"You have to be able to imagine yourself unwatched" - how smart cities threaten freedom

There has been a great deal of "isn't it scary" discussion about the pretty clunky on-line targeting systems developed for political campaigning. We're told that there are sinister forces at work out there conspiring to undermine democracy by scraping Facebook for psychographic profiles allowing intimate knowledge of everyone:

A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.

Christopher Wylie, who worked with a Cambridge University academic to obtain the data, told the Observer: “We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of people’s profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on.”

I'm not going to say much about this, it adds nothing much to what I said previously about what this company did - they used the Facebook API to create a profiling tool based on responses to a psychometric test. This is not really any different, other than its source, from the psychographics that profiling systems (e.g. SuperProfiles) have been employing since the 1990s - the lifestyle data back then was gather from questionnaires sent as parcel stuffers and inserts but it served exactly the same purpose as the data collected using Facebook's API by Cambridge Analytica.

Anyway, while everyone is having kittens about the use of data analytics in political campaigning (and rightly asking questions about data security and data protection - there's genuinely a question as to whether the data collected using Facebook quizzes is allowable as a data source for marketing), there's something else happening that should be just as concerning - so-called "smart cities":

Across the UK we are seeing more and more examples of smart city transformation. Key 'smart' sectors utilised by such Cities include transport, energy, health care, water and waste. Against the current background of economic, social, security and technological changes caused by the globalization and the integration process, cities in the UK face the challenge of combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development simultaneously. A smart city is a place where the traditional networks and services are made more efficient with the use of digital and telecommunication technologies, for the benefit of its inhabitants and businesses.

Wonderful. The application of all that clever and disrupting digital technology to making cities work better can only be a good thing, can't it? And I guess that, in a utilitarian, people-as-units, prudence-only way, it is a good thing:

Utrecht has become a tangle of individual pilots and projects, with no central overview of how many cameras and sensors exist, nor what they do. In 2014, the city invested €80m in data-driven management that launched in 80 projects. Utrecht now has a burglary predictor, a social media monitoring room, and smart bins and smart streetlights with sensors (although the city couldn’t say where these are located). It has scanner cars that dispense parking tickets, with an added bonus of detecting residents with a municipal tax debt according to the privacy regulation of the scanner cars.

These systems can be directed to nudging people along the city authorities preferred choices: "...a smart traffic app that rewards people for good behaviour like cycling, walking and using public transport." Brilliant stuff taking the city closer to that mythical "walkable, livable, sustainable" utopia beloved of today's City Managers, the "Mayors who Rule the World". But at what cost?

In the eastern city of Enschede, city traffic sensors pick up your phone’s wifi signal even if you are not connected to the wifi network. The trackers register your MAC address, the unique network card number in a smartphone. The city council wants to know how often people visit Enschede, and what their routes and preferred spots are. Dave Borghuis, an Enschede resident, was not impressed and filed an official complaint. “I don’t think it’s okay for the municipality to track its citizens in this way,” he said. “If you walk around the city, you have to be able to imagine yourself unwatched.”

Some are concerned that much of this data is being collected, analysed and employed by private businesses - the smart city is a privatised city, they say - but we should also be concerned about the state having such detailed information about the citizen - "Big Brother is helping you" says Peter van de Crommert from the Dutch Institute for Technology, Safety and Security. But let's imagine - as we always should with state power - what happens when the wrong sort of person gets hold of this information and these systems (if you're me, then the government is, by definition, the wrong sort of person)? And who exactly is the city being run for - citizens, business or the convenience of public officials?

The city also keeps track of the number of young people hanging out in the streets, their age group, whether they know each other, the atmosphere and whether or not they cause a nuisance. Special enforcement officers keep track of this information through mobile devices. It calls this process “targeted and innovative supervision”.

The aim seems to be management, preventing such sins as "hanging about", reducing activities deemed anti-social such as having a drink or making a noise (other than in constrained places where some of this is allowed).

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

At the heart of all this is the essentially autocratic and anti-democratic idea that the behaviour of the citizenry should be controlled, managed and directed towards a culture determined by those in charge of the city (and those with access to those in charge). This draws on the idea of corporate culture, Peter Drucker's thesis that business success is, in large measure, determined by culture has been stretched to form an ideology of the city as an entity requiring management, organisation and direction. As the smart city folk say:

"...combining competitiveness and sustainable urban development..."

This conveniently marries the obsession with dense, piled up cities (and the idea that agglomeration - cramming people together - is the secret of economic success) and the belief that cities, regions and nations are in competition, part of that 'global race' David Cameron liked to talk about. The symbol of this world is Singapore, that little autocracy on the equator where utilitarian control has been elevated into a state system - a pseudo-democratic de facto police state where producing is easy but consuming is frowned upon and the election unit is based in the prime minister's office:

"Meanwhile, although present to some degree, civil society plays a much less active rule in Singapore’s political sphere due to governmental attempts to stifle civil society’s maturation. Specifically, the institutions that constitute Singapore’s government are largely structured to undermine the expression of critical voices. Not only are the vast majority of media outlets controlled by the state, but the country’s Sedition Act also criminalizes any publication or even expression that seeks “to bring into hatred or contempt or to excite disaffection against the Government."

