The pre-Copernican fallacy of planning and transport policies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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Clean, green, child-friendly and joyful - why we need more suburbia

I wrote recently about our confused, often negative relationship with suburbs and the idea of suburbia:

So why is it that we have such a problematic relationship with suburbia? How did a suburban boy like Simon Schama come to use 'suburban' as an insult, as a way to dismiss someone he disagreed with and felt, in some way, beneath his attention? And when did we start the fetish of the city - the dirty, crowded, unsafe, unfriendly, child-free city? A fetish that, frankly, is something we (perhaps secretly) despise - what we hanker for is suburbia.

I feel that this attitude is damaging society by supporting the idea that somehow suburbs are places without soul or even worse, places that are environmentally damaging, socially divisive, mere creatures of our car-crazed culture. Suburbs are a sin:

In all, that suburban form of homogeneity, orderliness and spacing was an outward response to internal desires for security and control. But there was a cost to such an approach. Namely, the texture of life. Because sameness breeds sameness, which breeds stasis—hence, the “soulless” suburb moniker that has come to permeate the pauses in between suburban praise of “good schools,” “abundant parking” and “safety.”

Inside this desire is something else. Yes, it's to do with safety, comfort and good schools but it's also about space to live. And this is the reason why so much of the New Urbanist, city-focused planning and development approach is problematic. We might be building places suited to people in one stage of their lives but those folk don't stay in a sort of city living, Peter Pan world of endless youthful fun. Mostly because there comes a point in many people's lives when youthful fun isn't fun anymore.

Suburbs are essential if cities are to succeed rather than turn into rapacious parasites sucking the life from rural communities while the 24-hour party people become ever richer in their unhealthy, child-free towers:

For the first time in the history of the Western world, the one-person household has become the dominant mode of living. In Manhattan, New York City’s most densely populated borough, more than half of all homes have a single occupant.

Now I'm sure most of these single-person households are perfectly happy but there, niggling away in the back of my mind, is a question as to whether this really is ideal living. What we do know is dense urban environments in the developed world are increasingly child-free. Here's Aaron Renn, who lives in that child-free Manhattan:

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.

When you look, for example, at the recently published (draft) London Plan - 2kg of turgid prose interspersed with nice maps - you see that, far from addressing the sort of concerns Renn raises, the Mayor simply sees housing as a numbers game with the solution being to build the little boxes on top of each other rather than next to each other. In places - Grove Park, Eltham, Southgate, Chiswick - that were once filled with family homes (with gardens), we can expect ever taller accommodation blocks suited to the frenetic, solo life lived by so many young Londoners. All this is intended to avoid taking anything out of the precious 'green belt', to not build new suburbs but crowd the ones we've got.

The attacks on suburbanisation - as typified by that London Plan - continue. Witness the responses to the damage done by Hurricane Harvey in Houston. We're told (by New Yorkers) it is the Texan laissez faire approach to development that made things worse:

For years, the local authorities turned a blind eye to runaway development. Thousands of homes have been built next to, and even inside, the boundaries of the two big reservoirs devised by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s after devastating floods. Back then, Houston was 20 miles downstream, its population 400,000. Today, these reservoirs are smack in the middle of an urban agglomeration of six million.

Terrible! Suburban sprawl at its worst - we need denisification, zoning, strict enforcement. Or do we?

Houston’s dispersed, multipolar form, notes MIT’s Alan Berger, may have helped it respond more effectively to Harvey; the city has no central point, like Manhattan in New York City, whose closure damages the entire region. If we accept that more Harvey-like events are possible, even probable, then the most important issue is not zoning but flood control, which requires resilient systems.

So sprawl ain't so bad after all. Indeed, it might just be a good thing. Let's start with a look at South London. This is part of Beckenham, the suburb where I was brought up (my old primary school is featured as is the house where Mary Finnegan - and David Bowie - lived):



The striking thing about this image is the presence of so many mature trees and so much undeveloped space (OK planners, I know you call a garden development). Across the vast acres of London's suburbs this is the norm - even in Croydon. Suburbia is a lot greener - and more environmentally sustainable - than most urbanists and planners credit:

“We’ve all grown up thinking that urban density and verticality is a good thing but there has never been a study that has really looked at this in any detail; they’ve all been generic studies, based on large sets of generalised data. So we thought we should undertake a more focused study to prove it. And the results have been quite the opposite to those we thought we would find.”

