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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Town planning does more harm than good - which is why it's not cool

I was expecting some sort of paean to the town planners art replete with talk of garden cities and quotations from Peter Hall but this article by Tom Campbell in the Guardian surprised me with the manner in which it deconstructed the problems with town planning - and with the planner:

“Planners have become simultaneously under-respected and over-professionalised. Their training and practice too often leaves them able to communicate effectively only with other planners and professionals, working in an abstract language that alienates them from people. People are occasionally allowed into the professional planner’s world, but in highly mediated terms dictated by the profession.”

Now to be fair to the town planner this description could apply to a host of other (sometimes derided) professions - law, accountancy, health service management to name just three - but it remains the case that we don't seem to know what the role of planning is in helping create great cities. The article goes on to argue (without any supporting evidence) that planning isn't a barrier to growth and even that planning can be "positive and bold", whatever that actually might mean.

The concluding argument though is this:

If cities such as London are going to thrive from globalisation, channelling funds into affordable housing, public infrastructure and civic spaces, it is planners who must go into battle on our behalf – democratically empowered; confident in their ability to negotiate firmly with private capital.

Which rather places planners as the plucky little chaps fighting against The Man on behalf of all the little people and, in doing so, creating great places. The problem is that London, unquestionably a great city, owes none of that greatness to the planning profession. Indeed, it wouldn't be hard to argue that planning - far from promoting great places - actively stifles their development. But all this merely reflects the nature of town planning as a bureaucratic function - for all that planners talk about public engagement and involvement, they still produce a rule book for fellow planners (and for the crust of parasitic lawyers that cling to these bureaucracies like barnacles).

Most planners start their careers by doing a thing called 'development control' (sometimes in a new and, I suppose, ever-so-trendy innovation this is called 'development management'). Put simply development control is the application of that rule book and is filled with phrases like 'Policy H10.0 of the rUDP states" and "the NPPF supersedes earlier guidance meaning that PPS13 not longer applies in this instance". The activity is designed - or so it seems - to numb the brains of even the most assiduous and thoughtful local resident.

Planners start their careers with this dull listing of policies and writing of reports explaining why Mr & Mrs Jones can (or cannot) build a little bungalow on the land next to their daughter's house, why Ali Khan isn't able to sell hot food from his shop unit or why local residents will (or won't) have to put up with lorries trundling along their narrow streets. This bureaucratic process seeps into the souls of these planners and they lose sight of the reason they set out on the career - the shiny pictures in the RTPI brochure and the flash urban design images on the University Planning Department's website are all erased by processing loft conversions, applications for takeaways and variations to Condition 23 of a planning permission.

So when planners get to do policy they approach it with their souls stained by years of routine, their minds filled with acronyms, legal cases and policy reference numbers. The planner assumes their purpose is given - how could we operate without the comforting and comprehensive tome setting out local polices. So we change its names from time to time - structure plans become unitary development plans which morph into the slightly disturbing set of letters, rUDP before emerging as the rather more prosaic Local Plan. But these are all essentially the same document  - each one starts out with a glimpse of the geographer as a picture of the place being planned is painted. Geology is mentioned, a little bit of history is added plus a description worthy of Stamps Commercial Geography. All this is but a false dawn as the document then plummets into the micromanagement of everywhere and everything - nothing can be left without a policy setting out how it should be done plus rules on which those parasitic lawyers can grow.

The problem is that this micromanagement has destroyed the purpose of planning - the sweeping thoughts of Peter Hall and others about helping design places that work for everyone. Planning is never seen as either bold or positive let alone creative or innovative. Yet that is what planners wish for but are denied by the pressure to use the system as a means of control rather than as a way to empower. Look at the direction for planning - rather than being free to help create great places the planning system has been filled with controls, bans, blocks and 'you can't do that there'. It is less the triumph of the NIMBY and more a deadening system where the default position - a position wanted by too many of my fellow politicians - is 'no, we don't want that there'. We're told that a presumption in favour of 'sustainable development' is somehow a bad thing and watch as planners (supported by local councillors) invent new ways to prevent that sustainable development taking place.