The price of this city state ideology, the premise of the smart city, is the relegation of people's lives to a place akin to employees of a benignly controlling corporation - bounded, directed, managed and only free within the limits determined by the corporation. It is the neoliberal city where maximising utility takes on the form of a religion, a smart city where data directs what people do, where they go and what resources they use - made possible through an unholy alliance between intrusive technology and what we used to call municipal socialism. And most people are either inside these cities consuming the bread and circuses but unable to secure a real stake or outside and unable to access the shiny wonders of the smart city:

...the city is a failing model - at least the idea of the concentrated, centralised, mayor-led city. These things are parasites, sucking away all the good from small towns with the promise of riches, opportunities and better bars while giving little back when it comes to the long-term quality of our lives. Urbanists talk about 'liveability' and 'walkability', about public spaces, even about play - yet the reality of the city is selfish, focused on the here and now rather than on creating places to which people can relate, where they might want to spend their whole lives.

Instead of creating places that are safe, sustainable and social because the people living there feel that way, we try to make places like this through control, clever technology and ever more restrictive regulation. The smart city may be clever but it's a place where corporations - public and private - control technology, where citizens are motivated by petty rewards (a day's free parking or a discounted theatre ticket), and where democracy is a facade covering up a society run by the new data kings, the controllers of the system.

UPDATE: If you think I'm being a scaremonger, try this:

Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, have presented Google with warrants to obtain data from mobile phones from not just specific suspects who were in a crime scene area, but from the mobile phones of all people in the area, reports Raleigh television affiliate WRAL. The request will trouble Fourth Amendment advocates as it could be seen that police are carrying out unreasonable searches on people who just happened to be in the area at the time the crimes were committed. And the area sizes the police requesting the data on are not small. In one instance, police requested user data from Google for anyone within a 17-acre area. For its part, Google has not revealed whether it has complied with the police request.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Everything wrong with planning in one paragraph...

This is California but don't let's pretend it's any better here in England:

Mandatory parking requirements, sidewalks, curb cuts, fire lanes, on site stormwater management, handicapped accessibility, draught tolerant native plantings… It’s a very long list that totaled $340,000 worth of work. They only paid $245,000 for the entire property. And that’s before they even started bringing the building itself up to code for their intended use. Guess what? They decided not to open the bakery or brewery. Big surprise.

Sanphillippo goes on to cite example after examle of how planning and regulatory codes stop things from happening - leaving unused buildings slowly rotting in valueless environments because fancy urban experts wandered round pretending that there's some magical value in those buildings that aren't being used, won't get used and will stay empty unless you get creative and flexible.

I'm in Bradford. This is half our problem.

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The Inner City - urbanism's dirty secret

From Chicago through Dublin, Glasgow and Manchester to Lyons, Barcelona and Vienna, the Inner City is urbanists' dirty secret. We've spent decades bashing away at solutions and nowhere are we any closer to what the right policies might be.

Just a reminder what it looks like - this is Baltimore:

Take, for example, McElderry Park, a 103-acre area just east of Johns Hopkins University's centrally-located medical center. The neighborhood, which was once middle-class, is now a severe version of the city's downward spiral. About one-third of families there live in poverty, and workforce participation levels are 54%. Nearly three-quarters of residents don't have any college education, meaning they are generally supported either by the government, or low-wage service jobs—which make up an increasingly high percentage of jobs in the city. The neighborhood's physical emptiness symbolizes another discouraging trend, population loss, which is at the heart of Baltimore’s problems.

As Scott Meyer who painted this picture observes, this isn't an anomaly in Baltimore or indeed any large city in the USA. And we know - we see the riots, despair and dislocation in our own cities - that it's not an anomaly in Europe. In the USA, Donald Trump made much of the inner cities in his campaign - in that blunt and divisive style of his, he said stuff like:

“Our African-American communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they’ve ever been in before, ever, ever, ever...You take a look at the inner cities, you get no education, you get no jobs, you get shot walking down the street.”

Set the rhetoric aside for a second, hold back your distaste for Trump - doesn't he have a point? If that sad, declining picture of Baltimore is any guide then these seemingly intractable problems of the inner city are genuine. And Trump is right - if you're a decent parent how are you going to raise your children, keep them out of trouble, keep them alive and off drugs when the only thriving industries are crime and welfare?

And is isn't new. Here's P J O'Rourke from 1991 in New York:

Mott Haven was once a district of substantial apartment houses, comfortable if not luxurious, the tract homes of their day. These sheltered the Jewish middle classes on their way from the Lower East Side to White Plains. Now the buildings are in various stages of decomposition, ranging from neglected paint to flattened rubble. Abandoned buildings are office space for the local criminals, who deal almost entirely in drugs. (There's not much felonious creativity in a modern slum.) Scattered among the remaining turn-of-the-century structures and the empty lots piled with trash are various housing projects with large, ill-lighted areas of "public" space, dead to all traffic and commercial activity. Squalor and overcrowding are often spoken of as almost a single phenomenon, but in New York's poor neighborhoods the lower the population density, the greater the filth and crime.

Or, to make clear this isn't a problem merely of US inner cities, here's The Economist in Paris:

For all the schemes and money, the banlieues are a world apart. From 2008 to 2011 the gap widened between unemployment rates in “sensitive urban zones” and in surrounding areas. Schools have a high turnover of often-inexperienced teachers, gaining merit by doing time in the banlieues. Job centres are understaffed. The unemployed say their postcode stigmatises them. Drug dealers compete with careers advisers to recruit teenagers. “Here, drug trafficking has always helped circulate money,” says Stéphane Gatignon, Sevran’s Green mayor. “It’s how people scrape by, despite the crisis.”

