Rebuilding Britain: Planning for a Better Future 9781447317623

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H U G H E L L I S & K AT E H E N D E R S O N

REBUILDING

B R I TA I N PLANNING FOR A BETTER FUTURE

REBUILDING BRITAIN Planning for a better future Hugh Ellis and Kate Henderson

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Policy Press North America office: University of Bristol Policy Press 6th Floor c/o The University of Chicago Press Howard House 1427 East 60th Street Queen’s Avenue Chicago, IL 60637, USA Clifton t: +1 773 702 7700 Bristol BS8 1SD f: +1 773 702 9756 UK [email protected] t: +44 (0)117 331 5020 www.press.uchicago.edu [email protected] www.policypress.co.uk © Policy Press 2014 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 978 1 44731 759 3 paperback The right of Hugh Ellis and Kate Henderson to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved: no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of Policy Press. The statements and opinions contained within this publication are solely those of the author and not of the University of Bristol or Policy Press. The University of Bristol and Policy Press disclaim responsibility for any injury to persons or property resulting from any material published in this publication. Policy Press works to counter discrimination on grounds of gender, race, disability, age and sexuality. Cover design by Andrew Corbett. Front cover illustration kindly supplied by Clifford Harper Other photos kindly supplied by the TCPA, David Barnes and Paul Glendell. Printed and bound in Great Britain by CMP, Poole. Policy Press uses environmentally responsible print partners.

For Samuel, Bethan and Owain

Contents About the authors vii Acknowledgements ix Foreword by Peter Hetherington xi Part One: We are not a poor nation but we are badly organised 1 How are we going to live? 3 2 Why care about the future? 9 3 A forgotten heritage of hope 15 Part Two: The lie of the land! 4 The nature of the challenge 5 A divided nation 6 The housing crisis 7 The climate change challenge 8 Economic transformation 9 A disconnected politics

37 41 49 55 65 71

Part Three: Practical steps to building a better society 10 A fair and efficient society 11 Rebuilding trust in planning 12 Building the homes we need 13 Providing a resilient and low-carbon future 14 Paying for utopia

81 91 97 109 125

Part Four: Tomorrow’s pioneers 15 Utopia on your doorstep? 16 Too late for utopia?

139 143

Notes 148 References 154 Index 167 v

About the authors Hugh Ellis is head of policy at the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) where he is responsible for the Association’s work on climate change and planning reform. He has been involved in providing expert advice and analysis of British planning policy and legislation, including the National Planning Policy Framework and the Localism Act 2011, regularly appearing before government select committees. Hugh leads the Planning and Climate Change Coalition, a group of over 50 cross-sector organisations and individuals, which campaigns to ensure that the planning system makes a full contribution to meeting the climate change challenge. He has been closely involved in a number of TCPA-led European projects on climate change adaptation and mitigation and he regularly delivers officer and elected members training. Prior to joining the TCPA, Hugh was senior planning adviser to Friends of the Earth for 10 years and held a teaching and research post at the University of Sheffield. Kate Henderson is chief executive of the TCPA and a visiting professor at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. At the TCPA, Britain’s oldest charity concerned with planning, housing and the built environment, Kate leads the Association’s efforts to shape and advocate planning policies that put social justice and the environment at the heart of the debate. She has raised the TCPA’s profile through a range of campaigns and policy initiatives, most notably around Garden Cities, affordable housing, poverty and climate change. Kate has been involved in a number of government panels and independent commissions including the government’s 2016 Zero Carbon Taskforce and the independent Lyons Housing Review. The idea for Rebuilding Britain comes out of multiple collaborations and research projects that the authors have worked on together at vii

About the authors

the TCPA. These projects include the Association’s ongoing Garden Cities campaign and Planning out Poverty, a year-long research project which explored how planning can more effectively deal with social exclusion.

viii

Acknowledgements This book was only possible because of the support, love and above all tolerance of our family, friends and colleagues. Without their encouragement it would simply never have happened. We would particularly like to thank Samantha Wood, Hannah Henderson, Julie Dixon, Fiona Mannion and Chris Ellis, whose detailed edits and comments were not only helpful but brought much-needed laughter. We are profoundly grateful to the Town and Country Planning Association for inspiring us to explore our heritage and for the opportunity to draw on multiple collaborations and research projects that we have had the opportunity to work on together over the past few years.Thanks to all of our amazing colleagues at the Association who have kept the fire of the British utopian tradition alive in hard times, and especially to Nick Matthews for his help with illustrations. We would like to thank all of the TCPA trustees and particularly Peter Hetherington and Lee Shostak for their support and comments. We owe a special debt of gratitude to the late Professor Sir Peter Hall whose encouragement, generosity and wisdom were invaluable. Many thanks to Policy Press for supporting us in writing Rebuilding Britain; Emily Watt has been an enthusiastic and supportive commissioning editor. Our special thanks to James and Ceri for all their love and generosity. This book is dedicated to Samuel, Bethan and Owain in sincere hope that it is not too late for utopia.

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Foreword Peter Hetherington1

We are a nation beset by growing social inequality and by intensifying environmental crisis, but unlike many other advanced economies we seem to have forgotten how to think about and plan for our collective future. This is a striking position for the country that pioneered comprehensive planning, and has centuries of utopian thinking to build on. Britain in general, but England in particular, seems singularly incapable of planning itself to deliver the economic, social and environmental progress it deserves. The last five years have seen the process of deregulation intensify despite the clear evidence of our need to plan effectively for more housing and to deal with the kinds of flooding chaos driven by climate change. As the authors of Rebuilding Britain make clear, we live in a small island and we have to find a fair and efficient way of distributing growth. Talk of a north–south divide is over-simplistic; low-wage Cornwall, after all, bears many of the physical and social postindustrial scars associated with the north; ditto east Kent and pockets in the south east. But we have to recognise that a nation obsessed with lavishing so much on its capital – the lion’s share of transport funding, new powers, powerful mayor and a regional authority – is failing to release the potential of all its parts. High growth areas also show the signs not just of environmental and infrastructure stress but the uneasy relationship of super-rich and the abject poor whose life chances are now dangerously divergent.