And what did they find?

The high-rise residents energy consumption was 27 per cent more per person than the suburbanites, and even per average square metre of space, consumption was 4.6 per cent higher. Remarkably, the suburban homes involved not only had a typically larger floor area and greater surface-to-volume area (e.g. higher ceilings, roof cavities, etc.), they were also wooden-framed and significantly older – nearly 100 years old on average.

Some of the greater energy use in the high-rises was due to the lifts and the lighting and heating of common spaces and amenities. But on the “embodied energy” (in construction and materials) measure, the high-rise buildings required 49 per cent more embodied energy per square metre, and 72 per cent more per resident.

Piling people up in tall towers feels like better land use but it turns out to be the wrong idea if we want a more sustainable urban environment as well as some children (and let's not get started on safety). And, if you're concerns are about social sorting, - planners are always on about mixed tenure and social mobility after all - densification is again a bad idea:

One important point that needs to be taken into account when studying this phenomenon, is just how steeply “exclusionary” a city is “by location”. It has often been noted (e.g. by the authors of the “Costs of Sprawl 2000” study) that the higher house prices are (e.g. expressed by a median multiple) in the entire urban area, the stronger the “drive to qualify” effect. Chicago is actually significantly cheaper in all housing options than Australia’s main cities. Explicit anti-sprawl growth boundary policies exacerbate this “spatial sorting by income” effect, inevitably forcing up the price of all urban land and housing of all types in all locations.

It seems that, far from suburban sprawl being a bad thing, it is instead pretty much essential if we want sustainable cities. Urban containment policies everywhere have failed (check out Auckland's homelessness, London's beds in sheds and Seattle's inward migration crisis) but despite this planners are still churning out strategies for cities based on 'green belts' and urban densification. The reason for this isn't because we want to protect environments but rather because we've convinced ourselves that suburbs - sprawl, to use the pejorative term - are unpleasant places filled with dull people.

We need to change our thinking and rediscover the joy of suburbia not just because suburbs are great but because not building them is making our cities less sustainable, more crowded, unfriendly to children and shockingly expensive. So let's start with a correction on the environment - here's one of the editors of Infinite Suburbs:

One of the consistent themes in the book, and what gets me most excited as a landscape scholar, is the virtue of low density and the ecological potential of the suburban landscape. Environmentally, suburbs will save cities from themselves. Sarah Jack Hinners’s research in the book really surprised me. It suggests that suburban ecosystems, in general, are more heterogeneous and dynamic over space and time than natural ecosystems. Suburbs, she says, are the loci of novelty and innovation from an ecological and evolutionary perspective because they are a relatively new type of landscape and their ecology is not fixed or static.

Yet - and these editors observe this - the planning and development profession still "overwhelmingly vilify suburbia and seem disinterested in significantly improving it. Robert Bruegmann’s essay in the book reminds us that those who consider themselves the intellectual elite have a long history of anti-suburban crusades, and they have always been proven wrong."

Much of the NIMBY argument - albeit from people already in suburbs - is made easier by the willingness of planners to argue that dense urban development will work. We've got to a stage where words like "brownfield" and "regeneration" dominate the case made by the likes of CPRE rather than the reality of that case as 'we don't want any more houses round here' and little else. This urban redevelopment argument (and it is one of the five purposes for the UK's 'green belts') acts as cover for a policy that is responsible for much of London's housing crisis.

I can understand how someone who has enjoyed a field view for years might be put out by it being replaced by an estate of family housing (and I know how developers like to push the country aspect - one development in Cottingley had hoardings with a picture of horses proclaiming "meet the new neighbours") but I also feel that we shouldn't let such sensitivities dominate the system to the point where:

Around 9,000 illegal “beds in sheds” housing tens of thousands of people have sprung up across London over the last five years, a report says today.

Do we seriously think that protecting someone's open view across a not particularly special field should prevent us building the homes we need to prevent people ending up in cramped flats or on a bed in a drafty wooden structure down the end of an inner city garden? Especially when building tower blocks is expensive, environmentally-damaging and unsafe?