Every city has its dark side, the place where the crime, drugs, squalor, poverty and despair lives. We've spent millions - we're still spending millions - on these places. We do up the houses, Smarten up the schools. Put in neat pocket parks. We even try to do up the people - schemes of training, child care, job support. And yet if we take a map of England's poorest places from 1968 and a map from today, there's a frightening correlation. For sure some bits of inner London and a few streets of Salford and Manchester are now swish and gentrified. And in the seaside towns and mining villages the collapse of their industry created new places of poverty - Blackpool, half the size of Bradford, has twice as many children in care. But not much else has changed.

We sort of know what needs to be done. That old line about escaping the ghetto - finish school, get a job and keep it, get married and stay married - is still true. But the problem is that not only does this not happen enough, there are young people on the edges of these places - people who start out OK - whose lives collapse them into the slums. Immigration helps, especially immigration from even poorer places, but only when you've an economy that generates the jobs those people need. That's France's crisis - in a country where one-in-ten of working age is out of work, the banlieues have double that rate and even higher rates of youth unemployment. It's no damn use having employment protection, mandated working hours, minimum wages and child care if the result is there aren't any jobs - especially if you're black or an Arab.

Britain's most dysfunctional places are different - mostly filled with native white communities (often mixed with long resident afro-caribbean communities) rather than immigrants. In an economy, even in the North's big cities, that creates jobs, not great jobs but a step on that ladder, too many decide to step aside from that world. A community settling for a half-life on benefits topped up with bits of crime and casual, cash-in-hand work. What's gone is the thing - whatever it was, church, club, union, workplace - that showed those growing up how it worked. There's no-one saying "learn something at school, get a skill if you can, get a job - any job - and keep it, try to make your relationships work".

Instead we get the well-meaning and the bothersome. The former do a lot of good by stopping the whole place falling into utter chaos and letting some few young folk escape the life of the slum. These social workers, policemen, housing officers and folk delivering job programmes are, however, mostly a sticking plaster, more about giving a broken community a hug than fixing the break.

The bothersome on the other hand are different - these are the folk who know better - they want people to change their lifestyle, to conform and are more worried about delivering stop smoking clinics and fat clubs than seeing behind the eyes of their 'clients'. There they'll see someone who wants to know why they should bother being 'healthy' when booze, fags, easy sex and crap telly are the only things that take the edge of pain away from a shit life.

It's no surprise that, in this world, the people most likely to escape are those who've found god. Church, mosque and temple provide a place of calm and the faith a direction - all those beliefs will point to the very things that allow people a road to a better life. Educate yourself. Work hard. Respect others. Do the right thing. In times past we also had secular institutions embedded in these working class places that did the same - trade unions, clubs and pubs (often with sports attached), friendly societies, allotment clubs. A host of activity done by the community not to the community.

These places weren't perfect but, in dealing with the imperfections - sexism, cliqueiness, casual racism - we've lost sight of the good things like community, shared experience and decent role-models. What we have left, with the death of these institutions, are the institutions that are least wanted and most exploiting - crime, landlordism and the external state.

I've often suspected that, in part, we don't want the responsibility of trying to fix these broken places. We've been happy to manage their problems rather than invest in the intensity needed to provide a new hope. For sure, it's easy to say to people "your life, your responsibility" and then make sure they don't starve (while locking up their sons and taking the children off their daughters). But is that really what we should be doing? Or should we be looking for the skeletons of past institutions are trying to breathe new life into them?

It's easy to point at the city as the problem with its lack of personal scale, its busy-ness and its tolerance of wealth and poverty in the same place. But rebuilding the bones of an old community, helping shape strong people - that to me seems worth doing. To do this we need to set aside fifty years of sociological presumption, to lift the stone and see glorious life not nasty bugs. Instead of make people's habits the problem, we should be asking how we build back the social infrastructure that once held places together and pointed people to a better life - even when sometimes those things involve booze, fags, burgers and cake.

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Legacy transport and housing systems - barriers to better cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And it'll look like this:




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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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Migrants on benefits, mosquitoes, arts funding and other links you'll like

Spooky Bradford

"I didn't even know I could get benefits" - a reality check on migrants and the benefits system

“And actually it doesn’t bother me, all this immigration debate. I’m too busy. I work full time; I have three kids. But nobody I know came here for benefits and I don’t think not getting them will stop anyone coming. Maybe one or two. There’s always someone. But I know many, many more British people who live on benefits than east Europeans.”

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Kill all the mosquitoes

"Mosquitoes spread Malaria, Chikungunya, Dengue Fever, Yellow Fever, a variety of forms of encephalitis (Eastern Equine Encephalitis, St. Louis Encephalitis, LaCrosse Encephalitis, Japanese encephalitis, Western Equine Encephalitis, and others), West Nile virus, Rift Valley Fever, Elephantiasis, Epidemic Polyarthritis, Ross River Fever, Bwamba fever, and dozens more."

So exterminate them - all of them

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So you don't do politics? Think again.