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Eight years’ ago the report of a cross-party commission I chaired (serviced by the Town and Country Planning Association) produced a lengthy report to address the country’s economic and spatial challenges. We called it Connecting England. Why? Because England was (and is) anything but connected. In the preface, I wrote that the ‘country wasn’t working to its full potential because it lacked a strategy to guide key infrastructure projects and national programmes...’. Nothing has happened in the intervening years to address our woeful lack of foresight. In fact the abolition of the strategic English planning system has simply made things worse. Rebuilding Britain is a challenging book not because it highlights problems we all know are real, but because it dares us to take responsibility for doing something about them.The authors are driven not by ideology, but by hard evidence and a belief that this country can, and must do better if it is to meet the challenges ahead. These issues are too often side stepped by politicians of all parties as too unpalatable for a restless nation to swallow. However, this is not a debate about planning, but about the future of a nation in challenging times. It is a debate we cannot and must not ignore.

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PART ONE

We are not a poor nation but we are badly organised

1

How are we going to live? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. (Oscar Wilde, 1891)1 This is a book with a simple question at its heart. How are we going to live? During our grandparents’ lifetimes the question was not only asked, discussed and imagined but also acted on. Many of the institutions which now shape our lives are part of their legacy. Decent social housing replaced slum cities and health and education were made available to all. In the 1940s in the aftermath of a catastrophic war and as a bankrupt nation we managed to build over 30 new communities, which still house over 2.5 million people. We designated national parks and transformed our infrastructure.We offered people a better way of life and as a nation we shared a collective ambition to rebuild Britain. This book is inspired by that passionate ambition. It is inspired by the pioneers of the planning movement, who did so much to reshape our society for the better. In the face of growing inequality and the threat of climate change, we need to once again ask the question, how are we going to live? There is no doubt that we have lost the art of thinking about our future and understanding how it can be made better for ordinary people. We have abandoned any ambition for the ideals of utopia which used to be a mainstream part of our political debate. Worse 3

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still, many places seem to be on a pathway of decline. Not only are we incapable of offering communities a better life, we cannot even deal with the challenges that confront us every day. As a nation we are gripped by a collective fear of economic insecurity and environmental crisis, but we have no plan for the future, no strategy to guide us. Have we lost all of our foresight? Is this really the best we can do? Is this really how we will face the future? Perhaps we don’t need an idea of a better way of life. Or perhaps we have simply lost the ability, and the will, to dream about and then take hold of the future. Of course we are all still dreaming of our own utopia and tune in to the endless TV programmes which sell the idea of ‘escaping to the country’. What all those programmes teach us is that utopia is a personal thing. It is a house in the country in a real community where people look out for each other. However, this personal utopia is a place with a very small entrance door. Only a few can buy into the dream and once inside there is a strong tendency to pull up the ladder. This personal running for cover is not an option for most of us. We are dependent on our communities and we share their collective fate for better or for worse. It may seem very odd that two planners should try to write about the hope of a better life. Planners and planning are about as popular as dental surgery and are blamed for economic decline, social exclusion and their ability to clear bars by talking about planning regulations. Historically, though, planning was once as much an artistic as a technical endeavour. It was a civic art expressed in music and poetry as well as design and architecture. It had a positive purpose to protect the best of the old and of the natural environment and to build a practical utopia for the nation. It meant more than just a way to help you object to your neighbour’s conservatory. It was focused not just on where we should live, but on how we should live. The Garden City movement, which embodied all these ideals, was as much about cooperative ways of living, innovation in education and the arts as it was about circles on maps. It was, in short, the art and science of building utopia and this is the part of planning that we so desperately need now. Few people now remember the visions of John Ruskin and William Morris, yet they managed to hold in one idea the power of art, the preservation of the past, the intrinsic value of nature, and the need for a new society built on justice and fairness. Even less remembered 4

How are we going to live?

are those like Ebenezer Howard who took this vision and built it in many towns and villages like Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities and Hampstead Garden Suburb. Even this effort was put in the shade compared to our wartime endeavour, which proved the value and effectiveness of democratic collective action and delivered in the reconstruction of Britain the most remarkable achievements, from national parks to new towns. All of this, furthermore, in the context of a nation bankrupted by war. The past also offers important lessons about the need for humility and to be honest about what we got wrong.The drive for economic growth led to the slow abandonment of the high quality standards of the early pioneers. They had understood the need for local distinctiveness, building within the grain of the landscape.The early pioneers worked with – and not simply for – local communities. By the 1960s, however, we had persuaded ourselves that cheap systems-built high-rise development was the new utopia. While in many places high rises were a vast improvement on the slums they replaced, they lacked a simple but important component, humanity. They were built against the grain of people’s basic aspirations for simple things like gardens. We must learn the successes and failures from the Garden Cities and New Towns, as well as the later high-rise developments.They illustrate the need for practical solutions grounded in our diverse culture, the natural landscape and the lived experience of communities. Our past also offers an inconvenient lesson, which is simply that we are capable as a nation of almost anything, but we currently lack insight to face our problems and the will to solve them. We are not a poor nation but we are badly organised. It feels important to state that this is not a technical handbook on planning, or a political manifesto. Its aim is simply to reconnect the art and science of planning with the wider social values which were at the heart of what planning was meant to achieve. For us planning has a much wider, more creative and progressive definition than that found in the law. It is about how we organise our homes, neighbourhoods, cities and nation. Planning, as history shows, can be a transformative tool in shaping people’s lives for the better. We are fully aware that building a better future will be a hard struggle. We live in a sophisticated world where vested interests of all kinds are adept at squashing the art of possibilities. Raising the 5

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prospect of a better life does not suit everyone because it requires political and economic change. It means challenging ourselves to make change happen with humanity and love, but also with precision and efficiency so that progress leaves no one behind.

