilot programs has begun in the Hernesaari district, and will run through mid-September. 

Finnish law does not require vehicles on the road to have a driver, making it the perfect place to get permission to test the Easymile EZ-10 electric mini-buses.

The buses look cute too:



And self-driving trucks are on the way too:

By joining forces with Uber we can fast forward to the future. Together, Otto and Uber can build the backbone of the rapidly-approaching self-driving freight system. We can help make transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone, whether you’re talking people or packages.

All web-enabled too:

Veniam, a startup coming out of the University of Porto with offices in Silicon Valley and Singapore (besides its homebase in Portugal), turns moving vehicles such as cars and buses into live networks that allow people to be online without being dependent on a cellular network. The platform is also capable of using the data it collects to keep track and better manage traffic flows and alternate routes. Veniam’s technology was launched 18 months ago in Porto, where its hardware has been installed onto the public transport system. The company claims that about 73% of the city’s bus riders are using Veniam’s free Wi-Fi. The next market for the company this year is Singapore.

And yet again Singapore is at the forefront.

Anyway. Should parks be open at night?

A couple weeks ago, it was a beautiful summer evening in Milwaukee and some friends and I decided to meet up at our favorite park to toss our light-up frisbee. It was about 9:30pm when we finally gathered, so we spent the next couple hours tossing the disc. We also spent the next couple hours keeping a constant eye out for the police. This is because all the parks in our area “close” at 10pm and it is technically illegal to be in this public space at night.

Singapore embraces new technology the disruption of existing market models - Spain on the other hand:

A month ago, Barcelona City Hall introduced a €1.3 million raft of measures to crack down on owners letting out apartments using sites like Airbnb, but without a license. The authorities set up a website and called on residents to report apartments being rented out illegally. So far, some 500 complaints have been made.

And you wondered why Europe was falling behind?

Mind you it's not just Europe with daft planning rules - here's New Zealand:

Just look at the mess in Auckland where a developer wanting to build housing for 1500 households in an old gravel pit at Three Kings, turning much of it into parks and open spaces, has bought almost a decade’s worth of objections and processes and hearings. How can anybody build anything to scale under those conditions? In the middle of a housing crisis, with daily news stories about the number of children having to live in cars with their parents because there are not enough houses to go round, NIMBY activists block new construction.

This consultation has been going on for eight years - helps explain why Auckland is one of the world's least affordable cities.

It doesn't have to be that way - here's Tokyo as an example:

As FT’s Tokyo bureau chief Robin Harding wrote in the article, the city had 142,417 housing starts in 2014, which was “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).” Compare this, also, with the roughly 20,000 new residential units approved annually in New York City, the 23,500 units started in Los Angeles County, and the measly 5,000 homes constructed in 2015 throughout the entire Bay Area.

And this is in a city with no empty land. This is what laissez faire planning policies get you. Take note London.

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"Gimmicks" - or transport innovations at they're known outside West Yorkshire

Tomorrow's driverless taxi?

The West Yorkshire Combined Authority is going out to consultation on its transport strategy. This is a strategy and plan intended to set the direction for transport in West Yorkshire up to 2036. In doing this, the WYCA is acting quite properly - transport schemes are expensive, slow to develop and take a long time to implement so a twenty year planning horizon is sensible. You can contribute to the consultation through the page on WYCA's website.

At the recent WYCA full meeting - where the leaders of West Yorkshire's five councils plus a couple of others tagged on for good measure (like me, for example), we discussed this transport strategy. Not in much detail - these meetings are never big on detail - but enough to get a feel for what it's proposing. And it's not very good.

The strategy is linear seeing challenges such as congestion, air quality and connectivity as solvable only with existing technology - trains, buses - and new infrastructure (roads, bike lanes and so forth) within the existing spatial circumstances. Thus we are keen on HS2 and HS3 (or Northern Powerhouse Rail - NPR - as afficionados will now call it) as transformational schemes and we bemoan the lack of foresight at the Department for Transport in not allowing us to build our exiciting and innovative new 'bus-on-a-string'. As if the 19th century technology of the trolley bus is somehow a solution to 21st century transport challenges.

In setting objectives, the strategy focuses on modal shift, getting journeys shifted from nasty bad cars onto lovely buses, trains and bicycles. The strangest thing about this policy is that it is essentially backwards looking in seeking to move people from a 20th century transport system (the car) onto 19th century systems (rail, bus, bike). And while this is all fine it represents another triumph for anti-invention green strategies.