It is time to get less precious about those fields, to end planning micro-management of housing delivery and to get back to the sort of build rates we saw from the private sector in the 1930s (when lots of those lovely London suburbs were built) - touching 300,000 in 1937/8. Suburbs are great - you can call them what you like, even 'garden cities' - and we need more of them. The best way to do this is to put the planners back in their box and let people get on building the homes they (and we) need.

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In which a Guardian writer bemoans the lack of slums...

Or so it seems:

In this mix of complexity and incompleteness lies the possibility for those without power to assert “we are here” and “this is also our city”. Or, as the legendary statement by the fighting poor in Latin American cities puts it, “Estamos presentes”: we are present, we are not asking for money, we are just letting you know that this is also our city.

It is in cities to a large extent where the powerless have left their imprint – cultural, economic, social: mostly in their own neighbourhoods, but eventually these can spread to a vaster urban zone as “ethnic” food, music, therapies and more.

All of this cannot happen in a business park, regardless of its density – they are privately controlled spaces where low-wage workers can work, but not “make”. Nor can this happen in the world’s increasingly militarised plantations and mines. It is only in cities where that possibility of gaining complexity in one’s powerlessness can happen – because nothing can fully control such a diversity of people and engagements.

OK, our writer - one Saskia Sassen - doesn't actually use the word 'slum' here because that would load a whole lot of negatives onto her narrative. This narrative is filled with the popular "everything is being bought up by huge corporations" line - as if the buildings in London, New York and Berlin were all owned by collectives, co-ops and interesting old couples who've lived there since the place was built. There's also a slightly worrying 'and lots of the money is Chinese' as if this is necessarily a problem (a decade or so ago the bad foreigners with funny names were Japanese).

Now the point about slums is that they allow people to do those capitalist things away form the gaze of the authorities occupying expensive real estate in the city proper. And our writer is perhaps right to be concerned about the squeezing out of these places:

"Arrival cities are known around the world by many names," Saunders writes: "slums, favelas, bustees, bidonvilles, ashwaiyyat, shantytowns, kampongs, urban villages, gecekondular and barrios of the developing world, but also as the immigrant neighbourhoods, ethnic districts, banlieues difficiles, Plattenbau developments, Chinatowns, Little Indias, Hispanic quarters, urban slums and migrant suburbs of wealthy countries, which are themselves each year absorbing two million people, mainly villagers, from the developing world."

But Sassen is also wrong because the arrival of those grand developers, the imposition of those gigantic regeneration schemes, and the suborning of public space to private use doesn't stop those migrants coming. They still fill up the cracks, occupy what space can be found that's too marginal, contested or contaminated to attract those rich foreigners with funny names and their millions. And Sassen seems overly bothered by the location of public buildings filled with regulators and controllers - as if these people are either the friend of the slum-dweller or their places of work truly public spaces.

In The Arrival City, Doug Saunders talks about Istanbul - not the old city of tourists and old architecture but the far suburbia where the rural migrants settled illegally and built the fastest growing, most dynamic communities of Turkey. And this is the pattern in all our cities - the success of those at the margin makes the success of the city, a success achieved in the teeth of government opposition, eviction, regulation and distrust.

But they stay in the city. I remember selling a magnificent hand-stitched quilt to a middle-aged Jewish lady in Mill Hill. She and her husband were rich, living in a multi-million pound house in a desirable North London suburb. Asking the woman why she wanted the quilt she told me that she 'wanted an heirloom, our families came here with nothing and we want our families to have something'. Those families didn't come to Mill Hill, they came to London's East End and lived in a couple of cramped rooms from where they made their way in the world.