What do we mean by planning? Planning is the messy business of anticipating the future and attempting to shape it for the good of society – one of the most basic of human aspirations. It is carried out by all societies everywhere. In the English context, the planning system has come to be defined by the statutory system of development control and plan-making and by the process, policy and governance structures that go with that. Historically, this is a very narrow definition of planning. Attempts have been made to restore social dimensions to planning practice, acknowledging the interconnectedness of issues which surround the management of space and community – this led to the label ‘spatial planning’, adopted formally by the previous Labour government (1997 to 2010) in a planning policy statement called ‘Delivering Sustainable Development’.2 The statutory planning system is only one aspect of a wider creative enterprise to realise the objectives of sustainable development through democratic and participative means.While planning cannot and should not force people to live differently, the work of previous generations shows how a collective vision can create the conditions where more sustainable and cooperative living is encouraged and quality of life is improved. Our arguments then are founded on the simple assumption that, given the chance, human society can be made better, more cooperative and equal and ultimately more satisfying to the human spirit. The book is also written with the simple understanding that when people are surrounded by beauty with close access to the natural environment, as well as clear benefits of technological innovation, they are happier, more productive people and that is a worthwhile goal. This is our utopia. Whatever values we bring to the debate about the future there is no escape from the practical problems Britain faces.The rising human and economic cost of climate change confronts us in visible and dramatic ways, but there is also a growing awareness of the negative 6

How are we going to live?

impact of inequality not just on the poor, but on our society as a whole. The publication of The spirit level3 sparked renewed interest for real evidence of how these impacts play out and crucially how the inequality of things like income and health outcomes in the UK had got much worse over the last 30 years. This analysis shows us the problem and points to other nations that manage to organise themselves with greater fairness. Less has been written, though, on how such a society might be transformed and almost nothing on what it might look like when you open your front door. We do not pretend that it is possible to hold together and understand all of the complex questions which confront us in building the future.The purpose of this argument is to create the space to reimagine the future and to make the debate about building a better society normal.Achieving this goal requires matching high ambitions for our future with real practical solutions to help us achieve it.

Land and freedom There are many pathways to a better world, but access to land is an important part of all of them. Land reform has always been central in dealing with historic problems and it remains at the heart of solving our future challenges. Those who own land are on to a pretty safe bet: ‘after all, they’re not making it anymore’. Land is a scarce resource because it is the foundation of all primary wealth and enterprise. This is not to say we have somehow run out of it in the UK, but simply that we have to make some very smart choices if we are to grow our food, house our population and preserve and enhance our environment. In England only around 10% of the total land area is considered urban and around 13% is green belt. The geography is not black and white, however; the green belt will include a fair amount of development and our rural areas, which are often considered undeveloped, are our engines for food and resources such as minerals, forestry and energy. In fact, only a tiny portion of Britain can claim to be undeveloped. For example, only 2% of Britain remains ancient woodland. How we use the land is about making smart choices.These choices will not happen by accident or by pretending we do not need to have a plan. The big decisions about land are too important to leave to the tiny number of individuals and organisations who own the vast 7

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majority of our nation’s land. For example, a 2010 survey for Country Life magazine revealed that ‘more than a third of land is still in the hands of aristocrats and traditional landed gentry.’4 This equates to a group of just 36,000 individuals – only 0.6% of the population – owning 50% of rural land in England and Wales. Although much of the land in Britain is privately owned, it is both a national and community resource.

The case for change There is much in our society to celebrate; technological advancement, cultural and political and personal freedoms and a rich ethnic diversity. Britain remains a place where individuals can achieve extraordinary things. It is also an increasingly divided nation, however, and the nature of this division is complicated – it is partly about class, gender and race, but it is also expressed in places. The drivers for change are both moral, as set out in Part One of this book, and practical, as set out in Part Two, which identifies the challenges facing the nation. Part Three of this book is based on the idea of holding on to the ambition of utopia. If we want to ensure everyone benefits from a good quality of life, how do we, working together, begin to achieve this in Britain in the 21st century? The final section of the book is about tomorrow’s pioneers – creating utopia on your doorstep and learning to dream again. Ultimately this book is about the disturbing possibility that we can do better.

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2

Why care about the future? We stand now where two roads diverge...the road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster.The other fork of the road – the one ‘less travelled by’ – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make.(Rachel Carson, 1962)1 The arguments in this book are founded on the assumption that we should seek to shape our future by engaging with the challenges which confront us rather than simply accepting their consequences. Change is not easy to deal with because of the inherent unpredictability and stress it involves. Once we accept that it is going to happen, though, the challenge becomes how to shape that change for the collective good. We have choices and the future is our responsibility. Many would argue that we cannot shape the future. In a highly globalised world what impact can governments, let alone individuals, have? How can we grasp the challenges of climate change or rising global populations? There is a view that it is best left to the natural processes of market decisions. Planning has come under particular attack for being bureaucratic and counterproductive, for stifling innovation. Our current orthodox assumption is that the sum total of individual choices in a free market, whatever that may be, is the best humanity is capable of achieving. This idea is extremely powerful to the point where the case for any alternatives, such as collective action, has almost completely disappeared.This is partly because this strand of thinking, sometimes 9