"Politics is omnipresent wherever humans negotiate over power and governance. We speak of “office politics” or “university politics,” and those phrases are not mere metaphors. Our negotiations with friends are a form of politics as well, as we figure out where to go out to eat or what show to see. Our romantic and familial relationships are full of similar negotiations about language, persuasion, power, and mutual consent. To say we “don’t do politics” is to have a narrow notion, in Ostrom’s view, of what constitutes being a citizen in a society where democracy is a feature of so many institutions."

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Virtue signalling as conspicuous consumption.

"Rather than trying to one-up one another by buying Bentleys, Rolexes and fur coats, the modern social climber is more likely to try and show their ‘authenticity’ with virtue signalling by having the correct opinions on music and politics and making sure their coffee is sourced ethically, the research says."

...interesting and challenging

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Nothing new about retailing as performance (ask any market trader) - and it's back...

One of the key themes emerging from the presentations was that creating face-to-face customer experiences is vital to retailers not only because of the value to audiences in-store but also because of the huge value of customers sharing their experience across social media platforms. Sophie Turton from eConsultancy, who spoke at one of the learning talks, noted that:

“Instead of creating content, retailers should be creating opportunities for content creation – instagrammable moments, inspiring experiences.”

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The Urbanophile on Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age'

"The creation of the buffered self had consequences, however. By disconnecting us from the world, and draining the world of meanings, the buffered self creates a sense of improverished existence. That is to say, it produces the pervasive modern sense of malaise long commented on by Freud and others. But whereas Freud saw malaise as the inevitable byproduct of the sense of guilt necessary to make civilization possible, for Taylor it is rooted specifically in Western modernity’s sense of the buffered self."

Fabulous stuff.

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And how all the arts funding still goes to London:

The report also highlights that Arts Council England’s decision to move an extra 5% of Lottery funds outside London amounts only to an “improvement outside London of 25p per head”.

Its Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital report in 2013 also claimed that ACE was allocating more than five times as much spending per resident to London organisations as those outside the capital in 2012/13.

Enjoy!!

Meanwhile in Venezuela the left remind us of their weird priorities...

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So Venezuelan people don't have food in the shops, they have to queue for loo paper and the government is taking over businesses right, left and centre just in case they might actually be trying to make a living. It is an object lesson in the stupidity of the left's obsessing with fixing prices.

But you'll be pleased to know that the Venezuelan government is on the case and sorting out the problem:

Last year, Venezuela became an urban laboratory for architects and urban designers who believe in the implementation of participatory processes and collaborative design techniques in order to change communities who live under threat.

The Venezuelan firm PICO Estudio in hand with the National Government of Venezuela organised Espacios de Paz (EDP) (Spaces of Peace); an urban journey where professionals, students, local residents and public entities worked together to benefit their cities and people. This initiative activated urban processes of physical and social transformation through architecture, using self-building techniques in public spaces located in conflictive urban contexts.

The result of the project is some pretty funky and brightly coloured community spaces and buildings - you'll be familiar with these because they feature that slightly manic style of design beloved by community action groups.

These 5 projects were conceived as spaces of encounter, where a local community can gather together, developing different activities, meetings and workshops under beautifully designed, colourful roofs. Projects included basketball courts located on a rooftop; shadowed spaces built for promoting dialogue among residents; spaces for learning and debating; and orchards, playgrounds, amphitheatres, viewpoints, and so on.

It's all terribly sweet and lovely - introducing us to a world of happy, smiling faces as communities work with 'agencies' and 'professionals' to put lipstick on the abject poverty their government's policies have created. It is the finest example of how the left's approach to community development is typified by going into these communities, giving them a great big hug and saying 'there, there, it'll all be OK'.

The truth is very different - as even Venezuelan government figures tell us:

According to this measure, the number of Venezuelans classified as poor shot up in the last year by 1.8 million people. Roughly 6 percent of all Venezuela’s 30 million people became poor in the last year alone. The situation is even direr when one looks at extreme poverty, i.e., the number of people whose income cannot even buy a representative basket of food and drink. In the last year alone, the number of extremely poor Venezuelans rose by 730,000. They now reach close to three million people, or roughly 10 percent of the population. 

And of course the happy professionals will return to their achingly trendy offices in places where you don't have to deal with the reality of living in Venezuela's slums. It's not just the lack of basics but increasing levels of violence - 25,000 homicides in 2013 (this compares to 15,000 in trigger-happy USA with ten times the population) including over 200 police officers.

Still I guess that creating "...social dynamics which invite new ways of living in communities, modifying categories that rule the daily life, transforming vacant plots into powerful spaces for their inhabitants..." is absolutely the way to make Venezuela's economy and society better!

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Urban agriculture - the latest green indulgence

Jane Jacobs argued in The Economy of Cities that agriculture was a consequence of urbanism not, as is commonly held, the reverse. Jacobs' argument was that settled communities developed in places where there was plenty of food and people in those cities began cultivating gardens and experimenting with growing rather than gathering food.

The problem is that, so far as archaeological investigation allows, this is not the case:

In The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs conjectured that the world's first cities preceded the origins of agriculture, a proposition that was most recently revived by Peter Taylor in the pages of this journal. Jacobs' idea was out of line with extant archaeological findings when first advanced decades ago, and it remains firmly contradicted by a much fuller corpus of data today. After a review of how and why Jacobs formulated her ‘cities first’ model, we review current archaeological knowledge from the Near East, China and Mesoamerica to document the temporal precedence of agriculture before urbanism in each of these regions. Contrary to the opinions of Jacobs and Taylor, archaeological data are in fact sufficiently robust to reconstruct patterns of diet, settlement and social organization in the past, and to assign dates to the relevant sites. 