We look at slums and see squalor, dirt and disorganisation. The leaders of these places speak of poverty, exclusion and prejudice. But those new arrivals aren't staying in those slums - the best summation of what drives them is this quotation from Marco Rubio, one of the men seeking the Republican nomination in next year's US Presidential election:

Many nights growing up I would hear my father’s keys at the door as he came home after another 16-hour day. Many mornings, I woke up just as my mother got home from the overnight shift at Kmart. When you’re young and in a hurry, the meaning of moments like this escape you. Now, as my children get older, I understand it better. My dad used to tell us — (SPEAKING IN SPANISH) — ‘in this country, you’ll be able to accomplish all the things we never could’. A few years ago, I noticed a bartender behind the portable bar in the back of the ballroom. I remembered my father, who worked as many years as a banquet bartender. He was grateful for the work he had, but that’s not like he wanted for us. You see, he stood behind the ball all those years so that one day I could stand behind a podium, in the front of a room.

This isn't a defence of slums, just an observation that, for many of those who live in urban poverty, their life is better than the one they left behind. And they also know their children's lives will be better too. I guess only a conservative would really understand this though.

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Offering folk stuff to buy isn't enough for a place to work - you have to entertain them too!

Retailing as entertainment

The long-term transformative effects of ICT cannot yet be fully appraised in part because technology uptake is rapid and unpredictable. Nevertheless, in one aspect – urban design – a synergy has emerged between bricks-and-mortar merchants and planners, in reaction to virtualization. Their complementary efforts, when successful, imbue commercial space with interaction-based vitality. The human instinct for sociability further supports these efforts, evidence that there is no substitute for many of the benefits cities offer. Lives are arguably better in proximity, a point supported by decades of agglomeration and anthropological research. The challenge for planners, therefore, is to create space for meaningful experiences inimitable in the virtual realm.

OK it's a little bit wordy (as we'd expect from an American academic) but the point being made is central to the business of regeneration and the future direction of 'place-making'. The critical issue is that the 'field of dreams' approach that tended to dominate town centre development no longer applies - just because I build a shopping centre doesn't guarantee that people will flock to its hallowed halls. If all I offer is stuff to buy, the consumer has the choice of sitting on her step with a smartphone flipping through a vaster and more exciting range of stuff to buy.

Pay a visit to a recently developed shopping mall - say the Trinity in Leeds, for example - and check out the shopping. Isn't the most striking thing just how little of this there actually is in the new mall? There are dozens of places to eat and drink, there's a cinema, and there are shops - run by brands like Apple, Bose and Superdry - that are as much as branding and market positioning as they are about actually selling you stuff. We were in the Bose shop getting a demonstration of their TV (unsurprisingly the sound quality was beyond awesome although this didn't make up for its lack of smartness) and, in chatting to the sales assistant, we discovered that she wasn't incentivised to sell us stuff. No commission, no sales bonus - because the shop was there to promote and position the Bose brand.

If we want places to succeed then there has to be a reason for people to visit them - if what they offer can be perfectly replicated on-line (or, in some cases, imperfectly) then the chances are that people will access the offer through the web rather than by visiting some place. What places need to do is threefold.

1. Offer those things - chiefly around 'human sociability' - that can't be done on-line (even if they can). 'Live' music is only really live music if you're there - yes someone could stream it live to the smart TV in your lounge but is that the same? I would argue it isn't - we want the live because of the whole experience, the beer, the slight crush of the crowded venue, the sense of sharing a great experience with others. The ability to say 'I was there'. Just having a bar or foodstop isn't good enough - it needs a purpose beyond that mundane fact, a presence that can't be replicated with a bottle of wine from the supermarket and some home cooking.

2. Connect with the on-line world. We went to the Prado in Madrid and, unplanned, bought an offer to guide us round from a smartly dressed gentleman. He showed us 10 - just ten - pictures from the thousands in the gallery. And these pictures taking us from the middle ages to the 21st century told us a story of art down those ages. We could have hired one of those clunky electronic gadgets as a guide but wouldn't it be more interesting if a little smartphone app could replicate the sort of offer that gentleman made for us?

3. Focus on the occasion, the event and the demonstration rather than just the sale. It's true that the value of the place comes in part from the value that consumers invest in that place - and much of this is, inevitably, a cash value. But, as Apple, Bose and many other brands have shown, the value of a public presence needn't be about selling you some stuff. Rather it's about showing you what that stuff can do, reminding you that the stuff in question is popular (why else would there be a big shop fill with other people looking at that stuff), and reinforcing your decision to buy it.