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collectively known as the New Right, employs powerful words, around individual freedom and aspiration, which have a strong appeal in a market led economy. Since 1980, the idea that we should have the collective view of the future has become politically beyond the pale. This is the first and perhaps the biggest barrier to a better world which we have to confront. Markets, cities and economies are the product of human decision making and choice. We make the world as we choose, or perhaps more accurately those with power and influence make the world we live in. In fact, Oxfam have revealed that the 85 richest people between them control as much wealth as the poorest half of the global population put together.2 In order to shape the future, however, a democratic society needs the powers and regulations to intervene and those powers have been very largely removed over the last forty years. Not all regulation is good or smart, but as a general rule a deregulated society is less able to organise itself in the face of the big challenges before us; as a result it is less democratic and less responsible. Regulations can only be fair if they come with democracy and individual rights, but those who argue against planning our communities (and there are many) forget that the act of planning is no more than trying to anticipate the future. It is an imperfect art, without which civilisation itself would have been impossible.We all do it, from corporations to the military. Those who argue for the flexibility of the market are not really arguing against planning, they are arguing that it is their plan that should shape the future. It is worth emphasising that planning is not about predicting the future. Instead it is about engaging in change, with all the complexity and difficulty which it throws up, based on clear sighted principles like democracy and fairness.

How is Britain organised? Britain compromises three constituent nations, each with separate systems of government and planning. From the inside, these differences look increasingly significant, although from an international perspective the nations share broadly similar public policy responses. England has pursued the most aggressive form of deregulation. The Localism Act 2011 was a fundamental ideological, as well as a practical, shift in the way we organise the country. The 10

Why care about the future?

government’s attitude to strategic spatial planning was driven by a clear lack of public legitimacy and accountability in regional planning structures and the longer term political imperative to reduce, to a minimum, the role of central state activities. As a result, by 2013 the regional planning framework in England had been abolished. There is now no system for dealing with the pressing issues of housing and climate change which have an intrinsically national and regional character. A great deal of strategic data gathering and analysis, along with policy and implementation, have now been localised, with no statutory process for sub-national planning. Nor, after the abolition of the government regional offices, is there any comprehensive mechanism for the effective coordination of local plans. New bodies, such as Local Enterprise Partnerships, have been introduced to coordinate the spending of EU and government money for economic development and transport, but, ironically, these have no form of democratic accountability and most citizens are unaware they even exist.3 This position is not universal however. London retains its regional planning and governance structures and other cities, notably Manchester and Leeds, have put in place effective (although less formal) joint planning arrangements. At a district council level, joint planning agreements are emerging in some areas, but these tend to be relatively small in scale. In practical terms, this means that 330 district and unitary authorities in England now have to plan for the nation. In some places, like the East coast, where 30 local authorities face the intense challenge of sea level rise, there is no joint plan nor even any joint conversation about how to respond. There would of course be immense efficiency saving in skills and resources if these authorities planned together as a region with common interests in their future survival. This position should be seen in the context of England having no national spatial planning approach. England’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF)4 is the core national policy for the town planning regime, but it is criteria-based rather than understanding and responding to the distinct social, environmental and economic geographies of the country. In other words, it has no sense of what might go where or the fact that London might need different policy to Liverpool.

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As a result, England has no effective national planning. There is a regime for major infrastructure like nuclear energy and large scale transport, but policy for these is produced in separate National Policy Statements rather than an integrated plan. As a result England has no way of linking its major new transport infrastructure plans to the need for large-scale new housing. Apart from the nuclear policy, which specifies locations, the National Policy Statements do not even give an indication of where the government would like new development, such as ports, to take place.5 Taken together England is unique in Britain and Western Europe in having neither a cohesive or comprehensive national spatial approach, nor a sub-national regional structure. In many ways the position is even worse than it appears because some key organisations which provided data and analysis and advice on issues such as climate change and population have been removed or cut back to the point where they are no longer fit to meet the challenge of the future. For example, the abolition of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in 2010 was significant. The Commission had been set up in the early 1970s and delivered consistently high quality data analysis and policy advice in more than 20 reports, on everything from demographic change to the natural environment and climate change.6 Its abolition, on cost grounds, was one of the defining indicators of the short sightedness of modern politics. Britain now has no body with the capability of investigating the environmental challenge facing the nation in a holistic way. In 2012, The lie of the land!, a report by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) concluded It remains a shocking reality of England in 2012 that there is no government department or agency, no academic institution or NGO who has a remit to address the multiple and complex spatial problems of England in a holistic manner. As a result our future is much more uncertain than it needs to be.7 Uncertainty about the national and international pressures are often used as arguments as to why long term planning is impossible. In fact, the opposite is true. Long term strategies which acknowledge the need for the flexible adaptation of responses is the key way of 12

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managing change. The structures by which we plan should not be designed to achieve an end state vision, but to be a process of understanding and adapting to change within the key guiding principles of sustainable development. The choice of whether to engage with our nation’s future is a test of our collective commitment to future generations. Ultimately it is also a test of our democracy itself. Scotland and Wales have adopted distinctively different and more effective approaches to planning. In both nations it is possible to see a national framework for development and understand a narrative of what the respective nations are trying to achieve. Whether these policy goals are the right ones is matter for debate, but they have the ambition to organise themselves on a national basis for those issues that require it. This argument between markets and democracy would be of only academic interest if it was not for the fact that the real world is throwing up challenges which have to be dealt with now. Climate change is the best example of an issue where we are critically unprepared for the future and need to act now.The finer theoretical points of the size of the state are pretty unhelpful when your house is about to be under water. Our approach is not to argue that markets are somehow bad or shouldn’t be a major aspect of our society. The argument is that a free market approach has failed to deal with some of the key global problems, like equality and climate change, and that in fact, in these areas, free markets have been part of the problem, not the solution. One of our central assumptions, however, is that finding solutions to our immediate problems, vital though that is for the future of our society, is not enough. It is not just a question of whether we take action, but to what purpose.Whether we like it or not the challenges are real. We must use the necessity of change as an opportunity to test the aspirations of the utopian tradition. Much of this book is focused on demonstrating the practical value of that vision, but it is important to be clear about the principles which underlie it. Phrases like a ‘better society’ and ‘progressive values’ can soon become meaningless without some attempt at definition. The values of a better society will always be contested and for us they are not intended to be dogmatic and inflexible. Our notion of utopia is not based on a single design for some alien, modernist perfection. 13