This isn't to say that urban living isn't an important driver of invention and innovation but rather to observe that, however appealing, the idea that the countryside is sclerotic and trapped in an unchanging stasis wholly misrepresents agriculture and agricultural innovation. This doesn't stop urban designers, wrapped in green ideas, wanting to recreate that mythical urban agriculture. In one respect this represents the dream of having and eating the urban cake - we want the things that a large city offers in terms of variety, culture and opportunity as well as the bucolic charms of the countryside.

A team led by Perkins+Will and the LA River Corp just released the results of its Urban Agriculture Study for the area, which borders the LA River and gritty neighborhoods such as Chinatown, Cypress Park, Lincoln Heights, and Glassell Park. Funded by State Proposition 84, the study zeroes in on agriculture projects that can both attract green developers and serve local needs. Pilot projects are set to start this spring, and some related infrastructure has already begun. Other members of the team include community outreach partner GDML, urban agriculture expert Jesse Dubois, and financing consultants PFAL.

The proposals are financed through a bond intended for "safe drinking water, water quality and supply, flood control, waterway and natural resource protection, water pollution and contamination control, state and local park improvements, public access to natural resources, and water conservation efforts", and represent the usual smoke and mirrors associated with multi-agency urban environmentalism. At the heart of the project's rationale is the idea that the current model of agriculture less than environmentally optimal especially given the geographical distance between production and consumption.

However, the carbon footprint of food is overwhelmingly in its production rather than in its distribution - and this is why, in environmental terms, urban agriculture is a bad idea. This LA scheme illustrates the problem with its proposed production model:

Because the neighborhood has few greenfields, and could potentially have ground and air contamination, the plan suggests largely “controlled agriculture,” with internally regulated techniques like hydroponics, aquaponics, and greenhouses.

So rather than grow the food in a more-or-less natural environment, we opt instead for the use of high-cost, high-carbon 'controlled agriculture', for a world of high specification, architect-designed greenhouses rather than dull old fields with crops growing in them.

The proposers of the scheme also recognise that urban agriculture - other than for particular high margin markets - makes little or no economic sense either. They don't quite put it this way but that's what they're saying:

The study also suggests developing alternative financing methods, and in order to begin implementation, the team is now talking to non-profit partners like EnrichLA, which builds gardens in green spaces in local schools; Goodwill, which has a large training center in the area; Homeboy Industries, which runs a training and education program for at-risk youth; and arts group Metabolic Studio. The team is also meeting with local schools, food processing centers (like LA Prep), and government entities such as the Housing Authority of Los Angeles.

Nowhere in this is there any of that old-fashioned financing and this is because those old sort of investors (the ones without big charitable trust funds or taxpayers' cash in their piggy banks) look at urban agriculture and conclude that it simply isn't viable. We're getting a lot of very expensive infrastructure intended to grow food that right now is available cheaply and readily in the local supermarket having been grown in fields elsewhere in the world. More to the point those investors will look at the land being taken for this inefficient and expensive agriculture and ask questions like "wouldn't it be better to build houses with gardens?"

Indeed it's this question of land values - made worse in California by their very limiting planning system - that makes that urban agriculture uneconomic. Here's Pierre Desrochers describing the end of Parisian urban agriculture:

Urban agriculture in Paris and elsewhere quickly faded away at the turn of the twentieth century. The development of new technologies such as the railroad, refrigeration and improved fertilizers made it possible to grow food much more cheaply where nature provided more sunshine, heat, water and better soils. The movers and shakers in more profitable industries that benefitted from an urban location were willing and able to pay more for land while urban agricultural workers moved in ever-increasing numbers into more lucrative manufacturing operations. These realities haven’t changed. Urban farming simply does not create enough return on investment from scarce capital relative to other activities in cities.

Urban agriculture - whether grand schemes such as this one in California or local schemes such as Incredible Edible in Todmorden - is an indulgence rather than some form of environmental salvation let alone a viable economic proposition. And don't get me wrong here, if communities want to invest in these things - to collectivise the vegetable patch so to speak - that's great. Surrounding ourselves with living and growing things helps make the urban environment more pleasing - indeed there's nothing new about urban greenery:

According to accounts, the gardens were built to cheer up Nebuchadnezzar's homesick wife, Amyitis. Amyitis, daughter of the king of the Medes, was married to Nebuchadnezzar to create an alliance between the two nations. The land she came from, though, was green, rugged and mountainous, and she found the flat, sun-baked terrain of Mesopotamia depressing. The king decided to relieve her depression by recreating her homeland through the building of an artificial mountain with rooftop gardens. 

The world is improved by parks, gardens and we get joy from planting and growing but the prosaic industry of growing, producing and distributing the food needed to feed the world's billions isn't about that joy or pleasure but rather about hard economics facts. And one of those hard economic facts is that cities aren't the place for growing our food.

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Modern urbanism defined - build places people don't want to live in and call it 'sustainable development'

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I can understand dense urban development when there's not a lot of spare land and values are very high. But sometimes it just reveals the ideology of urbanists to be unpleasantly directing and controlling. Here's an example - the relocation of the Swedish town of Kiruna:

“Either the mine must stop digging, creating mass unemployment, or the city has to move – or else face certain destruction. It’s an existential predicament.”