In our discussions, I mentioned emerging transport technologies - autonomous vehicles, drones, zero-emission vehicles - and wondered why, given the strategy runs to 2036, none of these emerging transport systems was considered worthy of even consideration in our planning? The chairman of the WYCA's Transport Board and the Leader of Kirklees Council dismissed this suggestion. The former thought the 'holy grail' would be to have an integrated ticketing syste across rail and bus by 2036. For Londoners, this is us taking 20 years to introduce the Oytster card system you guys already have.

For the latter, Cllr David Sheard, these new technologies are "gimmicks" and we should focus on "real-time data" (which we already have through the Metro phone app) and "smart ticketing" (those Oyster cards again). The extent of West Yorkshire's transport innovation will be to introduce a system London already has and to improve another system already available in West Yorkshire. And we want to be some sort of powerhouse? With this sort of thinking we'll be lucky to keep up with Manchester let alone close the gap with London.

So, for the benefit of my colleagues on the West Yorkshire Combined Authority, here are some of those gimmicks being introduced elsewhere in the world.

Singapore is gearing up to become the world's first "smart nation", with another deal to bring self-drive taxis to the city.

The city authorities signed a deal with start-up nuTonomy to test autonomous vehicles in March.

Now Delphi Automotive will also offer a small fleet of automated taxis to carry passengers around a business park.

The driverless cabs could reduce an average $3-a-mile ride to 90 cents, the firm said.

Initially, the cars will have drivers, ready to take over if the system fails but the plan is to gradually phase the human out in 2019.

And - even more creative:

A drone that can transport humans has been given the go ahead to carry out trials in the US.

The Ehang 184, which was first unveiled at CES 2016, is a small, personal helicopter that can transport a single passenger. Rather than one large rotor above the body, the "taxi drone" has four rotors underneath the body, resembling a remote control drone.

Ehang will start running tests in Las Vegas later this year in the hope that it could eventually be used as part of the state's transport system, according to a local publication.

Buses might not be so dull:

A driverless electric bus is set to be trialled in Perth in a test run for the use of autonomous vehicles on West Australian roads.

The staged trial is being conducted and funded by WA's RAC later this year using a French-made electric shuttle bus.

With no driver, it will use three-dimensional sensing technology to carry 15 passengers at speeds up to 45 kilometres per hour.

And there's autonomous delivery systems:

"Whilst driverless vehicles once sounded like science fiction, it's now within our grasp," said Domino’s Pizza UK marketing director Simon Wallis. "Harnessing this innovation for pizza delivery opens up a new world of opportunities for us."

The vehicles navigate via GPS technology and feature an onboard Pizza Interface (PI) that calculates the fastest route to the customer.

Plus drone delivery of course:

Amazon will step up its drone tests in UK airspace after winning approval from the Government to lift strict flying restrictions in a major boost to its plans for unmanned delivery aircraft.

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has granted the internet retailer special permission to test its aerial vehicles without several of the rules that typically bind drone pilots.

The agreement will see Amazon move a step close to Jeff Bezos’s dream of fleets of drones delivering small packages directly to shoppers within 30 minutes.

Or, on a bigger scale, semi-autonomous freight trains:

Six convoys of semi-automated “smart” trucks arrived in Rotterdam’s harbour on Wednesday after an experiment its organisers say will revolutionise future road transport on Europe’s busy highways.

More than a dozen self-driving trucks made by six of Europe’s largest manufacturers arrived in the port in so-called “truck platoons” around midday, said Eric Jonnaert, president of the umbrella body representing DAF, Daimler, Iveco, MAN, Scania and Volvo.

And the landing of drones in drone ports:

Foster + Partners has unveiled the first full-scale prototype of its Droneport concept at the Arsenale, which is designed to transport medical supplies to remote regions in Africa using unmanned flying vehicles (+ slideshow).

The structure is the inaugural project from the Norman Foster Foundation, set up by the British architect to anticipate technological advances in the field, respond to humanitarian needs and encourage a more "holistic" view of architecture.

All this is before we've got to a world where autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles begin to replace the car as the dominant form of personal transport. This requires us to think about ownership, to look at the way in which we licence taxis, road safety and pedestrianisation. Instead we're going to fuss about installing better bus stops and holding interminable meetings to discuss ticketing arrangements between trains and buses. And instead of infrastructure investment paving the way for autonomous vehicles, drones and other innovations, we'll spend it on trying to shift one-in-thirty journeys from the car to some other form of transport.