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In fact, you will have experienced elements of this utopia in your daily life. For some it might be an absence of fear, freedom from debt and reliance on the food bank, or having basic human contact. For others it might be safe and secure streets, access to an allotment to grow your own vegetables or a decent local theatre, music festival or sports club and affordable and good quality public transport. So far as there is a single set of values for the future, they are based on the utopian tradition and in particular the Garden City principles.8 These were founded on social justice, fair distribution of land and profits from land, cooperative and participative decision making and imaginative, well designed affordable housing in mixed communities. There are walkable streets, local shopping facilities and great schools, beautiful parks and gardens on your doorstep, access to the best art and culture and locally supplied energy and food. It is important to recognise, as Part Three of the book will demonstrate, that there is no technical barrier to achieving any of this change. For example, we can build homes which are now so energy efficient that they can export renewable energy to the grid. Car share schemes are now so flexible in Berlin that you can book them on an App. We have the technology; all we lack is the will. In 1963 US President John F. Kennedy said Our problems are man-made, therefore they can be solved by man.And man is as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable, and we believe they can do it again.9

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A forgotten heritage of hope And so take courage, and believe that we of this age, in spite of all its torment and disorder, have been born to a wonderful heritage fashioned of the work of those that have gone before us...It is not we who can build up the new social order; the past ages have done most of that work for us; but we can clear our eyes to the signs of the times, and we shall then see that the attainment of a good condition of life is being made possible for us, and that it is now our business to stretch out our hands, to take it. (William Morris, 1884)1

Lessons from history In the summer of 1946, a bankrupt and war-weary Britain committed itself to the biggest programme of reconstruction in our history. Much had to be done out of necessity, but what is remarkable is the high social ambition which that generation had for the future. It wasn’t just a debate about bricks and mortar; it was about building a new society of personal and collective opportunity. As the then planning minister, Lewis Silkin MP, introduced the New Towns legislation, he invoked not an engineering manual or an economics text book but Thomas More’s Utopia:2 If the towns to be built under this Bill are new, neither the need for them, nor the idea, is in any sense new. My researches on new towns go back to the time of Sir Thomas More. He was the first person I have discovered to deplore the ‘suburban sprawl,’ and in his ‘Utopia’ there 15

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are 54 new towns, each 23 miles apart. Each town is divided into four neighbourhoods, each neighbourhood being laid out with its local centre and community feed centre. Incidentally, Sir Thomas More was beheaded, but that must not be regarded as a precedent for the treatment of town planners.3 It is a signal of the power which the ideals of utopia used to have in our society that, when introducing legislation that would (through the building of new communities) eventually house 2.5 million people, Lewis Silken quotes in his first breath a book written nearly four hundred and fifty years previously. This is just one instance of the power that the utopian tradition has always had to inspire practical action. Rebuilding Britain, itself, is partly inspired by a rediscovery of the extraordinary heritage of utopian thinkers and activists that have shaped Britain throughout our history. The ambition and insight that these diverse thinkers displayed often in the face of adversity is simply breathtaking. While it is understandable that most people don’t have the luxury to sit around imagining the future it is much more striking that we have forgotten our past dreams of building utopia. Perhaps it is both convenient for politicians and much more comfortable for us to persuade ourselves that we have never been capable of progress and change and that utopian experiments are always defined by failure. Lewis Silkin’s reference of Thomas More is just one indication of how utopian thinking used to be part of mainstream politics and was deeply embedded in our culture.With the centenary of the First World War in 2014, phrases like ‘Homes fit for heroes’ have come into sharper focus, but that was only one expression of the debate about everything from land reform to beauty in design which was once centre stage in the national political debate. Neither is this simply a Western debate, but resonates with much wider global calls for land and freedom which have marked almost all human societies. Part of our current inertia in dealing with the future comes from a powerful myth that utopian thinking was always marked by practical failure. In fact, the surprising reality is that many of the ideas proved successful and profitable and are still with us. The legacy of the past is one of hope that we disregard at our peril. 16

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Many debates about utopia lose themselves in arguments about its precise definition. The word has come to be associated with the physical expression of some ideal community which is often dangerously unachievable, or by nightmarish scenarios of social control. This idea has its roots in the biblical account of the Tower of Babel where Man’s dangerous overambition receives harsh punishment.The origin of the word is Greek and is open to various interpretations including ‘no place’ or ‘ideal place’. In the Western tradition it is More who coined the word ‘utopia’ to describe an ideal community in which the laws and social organisation support what, for the time, was a highly egalitarian society. Opinion is divided about whether More’s Utopia was a satire or a real vision of new society. In fact, the two books of Utopia are both.What makes Utopia stand out from the surprising number of contemporary 16th century satires and polemics attacking the ruling class is the level of positive detail about how this new community would live. More’s Utopia seemed to create the intellectual space to think about a possible alternative society, an idea which lasted almost to the end of the 20th century. The concept of an ideal community seems to have had a kind of gravity which is hard to escape. It is an endeavour that engages a blend of art, science and morality, which makes it one of the greatest creative enterprises of humanity. The fortunes of that great enterprise have ebbed and flowed, but the 17th century saw a great revival in radical ideas of planned utopian communities. Sparked by a cataclysmic civil war in which the social order was transformed, new ideas emerged from groups like the Levellers and the Diggers. In the autumn of 1647, a great debate took place between the officers and soldiers of Cromwell’s New Model Army at a church at Putney in London.They discussed whether to negotiate with the King and how a new constitution could be founded on democracy, civil rights and land reform. It was in many respects a very modern political debate with a strong sense of civil rights and social justice. In the aftermath of their final victory over King Charles I in 1649, however, the new commonwealth was seen by many as betraying the promise of a new society that had justified the war.The Diggers were one group that tried in several places to found new communities based on fairness. They occupied common land and started to farm believing that no one had any right to own land for their own 17