So Kiruna (familiar to us 'A' level geography students as the best example of a town that simply wouldn't be there were it not for an essential natural resource - iron ore) needs to move. But the proposed replacement is a classic example of what you get when trendy architects meet 'sustainable development' and state control:

The current town is a sprawling suburban network of winding streets, home to detached houses with gardens. White’s plan incorporates a much higher-density arrangement of multistorey apartment blocks around shared courtyards, lining straight axial boulevards, down which the icy winds will surge.

It is an opportunity, say the architects, for Kiruna to “reinvent itself” into a model of sustainable development, attracting young people who wouldn’t have stayed in the town before, with new cultural facilities and “visionary” things such as a cable car bobbing above the high street. But it is a vision that many of the existing residents seem unlikely to be able to afford.

Kiruna is in the middle of nowhere - quite literally. It only exists because of the reserves of magnetite and, if you don't want to stay and dig the stuff up, you're going to head south pretty sharpish. Why on earth would young people stay in a small town where it's dark for half the year when they can go to Stockholm?

There was no need at all to build this sort of trendy version of 'Stalinist Baroque' - the authorities could have simply parcelled up and handed out building plots to residents. But that would have been too free, open and democratic for the urbanists. They'd much prefer some choice and living room but will be getting the high rise, high rent apartments the state dictates. This is the sort of world the fans of garden cities and sustainable living want. It's not what people want.  But what do we get?

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The garden city - a stultifying, depressing but comfortable, car-free suburban zombie-land

I've known David Rudlin and Nicolas Falk from Urbed off and on for about a dozen years mostly because they've both been involved in some of the thinking - good and bad - about the future of Bradford as a place. And like many in the urbanist and urban design world, David and Nick are, I fear, a little trapped in a planning model rather than a people model. The solutions Urbed produce are - at the macro level - about deciding things for people collectively or, worse, about trying to second guess the aggregate impact of millions of consumption decisions.

Urbed were the winners of the Wolfson Economics Prize 2014, which focused on "how best to deliver a new garden city which is visionary, economically viable and popular." And, in Urbed's slightly disruptive tradition, the winning entry rejected the old 'new town' model of the garden city in favour of large urban extensions. It's well worth reading how Urbed responded to this brief because it reveals a very high quality of thinking about the challenges of a brief to deliver places rather than a new generation of uninspiring, predictable housing estates.

Given the brief Urbed's response was exciting, challenging and stimulates us to think about the model for future development in England. However - and this is what I will examine in the rest of this article - the approach is profoundly illiberal, assumes that more fixing of the housing market is needed because our planning systems have skewed that market and fails to consider how travel, communications and work will change over coming decades.

Writing in New Start, Nick Falk sets out some of the essentials that lie behind the Urbed entry.

Tomorrow’s cities not only have to be affordable in a world where few earn enough to make a deposit on a house, but also to cut carbon emissions, and create a sense of community. Letchworth was built at a time when the man was the breadwinner, working locally, and when energy was delivered by the coalman. Various religions brought people together; alcohol was banned, and people made their own entertainment. The motor car was hardly practical for most people’s needs.

The problem, as Nick recognises, is that the system we have of designating land for development (while protecting most other land) results in unaffordable housing. In Surrey there is famously more land given over to golf than to housing. It's true that our system of housing finance has also contributed but the primary cause remains the deliberate limiting of land available for the development of housing. Indeed, Falk notes this - although he may not have meant it this way - when he says:

...we have to find ways of doubling housing output and locating them where there is easy access to jobs and services, and this means taking much of the risk out of development.

Put more simply (and from the perspective of the housing consumer rather than the urbanist or planner) we need to build most of the housing in places where people actually want to live. This is something of a challenge and isn't met by the Urbed approach of urban extensions but rather by something that Nick Falk rejects - small scale developments in local communities that act to sustain those communities as places. The problem is - as Falk comments - the 'experts' reject this approach:

Through focus groups, we found that not only was there a general feeling among professionals that concentrating growth in a few planned settlements would produce better results than spreading it around, but we also identified ways in which a ‘social contract’ might be negotiated. 

This preference is determined not by the economic realities of housing demand but by a concern with 'climate change' and 'low carbon'. Thus we reject the idea of extending a village with, say, 400 homes to be one with 600 homes (thereby securing the future of the village pub, the post office and the shop) because such development is predicated on the motor car as the primary means of transport.

The result of this is that development simply doesn't meet either need or demand without public subsidy. Indeed, Nick recognises this with his proposal to freeze land values. Ostensibly this freeze is to prevent 'speculation' but, in reality, it represents an enormous public subsidy to those developing the garden city. Indeed, it is clear that - if the Howardian model is to work - such intervention is inevitable. In effect the state identifies a given area for development and takes the additional value rather than allowing this value to accrue to the land owner. The idea that this can happen without compensation is nonsensical.

Nick Falk also cites places like Freiberg in Germany as examples of how this 'social' development approach has worked. Now, it may be that this is the case for some but if the only option for the young worker in the South East of England is such a place, I fear that they'll still look in envy at those in million pound homes in gorgeous Surrey villages asking why. Indeed, this is the vision Nick Falk would impose on those young workers:

In Vauban, if Rieselfeld residents are to be believed, green living is compulsory. 'It jumps in your face a little,' Claudia Duppe warned me, 'and there is a lot of social control. If you walk into the quarter with an Aldi carrier bag, it's, "Sorry, I'm not talking to you; you shop at a discount supermarket and you don't buy organic." It feels claustrophobic, because everyone expects you to behave in the same way - and of course you are not allowed to have a car.'