With the collapse of the tram and trolley bus proposals for Leeds, there's the opportunity to step over our obsession with trains and buses and to plan for the future that emerging technology is taking us to. Sadly, the leaders of West Yorkshire think that's just "gimmicks". Seems to me we need some new ones - leaders that is, not buses and trains.

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A Northern Powerhouse needs collaboration, vision and planning more than it needs cash.

During a brief visit to London, we called in to the New London Architecture exhibition at The Building Centre - it's just round the corner from the British Museum and well worth an hour of your time not least for the splendid model of central London at the heart of the exhibition. The NLA uses this magnificent visual to present a vision of the new London emerging through investment, initiative and development and is accompanied by a series of short films featuring NLA's urbane chairman, Peter Murray, talking through the challenges - homes, transport, place-making, environment - and setting out what's already happening and how built environment professionals including architects, masterplanners, designers, engineers and builders can deliver a better city.

What comes across in these films is the scale of engagement between public and private sectors - the projects highlighted on the grand model or featured on the wall around the space are mostly private sector projects. For sure there are the great transport schemes sponsored by London's government and supported by national governments but we also see investment in public realm, privately or in partnership with boroughs, by the great estates - Cadogan, Bedford, Grosvenor and the Crown - that enhance the City's character and variety.

Above all there is both a sense of vision - one shared by mayor, boroughs, transport chiefs and developers - and an intense granularity to that vision. We're so familiar with vision being just that - grand sweeping words accompanied with carefully touched up pictures. But this London vision comes with hundreds of individual projects, with emerging plans across the 32 boroughs (all pictured on the walls around the huge model), with examples of individual masterplans for smaller places and with specific project plans ranging from hospitals and university facilities through housing schemes to pocket parks or street markets.

While enjoying the scale, scope and ambition of this NLA exhibition, a profound depression fell on me. We ask about the North-South divide and tend to couch our understanding of this gap in historical terms as being about what was not what will be. Yet this model and exhibition, tucked away in a corner of central London, gives the lie to this convenient belief. The North-South divide - or rather the contrast between the dynamism of London and the sluggishness of Northern cities - isn't about some past event but is about the here and now, about what London is doing today. Worse still, what an hour with the NLA model told me, the divide is fast becoming a unbridgeable chasm - what London is planning far outstrips anywhere else in the UK.

London is sprinting away from the North. Not, as too many want to believe, because the city has been favoured by successive government or because the current occupants of Downing Street are stripping the North of 'resources'. The NLA films, the projects described, the masterplans - none of these even mentioned central government funding or support. Yet, as we saw recently in the IPPR North and Centre for Cities reports on the Northern Powerhouse, the starting point for the debate about growth in the North is to argue for more central government resources. But why, other than sympathy, should government simply hand over cash to one or other Northern city? Having Andy Burnham shout about a mythical "One Billion Pound Black Hole" is great campaigning - plays to the sense of abandonment felt in some places 'up north' but it's just the politics of the begging bowl, of holding out the flat cap while intoning the old mantra, "got a bit of spare change mate?"

Back in 2005 architect and urbanist Will Alsop was commissioned to look at the development of the M62 Corridor, that strip of England from Liverpool to Hull. Although the result was a typically Alsop mish-mash of ideas (and giant teddy bears) the premise was a good one - we could have a linear city 80 miles long from coast to coast. Let's remember it's 50 miles from Heathrow to Tilbury and the government has commissioned a Thames Estuary study to look at bringing North Kent and South Essex - from Canterbury and Southend - into London's planning purview. A connected 'city' from the Wirral to Bridlington isn't all that far-fetched.

Yet the current position - Transport for the North aside - is that the government, through its devolution programmes, is simply creating the basis for future competition and resentment. I was sat at a meeting recently where person after person started what they said with smilingly snarky comments about Manchester and how the Northern Powerhouse was, in truth a Manchester Powerhouse. This chimes with Mick McCann's brilliant essay asking why the BBC hates Leeds - a reminder that those Northern divisions are as much of a barrier to our progress as core features of our cultures.

Next year Manchester and Sheffield (or rather Greater Manchester and South Yorkshire) will elect a mayor, a new shining leader who will drive forward the future development of those cities. Other places will be waiting a while longer (probably until the little devils are skating on the ice in the case of West and North Yorkshire) but the message is that we will have a set of competing places across the North - Liverpool. Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle. And those mayors will fill the early morning London trains with their cohorts - off to that London where they'll make the case for central government to spend more resources in Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield or Newcastle. Not in The North - there won't be any sense of Northern Vision, no real Northern Powerhouse.