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personal profit. Their great advocate, Gerard Winstanley, wrote the most powerful call for land rights for the poor ever written in the English language in his Declaration from the poor oppressed people of England.4 The opening of the declaration still has a very modern resonance: We whose names are subscribed, do in the name of all the poor oppressed people in England, declare unto you, that call your selves lords of Manors, and Lords of the Land, that the earth was not made purposely for you, to be Lords of it, and we to be your Slaves, Servants, and Beggers; but it was made to be a common Livelihood to all, without respect of persons: And that your buying and selling of Land, and the Fruits of it, one to another, is The cursed thing, and was brought in by War; which does establish murder, and theft, In the hands of some branches of Mankinde over others. Winstanley’s call, and the Diggers’ claim, was founded on a troubling question about land ownership and the enormous power it conferred in 17th century society. For the Diggers, the fact that the Aristocracy had gained most of their land by the sword fundamentally undermined their claims of legitimate ownership. Like many who have come after them, the Diggers underestimated the threat they posed by challenging the nature of land ownership. Their community at St George’s Hill in Surrey suffered numerous violent attacks from the local landlord and this, and their subsequent communities, were short-lived experiments in self-sustaining communal villages for the poor. Their ideals remain powerful in British and American culture, however, and were still inspiring community-based activism in the US in the 1960s. The upheaval of the 19th century set the context for perhaps the most intense period of utopian thought since the 17th century.The first element of this upheaval was the culmination of the enclosure process. The enclosure of the common land in Britain dispossessed tens of thousands of poor rural workers of their basic livelihoods. Common land is land which may be in private ownership, but to which others have ‘commoners’ rights’. These rights traditionally include the right to gather firewood or graze animals. These rights 18

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were enjoyed free of charge and formed a vital part of the income of rural workers. From the time of Thomas More, landowners had sought to enclose this open land in a process of removing commoners’ rights and fencing or walling the commons. Each common enclosure required a new act of Parliament, but since Parliament was dominated by landowning interests this process was normally straightforward. By the early 19th century the process was intensifying. It is estimated that some 25,000 square kilometres of common land were enclosed. This process created desperate economic hardship, driving rural workers into the growing industrial cities. The harshest expressions of the behaviour of private landlords were the clearances in Scotland and Ireland, where not just people’s livelihoods were disposed but also their homes through forced evictions.Whole communities were dispersed, often emigrating to the Americas. These people had no land rights, and as a result, no political rights. It is now forgotten that many of these dispossessed people rioted and resisted in a desperate attempt to preserve their livelihoods. Even while acknowledging the human cost, many histories of the period point to the vital need for agricultural improvement. In fact, the greatest transformation was not necessarily in productivity, but in the transfer of assets from collective ownership to private ownership.This relationship between land and political power has modern global resonance when we consider how many communities have been disposed of land for so called economic improvements. By the 1870s the process of enclosure was largely complete and the idea of collective land rights had largely been extinguished in Britain. The dramatic impacts of enclosure, not just on the physical landscape but the welfare of the rural poor, did result in calls for land reform and even for the nationalisation of land, which became a mainstream part of political debate. Gerard Winstanley’s question of why should a minority own and profit from the primary resources of the Earth was taken forward by those like the American writer Henry George. In his 1879 book Progress and poverty5 George argued for the common ownership of land and crucially for a single land tax which would allow the wealth of landownership to be fairly distributed. If land enclosures were one driver for land reform among utopian thinkers, then the industrial city was the other. Britain’s pioneering role in technology of industrial capitalism led to an extraordinary transformation in the distribution and conditions of the population. 19

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By 1850 more than 50% of the British population was housed in the expanding industrial cities. It is not fair to characterise these cities as places of universal poverty. In fact they are better defined by their inequality between social classes and the physical separation of working people from the growing middle class.The life for ordinary working people was both hard and short.Without regulation, urban development was characterised by cramped and unsanitary housing and as a result disease was rife. In many cities, life expectancy fell with the advent of industrialisation and was often lower than the surrounding rural areas. As early as 1835, Alexis de Tocqueville recorded in his diary his impression of a visit to Manchester, which was experiencing rapid industrial growth: From this foul drain, the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows. Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish; here civilization works its miracles, and here civilised man is turned back almost into a savage.6 Ten years later Fredrick Engels recorded the fate of the urban poor in Manchester. Published in 1845, The condition of the working class in England7 provided an influential testament to the result of unregulated markets and inspired subsequent studies into the industrial poor by Victorian social reformers such as Charles Booth and Beatrice Webb. Reform proved to be slow partly because the working class poor had no vote. Protest movements did exist and Chartism succeeded in bringing about a slow increase in the electoral franchise. What is now largely forgotten is that this movement also set up its own communities, most famously at O’Connerville in Hertfordshire. The idea was that people would pay a subscription to buy tracts of land and would then receive a small holding farm. The project was heavily oversubscribed, but the financial model was flawed with many finding it impossible to make a living out of their land allocations. Experiments in new ways of living thrived in the 19th century; perhaps most famously at places such as New Lanark, where Robert Owen was one of the first in a long tradition of industrial philanthropy. Owen saw a moral and economic case for creating good 20