This would be the triumph of the urban planner, a place where a supposed 'social contract' determines every last thing about the way people live forcing on them a constricting, unnecessarily dense urbanism where there words of Jane Jacobs critique of the garden city become stark and depressing:

...the creation of self sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

This, rather than the shining city on the hill, is the reality of the garden city. Nick Falk would have us create pretty 21st versions of Stepford, Connecticut (or at least its fictional version). Places where conformity with the 'social' rules are enforced by what began as a charming 'common weal' and quickly becomes the suppressing of difference - a modern prohibition.

I do not want to live in this socially contracted world of Falk's 'pocket utopia' for that supposed perfect place is anything but perfect. Instead it is the creation of planners who see people as things to be placed in carefully designed 'communities' and 'neighbourhoods' rather than as free agents able to, through their interacting with others, create real communities and real neighbourhoods - places that work. Some people want to live hugger-mugger in dense city places, some want space to breathe and a view and others want a variety of choices in between. For a few, Falk's 'green wonderland' would be just the ticket but if this is presented as the future of the urban place it will be one free from creativity and edge, bereft of individual initiative, a stultifying, depressing but comfortable car-free suburban zombie-land.

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Why urban agriculture isn't the solution to anything...

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We're supposed to get all agitated about food miles and to see growing food in cities as the solution with the countryside left to wild animals and strange bearded men with banjos and pick-up trucks. The truth is, as ever with environ-loon wet dreams, that this makes absolutely no sense at all:

What today’s enthusiastic locavores ultimately fail to understand is that their “innovative” ideas are not only up against the Monsantos of this world, but also in a direct collision course with regional advantages for certain types of food production, economies of scale of various kinds in all lines of work and the fact that pretty much anything they can achieve in urban environments can be replicated at lower costs in the countryside. These basic realities defeated sophisticated local food production systems in the past and will do so again in the foreseeable future.

While no one argues against the notion that our modern food production system can be improved, and entrepreneurs are always searching how to do so, the desire to make urban agricultural a viable commercial reality distracts from more serious issues such as international trade barriers and counterproductive domestic agricultural subsidies. The sooner well-intentioned activists understand these realities, the better. 

This is from an article by Pierre Desrochers Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Toronto where he explores five reasons why urban agriculture won't succeed (and the reference to 19th Century Parisians growing pineapples in horse muck is especially delicious).

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Quote of the day: on urban branding

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From Al Modarres, Director of Urban Studies at University of Washington Tacoma writing in New Geography:

The challenge of urban branding is that cities are not commodities. As such, urban branding is not the same as product or corporate-style branding. Cities are much more complex and contain multiple identity narratives; whatever the business and leadership says, there are other local voices that may challenge the accepted “script”. In fact, while city marketing may focus mainly on attracting capital through economic development and tourism, urban branding needs to move beyond the simply utilitarian, and consider memories, urban experiences, and quality of life issues that affect those who live in a city. A brand does not exist outside the reality of a city. It is not an imported idea. It is an internally generated identity, rooted in the history and assets of a city.

Catchy phrases, logos, shiny booklets, invented cultural events, or the latest urban design schemes are not the answer. Copying tactics from other cities won't make a city recognizable; it will make it less visible and less unique. The challenge is, then, to ask what assets a city has that others do not possess; which of these assets can be seen as a city’s mark of achievement or recognizable characteristics; and how does one activate, elevate and sustain those characteristics?

Interesting observations - many City marketers could learn from this outlook.

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Don't get bewitched by European urbanism again...

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Peter Hall is the godfather of British urban planning who, more than anyone else, set the scope and nature of our town planning system. There is no doubt that his contribution is enormous - and not entirely benign. Like many he is bewitched by European urbanism:

The brilliant new developments, visited by admiring tour groups of British planners, are now in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, France and Germany: Hammarby Sjöstad, a new-town-in-town in the centre of Stockholm; the Western Harbour, a similar redevelopment of an old industrial area in Malmö, facing out to look at the new bridge from Copenhagen; new Dutch suburbs like Almere outside Amsterdam and Ypenburg next to The Hague; developments along new tram lines, as in Montpellier’s spectacular new corridor to the Mediterranean; and Freiburg in south west Germany, the university city that got everything right.

These developments are, we're told, the acme of urban development -  'environmentally sustainable', appropriate in scale and driven by the state. Indeed Peter Hall and other planners will tell us that this approach gives the private sector "the surety it craves" and sets the ground for its development and success. This is the urbanist version of that 'white heat of technology', the development approach that may result in a place as dynamic as Milton Keynes but will also produce Cumbernauld, Skelmersdale and Corby.


And when we (or rather those "admiring tour groups of British planners) visit these wonderful European places, what they see is the shiny regeneration they're not shown this:

Away from the modern developments lie older areas developed in the late 19th and early 20th century. A growing population led to urban sprawl, which took place outside of the city walls (e.g. The Gambetta). Here terraced, ‘2 up – 2 down’ housing is packed into narrow and cramped streets, lacking the open space of the Antigone. Even with the influx of high tech jobs, unemployment in Montpellier rose from 16.7% to 22.4% of the active population. A large majority of these are the North Africans who have made Montpellier their home, but cannot locate within the newer developments. Both lack adequate housing provision and high crime rates are now major problems in Montpellier. Social and ethnic polarisation is therefore highly evident.