I'm quite excited about the future for town centres, malls and other shared places. Partly this is because the domination of public space by retail is nearing its end but mostly it's because the evidence right now is that successful places are places where the special stuff - the things that make them work - are made by the people visiting rather than for the people visiting. A new generation of entrepreneurs are creating new approaches to public fun and games - from political debates in a pub to cheese tasting and street parties.

And where there are lots of people having a good time there's the opportunity to enhance that good time by selling them the stuff they want (even if they didn't know they wanted it until just a minute of so ago). For public authorities there's a difficulty because of an instinctive discomfort with things that disrupt existing markets and existing expectations. Excuses will be used to prevent or slow the initiative of these new ideas - the street vendor or market stall undercuts the shopkeeper, selling alcohol in the street encourages anti-social behaviour and your funky flea market needs a "markets licence" for some bizarre reason.

What we know is that many of the best examples of this new place-making reflect this development. I prefer to call this consumer-led but, if you're uncomfortable with the idea of being a consumer, citizen-led works just as well:

Authentic urban transformation relies more on citizen initiative than the influence of global capital, and may be facilitated by ICT but not defined by it; this can be seen in the quiet regeneration of urban neighborhoods. Global capital may underwrite loans for acquiring properties and developing land, decisions in such neighborhoods are often made locally and in the type of fragmented manner that generates a bricolage of uses and styles. Examples in the United States include East Nashville, Kansas City’s Crossroads district, and Oakland’s foodie Temescal and KoNo districts. None displays the architectural shock-and-awe of emerging global mega-cities, but each embodies a citizen-level developmental determinism that shapes their design and atmosphere. They are literal incarnations of the unique priorities of citizens at that time and place, independent of global trends that often result in regression to an aesthetic mean.

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Breaking the bureaucrats' rules - a thought on urban regeneration

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The always interesting John Sanphillippo, writes in New Geography about the sale of plots on Hawaii's lava flows:

Soon after the lava cools a new kind of pioneer species arrives to colonize the rocks. Before the lava flow the land had already been carved up into farms and subdivisions which were covered over. Once the lava cooled the old lots were resurveyed and sold off at bargain prices. Lots began at $1,000. When I asked one resident about the precarious nature of the location he explained, “You pay your dollar and you take your chances.”

Sanphillippo goes on to describe how these pioneers build homes on the lava despite there being no roads, no connection to standard utilities and the ever present risk of another lava flow destroying those homes.

There’s no city water supply. No complex sewer system was installed ahead of development. There are no paved roads. No banks have financed any of these buildings. No insurance company provided coverage. There are no building codes, zoning regulations, or government inspections.

What we have is a perfect illustration of how settlement starts. The world's great cities - Rome, London, Athens, Tokyo and so on - didn't start with pre-installed services into which developers and city managers can, in the manner of Sim City, plus homes and businesses. And we know that this colonising of unused space is a feature of urbanisation the world over - we call them slums, shanty towns, favelas and a thousand other terms. We turn our nose up at them and see them as places of crime, ill-heath and poverty not as nascent places for tomorrow's growth.

Sanphillippo asks whether there's a lesson in this Hawaiian recolonisation for urban regeneration, perhaps a different route to reusing redundant land that the planned, designed, regulated and sanitised approach our city leaders prefer. Maybe instead of commissioning masterplans and procuring development agreements for brownfield land in our cities, we should parcel it up into lots and turn a blind eye to what people build on that land. Some of it would be ugly and utilitarian, little more than a place to park a caravan or a hacked about shipping container but from out of this approach might come some creativity and a real community response to the provision of homes for people who want to live and work in the city.

As Sanphillippo concludes:

These lava homes provide a glimpse into what town building used to look like and could look like again if the banks, regulators, and Upright Citizens Brigade cut people a bit more slack. I’m not counting on that, but it’s good to see obscure demonstrations of the historical pattern playing out in forgotten corners to remind us of how things were done before the days of the production home builder, the master planned community, and the seventeen volume building code.

I don't hold out much hope of this sort of thing happening but it would be great if, for once, we allowed people to just get on with it rather than make them jump through ever higher and ever more costly hoops to do any development at all.

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