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conditions for the workforce. Saltaire in westYorkshire, inspired by the nonconformist religious convictions of Titus Salt, showed how decent housing could be combined with outstanding social facilities and still provide profits for the industrialists.While influential in showing what might be achieved, these places were remarkable exceptions to the general rule. For the majority, reform came slowly, driven by fear of unrest and disease and by the growing labour movement. It found expression in basic rules for housing and sanitation (By-Law housing), which shaped tens of thousands of red brick terraced homes which still characterise much of ex-industrial Britain.The drive for decent living conditions was a practical driver for change, and at the end of 19th century there was the coming together of practical needs and solutions with the ideals of the utopian tradition. One key element of this movement is the Arts and Crafts tradition. Most people now think of these words in relation to curtains and furniture, but in reality it was a radical and highly influential group of ideas about building a new form of society. John Ruskin was an important figure at the start of this movement. He is now remembered for his contribution to art criticism and as an early environmental conservationist, but he was and remains an important social reformer. He responded angrily to the fate of the industrial poor, arguing for better conditions and new communities based on land reform. He used his own money to found a settlement near Sheffield based on cooperative principles. Ruskin’s great contribution to the utopian cause was the ambition to hold together in one idea what would now be regarded as incompatible principles. For example, he believed in the vital importance of preserving the natural environment while campaigning for new and better housing for working people. For him fulfilling lives were based not just on productive work but on access to the best art and architecture. Development that was well designed was a complement to nature, not its destroyer. One of the greatest mistakes of the 21st century is our seeing these ideals as belonging to competing interest groups, rather than as an integral set of interdependent facets of a health society. Ruskin was a direct inspiration on the work of William Morris who has claim to be the key figure in the flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement. Morris was an amazingly productive individual whose art is now seen everywhere, but whose politics have been all 21

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but forgotten. His work deserves to be read because it goes to the heart of many modern debates about the nature of work and the dehumanising effect it can have on people and society. His books A dream of John Ball8 and News from nowhere9 had a direct influence on the founders of the modern welfare state. Neither were they books solely for the middle classes. Harold Laski, a Labour politician, recalled finding both books in the houses of miners in the North East of England during the slump of the 1930s even when most of the other family furniture had been sold.10 Such is the power of art to bring the hope of fellowship and a more cooperative society to ordinary working people. Morris was pivotal in a chain of inspiration that had developed by the 1880s into a group of contemporaries who did more than any other generation before or since to turn the ideals of the Arts and Crafts tradition into practical change. One group met around the table of Edward Carpenter, the socialist writer who campaigned for equality, land reform, vegetarianism and gay rights which was extremely brave some 80 years before gay sex was decriminalised. Partly because of his radical views, Carpenter has been air brushed out of the planning movement’s history but it was around his table that a group of extraordinary people were to meet. William Morris was there and so was Prince Peter Kropotkin whose 1898 book Fields, factories and workshops11 is a study on how science and technology could be harnessed to improve human wellbeing. Campaigners for women’s rights such as Anne Besant were there as were union leaders like Ben Tillet and politicians such as Kier Hardy. There were also sociologists such as Patrick Geddes, who was to have a profound effect on the planning movement. This was free thinking in its most creative form with conversations ranging from politics, economics, psychology, sociology, planning, sexuality, art and psychoanalysis, with none of the artificial barriers which modern education has tended to create. It is perhaps the closest to a university of utopia that Britain has ever produced and it had a profound impact on young civil engineer, Raymond Unwin, who was building brick terraced houses for miners. Unwin was transformed by his relationship with Carpenter and by the influence of the Arts and Craft tradition, but above all he was to prove to be, with his design partner Barry Parker, one of the key driving forces behind the practical realisation of utopian values. Unwin’s 22

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Image courtesy of the TCPA

personal transformation from building regimented terraces to the Arts and Crafts homes in Letchworth Garden City mirrors a broader social transformation which recognised the importance of not just basic sanitation but the value of green spaces, gardens and proper community facilities in building Britain’s future.12

Image 1: Drawing by Garden City pioneer, Raymond Unwin, from a 1912 pamphlet Nothing gained by overcrowding.

The final element in the vibrant debate which characterised the end of the 19th century was Ebenezer Howard. Howard was a modest man, a parliamentary clerk who spent his time recording the political debates in Westminster. He had tried his hand as a farmer in the US before returning to write one the most influential books of the British utopian tradition, To-morrow a peaceful path to real reform.13 This book, like Thomas More’s Utopia, is one the giant markers in the utopian tradition. Howard’s book is above all a synthesis of many of the key ideas of the time. He was influenced by Ruskin, Morris and Henry George, but managed to combine a visionary sense of how people could live with a key financial measure that would make that vision a reality. The heart of his vision was the idea of the Garden City. These new self-contained cities would replace slums with high quality housing for working people; each house would have a decent garden and generous play space for children. The Garden Cities would provide for the best blend of town and country, allowing not just access to the natural environment but bringing that environment into the 23

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heart of the city. The Garden Cities would be surrounded by a belt of agricultural land which provided local food for the population. They would have integrated transport systems and a strong emphasis on democratic community governance. Each Garden City would have its own employment to limit commuting. Having taken the overspill population of the crowded larger cities, these cities could then be re-planned to improve the urban environment although it is true that Howard said much less about this latter process. Howard’s ambitions were extraordinary. Such a task as the construction of a cluster of cities like that represented in our diagram may well inspire all workers with that enthusiasm which unites men, for it will call for the very highest talents of engineers of all kinds, of architects, artists, medical men, experts in sanitation, landscape gardeners, agricultural experts surveyors, builders, manufacturers, merchants and financiers, organisers of trades unions, friendly and cooperative societies, as well as the very simplest forms of unskilled labour… For the vastness of the task which seems to frighten some of my friends, represents, in fact, the very measure of its value to the community, if that task be only undertaken in a worthy spirit and with worthy aims. It was ‘a large order’ which was presented in the early part of this century to construct iron highways throughout the length and breadth of this island, uniting in a vast network all its towns and cities. Railway enterprise, however, vast as has been its influence, touched the life of the people at but few points compared with the newer call to build home-towns for slum cities; to plant gardens for crowded courts; to construct beautiful waterways in flooded valleys; to establish a scientific system of distribution to take the place of a chaos, a just system of land tenure for one representing the selfishness which we hope is passing away; to found pensions with liberty for our aged poor, now imprisoned in workhouses; to banish despair and awaken hope in the breasts of those who have fallen; to silence the harsh voice of anger, and 24