The truth with state-led regeneration everywhere is that, even the successful stuff (or stuff the planners love) simply hasn't even scratched the surface of the problems lying below - crime, deprivation, unemployment, racism. The sectarian and communal aggro of modern Stockholm isn't resolved by the Hammarby Sjöstad however great it may be for its most better off residents. And to describe the mini-totalitarian place of Freiburg as the city that "got everything right" is a stark reminder that town planning sits at the heart of what I call the new fascism.

To remind you about the green wonderland of Freiberg:

Its housing blocks, built to a uniform height (usually four storeys), are reminiscent of the Eastern Bloc. Because the properties are all the same age, the place lacks character and charm. On the walk to my hotel, I pass an area of pitted waste ground reserved for the last phase in Rieselfeld's development, awaiting the excavators and cranes that accompany any such work in progress. It might be 'the gateway to the Black Forest' (as one resident put it), but the quarter lacks some of the facilities you might expect of a small provincial town.

And this is the town where you're charged  €18,000 a year to park your car - to not get charged this impost, you have to sign the pledge not to own one (something plenty of Freiberg residents do and then go buy a car anyway). This is the town where supermarket bags are banned and the bicycle is god. This is the world those planners - Peter Hall and his ilk - want you to live in. A sanitised, controlled, regulated, judgemental world of standardised apartments, regimented green space and a stasi-like control of our choices and behaviour.

Me, I like the untidiness of the old city, the idea of organic, people-driven development rather than a world planned and directed by people like Peter Hall. People who fail to realises that their cities of gold are simply gilded marvels, circuses tacked on to failure and shown to us as Potempkin villages hiding the deprivation, decline, degeneration and communal strife that is the real truth of much urban life Europe. Just as Britain's shiny regeneration didn't create new jobs or attract new industries, these European places are just chimera, illusions of success that bewitch us and lead us into believing that grand projects, state-directed regeneration and a green agenda will turn round our struggling northern towns. It won't.

And remember, planners in the mould of Professor Hall created the places we hate, the architects they spawned designed the buildings we loathe and the philosophy they espouse crushes individual initiative, prevents opportunity and detests the dynamism of business - the hatred, the fear and loathing of "haphazard growth" is designed to crush the private at the expense of the public. Those planners are the problem not the solution. Don't let them fool you with their enchanted European wonder-towns - these are the safe, environmental, sustainable banlieues of the new fascism.


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Urbanism and the case for devolution

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Yesterday I went public with a view I've coddled for a while. It is the answer to a question I've posed a few times - why is US and European writing on urbanism so more varied and interesting than our home grown British writing?

British writing and research on urbanism - or regeneration as it is more commonly badged - is trapped in the idea that central government distributes money. Ever more intense screeds are penned about 'multiple deprivation', 'place-based intervention' and the iniquities of how government sets policy. The industry cuddles up to ministers and lobbies for 'business-led' structures to manage the delivery of projects or developments.

Over the years since Michael Heseltine stood on a derelict site in Liverpool and Margaret Thatcher visited similar in Teeside, out regeneration models have been stuck in the same policy groove skipping a replaying the same actions and merely rebadging them as new, as thinking outside the box. In truth, with the exception of Neighbourhood Renewal Fund, nothing changed - either with policy or, more importantly, on the ground.

And here is the problem - a problem that still persists in Britain today. Policy is determined by central government and the funding distributed to those who comply with that policy. There is a great deal of talk about delivery, about innovation and about transformation. But nothing much changes - these are just fine words, no parsnips are buttered.

The reason why urbanism is more exciting in the US, in Holland and in Germany is simply because the creators of policy in urban places don't have to wait on central government for either guidance or money. The situation where West Yorkshire has to crawl up the backside of the Department of Transport in order to get a little dribble of funding for a mass transit system simply wouldn't apply - the money would be raised locally and spent locally.

Across the USA new approaches and ideas are tried - and you only need to read blogs like The Urbanophile or Project for Public Spaces to see the creativity of many US cities and communities. These ideas - good and bad, effective and disastrous - are part of the debate at local level as groups campaign for and against programmes rather than, as in the UK, mostly lining up to shoot down developments.

If we want this dynamism, wish to rediscover the Victorian passion that created out great cities, we have to unshackle local government from central government's apron- and purse-strings. I'd argue that we also need directly elected mayors, fewer city councillors and more everyday activities devolved to community, town, village and parish councils - but the central need is to end the current situation.

Every time Bradford Council meets in full session we pass resolutions asking for the Chief Executive to write to one minister or another, to lobby local MPs or otherwise seek to influence central government decisions. I'm pretty sure that council meetings in Columbus, Montpelier or Freiburg aren't making these sorts of decisions. They don't need to, they have the powers to act, to get things done - there are no central government planning inspectors, no second-guessing on borrowing permissions, no bureaucracies that must agree before anything can be done.

If we want a better urbanism in Britain, we need to set local government free and allow it to innovate, create, succeed and fail. With local voters not inspectors or Whitehall bureaucrats as the arbiters of that success of failure.

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