Campbell is right that planning must be the servant of the people - and it isn't right now. But he is wrong to place planning in opposition to capitalism. Instead planning should seek to help that capitalism with its innovation, initiative, enterprise and excitement go in the right direction. The problem with planning is that planners have absorbed an orthodoxy, turned it into a toolkit and used it to ruin too many of our fine places. The golden age of town planning that Campbell alludes to was, in truth, the era of slum clearance, of Wardley and Poulson. That golden age was anything but golden, it was rather a bit of sparkling gold spray on a corrupting and destructive scheme to remodel (many would say ruin) places like Birmingham, Bradford and Newcastle.

I know two things - that we don't want that golden age of town planning back and that Jane Jacobs, as ever, was right when she said:

“Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work. On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and business in them. They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, threatening to shatter their dearly won learning, they must shrug reality aside.” 

Planning is necessary but it more often prevents than creates great places.

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Urban planning - the quickest route to a dead community

It is one of the oldest debates around - do we have a grand plan or do we let stuff happen. The planners tend to win this argument - sometimes to the extent of the picture above which of a model showing the "finished" version of Shanghai. This will be a planned city - the untidy, cramped neighbourhoods with winding alleys and street vendors will be replaced with great accommodation towers. The crazy shopping streets will be sanitised and tidied up - turned into tourist attractions or into a copy of the west's stale shopping experience.

Be warned this is what planners do to a place.

What planners say is that we can't allow - Jane Jacobs-like - for cities to evolve and adapt to the needs and demands of their residents. This is far too untidy. Cities need to be planned - in the past for an assortment of reasons (traffic management, zoning industry, public transport) but today the planning is need to create "sustainable cities". Here's one view from the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI)- what I call the "Shanghai View":

"Spatial planning operates at all the different possible scales of activity, from large-scale national or regional strategies to the more localised design and organisation of towns, villages and neighbourhoods. It affects everyone, making policies setting out visions for places and decisions about matters ranging from the location of major new transport or energy facilities and employment development, through to the development of new shops, schools, dwellings or parks needed by local communities. It considers the things that we value and supports our ongoing use of the environment to maintain or enhance these; from the integrity of the atmosphere to limit climate change, to the provision of habitat for individual species; from the identification of global cultural heritage to locally valued townscapes. It maintains the best of the past, whilst encouraging innovation in the design and development of future buildings and neighbourhoods to meet our future needs."

...or possibly urban planners as little gods? Without the guiding hand of the planner our urban environment would be chaotic, jumbled, unmanaged and unsustainable say the RTPI. But would it? If we did away with grand spatial planning, with national planning guidance, with splendidly pompous urban designers..with all the vast and expensive infrastructure of the planning industry, would things actually be so bad?

Should we not revisit the thinking of Jane Jacobs about the organic nature of cities and remember that:

"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served."

Planners seek to imposed a false, politically mediated order on communities. Is it any surprise therefore that the public view planning and planners with distrust. Or that the development industry so often see the planning system as an obstruction to economic development, to the provision of homes and to the ability of business to respond adequately to consumer demand.

Planning should be driven by the needs, demands and expectations of neighbourhoods and the people living in those neighbourhoods. Designs about development should be decided democratically at this level - not mediated through and impenetrable, lawyer-dominated, centralised planning system designed merely to obstruct.

Above all we must resist the geographers temptation - the drawing of marks on a map, tidying up of edges. Married to the architect's hubris this had led to cities without soul, places without character. To great squares with no animation, to the replacing of untidy flea markets with shiny malls and to dysfunctional places filled with unhappy people. Planning has done this to us. It's time to reject its ideas, to rediscover the untidy, disordered cities we love.

If we don't learn this all we will do is create our own failing planned cities - and a world of Shanghais would be a bad place.

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