If we want a Northern Powerhouse, and I think we do, then it has to be pictured, planned, consulted on, organised and - so far as we can - funded from The North. And it's no good unless the whole resource - men and money - of England's North Country is brought to bear on that vision. We've seen this can be done for transport, we need to stretch that to the whole vision of a future economy.

A couple of days ago the Royal Institute of British Architects announced a new national centre for architecture in Liverpool. Great news for that city. Perhaps what we now need is a New Northern Architecture with the initiative and vision to build a model like the one I saw in Store Street yesterday - a model showing how private and public, local government, universities, manufacturers and housebuilders can share a detailed idea of how a future North of England will develop, will look and will work.

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This could be the London or the Home Counties

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The obsession of London's politicians with their 'green belt' really is a crying shame. But, as this quote from Joel Kotkin tells us, it's not a problem unique to the Home Counties:

To meet the needs of its increasingly diverse population, and particularly the next generation, California needs to reform its regulations to more fully reflect the needs and preferences of its citizens. Once the home of the peculiarly optimistic “California Dream”, our state is in danger of becoming a place good for the wealthy and well-established but offering little to the vast majority of its citizens who wish to live affordably and comfortably in this most blessed of states.

When you have to pay half a million pounds to buy an ex-council flat in Stockwell there is something wrong. Seriously wrong. And anyone who tells you the planning system - the means by which we decide which chunks of land can have houses built upon them - is not the main reason is simply deluded.

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The RTPI is wrong, poor places don't create poor people

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Planners have, inevitably, a primary focus on matters geographical - or 'place' as the trendier ones like to call it these days. So I get it when the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) rolls out a slightly whining piece about place and poverty:

Trudi Elliott, RTPI chief executive, said: ‘Many of the root causes of deprivation and social inequality are bound up in the poor quality of neighbourhoods - places that have no employment and lack community amenities, are poorly connected or simply run down.

‘Good planning is the one tool in our hands that can make places increase people's opportunities and help lift them from poverty.’

The planners go on to complain that:

...national welfare policies place too much emphasis on the individual factors behind poverty—poor education, for example—and not enough on physical environment.

The problem is that the planners are wrong. Not completely - there is some small evidence linking environmental or physical environment to poverty - but almost completely. To use a famous example, people live in Easterhouse because they're poor, they aren't poor because they live in Easterhouse. And if we look up and down the country we will find similar places - in every large conurbation - where, as the last group of poor, often immigrant people move out, they're replaced by a new group of poor, often immigrant people. My wife's uncle, the son of Russian Jews, was born - in poverty - in Whitechapel but ended his life in Alwoodley a wealthy suburb of Leeds. There aren't many Jews left in Whitechapel but the place still has poor people - Bengalis, Somalis, Roma - living there.

Even where we are speaking of the 'indigenous' UK population, the truth about poor places is that they stay that way because they are places where poor people can afford to live. Whether a place has high levels of private rental property or concentrations of social housing, their poverty is sustained by people moving into those places not by those places making people poor. When Bradford Trident (based in Little Horton and West Bowling two of Bradford's poorest places) studied what happened during its ten year regeneration programme, what it found was that people who did well - finished school, got a job, were in a settled relationship - moved out of the area. They didn't go far - half a mile or so to Wibsey or Great Horton, for example - but they moved away. And the low rent, poor quality place they left behind was occupied by another generation of poverty.

So we should guard against the argument from planners that says they can somehow fix poverty by fixing places. Over the years from 1997 billions was invested in many of the poorest places - through 'decent homes' investment, through the Single Regeneration Budget and through the neighbourhood renewal programmes. And at the end of these programmes those places were still poor places - better places for sure with better schools, better access to health care and lots of community support programmes but still places where poor people go to live. The root causes of poverty, inequality and deprivation are not rooted in places or their physical environment but rather in those individual factors - health, education, lifestyle - that the planners dismiss.

The truth is that, as JRF showed a few years ago, the poorest places in England in 1968 remain, overwhelmingly, the poorest places in England today. Despite approaching fifty years of regeneration.

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Don't laugh, really...don't laugh

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The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) thinks planning is needed for technology development:

‘City planners are uniquely placed to mediate and bring together the conditions that are attractive to technology and AM firms, such as highly skilled employees who prefer a more social lifestyle and proximity to workplace, broadband connectivity, good transport, physical compactness.’

Given the planners' record on housing might I suggest we keep them as far away from all this economic development stuff as we possibly can.

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We all know this of course....

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It's just that we keep trying to pretend that the problem is something else - the housing finance system, the evil housebuilders stockpiling land, immigration, selfish baby boomers, almost anything but the real culprit:

Both the center-Left and center-Right have come together in agreement on the depth of New Zealand's housing affordability and its principal cause, overly restrictive urban planning regulations. Labour Party housing spokesperson (shadow minister) Phil Twyford and Oliver Hartwich, executive director of the New Zealand Initiative, wrote in a co-authored New Zealand Herald commentary:“Our own research leaves no doubt that planning rules are a root cause of the housing crisis, particularly in Auckland…”

Auckland is one of the world's ten most unaffordable cities (as, of course, is London). And the reason for this is a restrictive planning regime. Why do we pretend that this isn't true for London?

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Sorry, Policy Network, but development control is not the planning system

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How people misunderstand the planning system:

If the planning system were the key constraint then one would expect to see housing start statistics on par with the number of agreed permissions, but clearly this has not been the case. Moreover, this means that since 2006 a large proportion of plots with planning permission has accumulated and not been used. Based on the data compiled, this figure is now close to 800,000 units and continues to rise. If local authorities grant permission for a similar amount of plots in 2015 as they did last year, then England already has over a million plots with planning permission to build on.

This is all true. But it doesn't describe the efficiency or effectiveness of the planning system. What it describes is the efficiency of our development control process and the fact that land with a planning permission is more valuable than land without a planning permission. So the idiots who don't see planning as the problem then propose a process whereby the uplift in value from agriculture to housing doesn't fall to the landowner but to "the community". All this means is that people stop seeing the sale of agricultural land for housing as worthwhile - we have less land than we have now on which to develop. Moreover the developers are unable to use the land value as the collateral for development finance - meaning that financing costs rise considerably removing a chunk of the supposed community benefit.

The problem is more profound than this though because a lot of the sites that aren't being developed aren't agricultural land but urban brownfield. And much of this is in places where people don't want to live (and therefore where housing values are low). I know of one development on a previously developed urban site where local housing values - around £120,000-150,000 for a typical three-bed family home - simply don't allow for a viable development even where land value is zero. Developers won't develop at a loss and won't develop in places where they feel they would find it difficult to sell the homes they build.

If you focus on development control then there doesn't appear to be a problem. But if you look at the local plan process - the land allocation part of the system - then we see too little land allocated in high demand areas and too much land allocated in low demand areas. Mostly because our system of objectively assessing need takes no heed of market signals - the things that make a three-bed semi in Sevenoaks cost £625,000 while one in Bradford is just £155,000. And this problem is entirely - or as near as makes no difference - down to the planning system.

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Will the gig economy kill planning?

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From California Planning and Development Report:

But how can you possibly plan for and control land uses when every bedroom is a hotel room, and every dining room is a restaurant, and every coffee shop is an office, and conversely every office is a potential living room or dining room or bedroom?

Well exactly. That is if your planning system depends on rigorous and strongly enforced zoning of land use (which is the case in California). And we're not just talking here about planning for housing, employment or physical infrastructure but a whole load of other things where we use control of land use as the starting point - health, education, recreation and waste management for example.

Even the need for road improvements – maybe the biggest driver of planning in California – is based on assumptions about different land uses. Road improvements are based on traffic estimates, which in turn are based on formulas about how much traffic is created by different land uses – single-family homes, apartments, office buildings, restaurants, and so on.

The basis on which much of local government is founded has been undermined by the way in which technology is disrupting service businesses, work patterns and social activity. We really have no idea whether our carefully defined models for estimating employment land demand, housing need or the need for public transport will actually meet the needs for those things. When people commute by Skype and conduct business from the pub on the corner, the assumptions about needs change in a way that the planning system - dependent on spatial determinism - simply can't accommodate.

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There's a case for looking at how we tax housing but it's not the reason for the supply problem

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That housing is taxed differently and, for most housing, doesn't get clobbered with capital gains taxes does make housing a more attractive proposition. Perhaps reducing capital gains taxes to a sensible level and applying them to all capital sales might work?

But this conclusion is wrong:

The biggest distortion to the housing market is our tax system. This not only increases demand for housing as an asset but it also encourages owners to be less flexible about allowing developments which might affect their wealth. We suspect that this is the root cause of much of the supply problem which needs to be addressed if we are to deal with the longer-term housing challenges.

The first part might be true except that most of us buy houses because we want to use them and the capital gain is nice. The second part is rubbish. Owners are not in charge of the development process (other than by ganging together to stop development) plus there's precious little link between new development and house prices at the very local level - i.e. those 100 new homes round the corner won't affect the value of your house by much, if at all.

The reason for the supply problem is because we don't provide enough land for housing in places where people want to live. And this is entirely down to the planning system. Not the housing delivery and development management part of that system but the local plan bit - this allocates the land. We can fiddle around with the taxation of housing until the cows come home but the supply problem remains if we don't have enough land available to build houses.

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Urban planning is bad for the poor

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Here's the Deputy Prime Minister of New Zealand:

"Poor regulation of housing has the largest proportionate effect on the lowest quartile of housing costs and rents. So when we're having the debate about whether there is sufficient land available, we have to recognise that the people who lose the most from getting that decision wrong – and who stand the most to gain from fixing those decisions – are those on the lowest incomes."

Housing costs are becoming a larger proportion of incomes – and that matters the most at the bottom end of incomes among people who have few choices. The new supply of lower-priced, affordable housing has dried up. There are parts of Auckland where no new houses are entering the market priced at the affordable end of the market. It is not surprising to see prices and rents rising disproportionately at the bottom end given this lack of supply."

Bear in mind here that Auckland is one of the ten most unaffordable housing markets in the world. What the DPM is saying is that planning has lost its way. Once we had urban planning in order to try and include the externalities to development but now:

"For those among you who are economists, I would go so far as to say that while the justification for planning is to deal with externalities, what has actually happened is that planning in New Zealand has become the externality.

It has become a welfare-reducing activity.

And as with other externalities, such as pollution, the Government has a role to intervene, working with councils to manage the externality."

I suspect this might be right.

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If we're not planning for 'robocars', we are planning wrongly.

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OK we're talking about America here but the point remains a strong one:

The rise of robocars may accelerate metro area decentralization. Congestion will be reduced, and the greater safety of driverless cars may permit higher speeds on metro area beltways and cross-town freeways. Once taxi drivers are replaced by robot taxis, the cost of taxis will plummet and the greater convenience of point-to-point personal travel anywhere in a sprawling metro area will make rail-based mass transit obsolete except in places like airports and tourist-haven downtowns. As in the past, most working-class families with children will probably prefer a combination of a longer commute with a bigger single-family house and yard to a shorter commute and life in a cramped apartment or condo.

We need to understand that this will happen and it will make all our debate about the negatives of personal transport obsolete. This also - with the need to travel also reduced by technology - rather undermines the idea that we will cram ourselves into enormous, dense core cities while the wilderness is recreated as that technology reduces farmland acreage.

Our debate about housing, transport and much else is stale and limited so long as our long-term planning is predicated on urban densification to reduce the impact of the private car. Driverless vehicles as a mass transit solution may be 30 years ago but this is not a massive planning horizon and the places that design themselves to meet this world will be the winners.

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Bradford Council's anti-business planning policy in action - health fascism edition

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Last year Bradford Council introduced - despite being told by their own Director of Public Health that it was pointless - a draconian planning policy banning new fast food outlets near schools and other places where children gather (churches, mosques, parks, play groups and so forth). The intention of the policy is to reduce levels of childhood obesity.

Yesterday the Deputy Leader of Bradford Council was crowing about the "success" of the policy:

"It is good to see that this new policy is working in blocking takeaways in these areas, as the purpose of this policy is to protect the health of young people in the district.

"When we consulted on the policy, comments were positive, especially from health professionals who recognise the obesity issue in Bradford."

In simple terms the policy bans new takeaways within 400m of schools (and all those other places) - which, if you know Bradford, means every single high street across the district. Except the City Centre because the politicians excluded it from the ban.

The article lists six proposals for new businesses that have fallen foul of the policy. That's six fewer businesses in Bradford each of which might have generated two or three jobs in a city with very high rates of unemployment. All to deliver an unquantifiable objective - there is absolutely no way for Bradford Council to know whether or not stopping these businesses from operating is reducing levels of childhood obesity.

The only quantifiable outcome of the policy is fewer businesses and fewer jobs. So when Cllr Slater says it's not "anti-business" she is lying.
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