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Image courtesy of the TCPA

to awaken the soft notes of brotherliness and goodwill; to place in strong hands implements of peace and construction, so that implements of war and destruction may drop uselessly down. Here is a task which may well unite a vast army of workers to utilise that power, the present waste of which is the source of half our poverty, disease and suffering.14

Image 2: High quality, beautifully designed housing for people on low and moderate incomes in Letchworth Garden City. Each home has access to a decent garden and generous play space for children.

One idea underpinned all the Garden City ideals was capturing and redistributing the increase in land values which development creates for the long-term benefit of the whole community. This was not a new idea and in fact has resonance with all those who have argued for fairer distribution of land rights. Its practical effect, however, was precisely harnessed in the Garden City to create a financial model which would not only pay back the loans needed to buy land and build infrastructure, but could provide long-term funds to make communities effectively self-sufficient. There were, of course, problems in the way the model was applied, but capturing 25

Image courtesy of the TCPA

Rebuilding Britain

Image 3: One idea underpinned all the Garden City ideals, capturing and redistributing the increase in land values which development creates for the long term benefit of the whole community.

the value of land for the benefit community remains at the heart of the practical realisation of utopia. Howard’s vision was complemented by an ability to draw people together from different political and social backgrounds.The Garden City movement was able, for example, to harness the support of industrial philanthropists, such as Cadbury and Rowntree, who were pioneering new communities at places like Bourneville, inspired very much by the Arts and Crafts traditions. Architects and planners like Raymond Unwin were cutting their teeth on such projects and producing results which stand today as some of the most beautiful housing in Britain. Howard’s determination to realise his vision resulted in a period of exceptional productivity. In 1899, the Garden City Association was formed and in 1903 Howard purchased an estate at Letchworth and founded the world’s first Garden City. Raising the funds for the upfront purchase of the land was a challenge, because, as the pioneers were to find, building a city required patient investors who are willing to see returns over the medium and long term.

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The design of Letchworth was initially in the hands of Unwin and Parker, who realised the ambitions of Arts and Crafts design and egalitarian politics. The community soon became famous for its political, cultural and educational innovation. The Garden City ideals became a mainstream part of national political debate with cross party supporters. 1909 saw Britain’s first Planning Act which gave local government limited power to prepare plans coming into force and the beginnings of the professionalisation of town planning. There were certainly major problems of finding investors but it is impossible to know how far the Garden Cities would have got had it not been for the outbreak of the First World War. It is certainly the case that the Garden City movement had begun to have international impact with Garden City inspired communities across Europe, from the suburbs of Paris to Poland, and even further afield to South Africa and South America. The war did not just have a practical effect on curtailing development at Letchworth, it had a profound political and psychological one on the utopians. For a movement built on the ideals of fellowship and cooperation, the war represented challenges to the very values which underlay their aspirations for a better human society. In 1917, C. R. Ashbee, who had been a close friend of Carpenter, wrote How much of the constructive effort of the last 50 years shall we save from the wreck of war? On all sides in Europe – certainly in England – the finer things are withering: schools & workshops closed down; great purposes laid by or definitely abandoned and the creative enterprise of a generation to all appearance thrown away. ‘There will be a time for all that after the war’ men say ‘this is not the moment for the thoughtful, the imaginative things of life; we are at the nadir of human folly and all must join in.15 The end of the war was marked by one the most famous political promises of modern history, ‘Homes Fit for Heroes’. In the end, it would be a promise only half fulfilled. Lloyd George’s government did introduce new housing standards championed by Raymond Unwin who was by now an influential member of the Tudor Walter 27

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Committee. Local government received new powers and new money to build working-class housing to an unprecedentedly high standard. There was funding for the back-to-land smallholding movement with some councils buying farms to rent to returning servicemen. There was also a massive expansion in private sector housing often copying the design features of the Arts and Crafts tradition, even claiming to be garden suburbs. Between the public and private sectors some 1.6 million homes were built between the First and Second World Wars. These homes were not, by and large, built in Garden Cities. Howard founded the second Garden City at Welwyn in 1920, but more often than not, public sector housing was built in large suburban estates. The quality of homes was high, but the rest of the Garden City ideals were often lost. Worsening economic conditions meant the investment in public housing was curtailed. Local government planning powers were pretty weak and, crucially, they had little control over land because of the risk of paying compensation to landowners. Key figures in the Garden City movement, like Frederic J. Osborn, became more and more convinced that only strong central government powers could realise the benefits of Garden Cities. By the 1930s, the economic depression only served to reveal the fate of millions who still lived in very poor housing conditions.There were still tens of thousands of back-to-back properties where overcrowding and poor health were a major problem. For those who could afford a private house, the ubiquitous semidetached home began to stretch along the line of many of London’s arterial roads, sparking a huge debate about the impact of the car and ribbon development on the countryside. Britain’s failure to match the record of the US in comprehensive regional planning of new technology in projects, such as the TennesseeValley Authority, only seemed to reinforce the view of the 1930s as a decade of half measure and muddle. While the profession of town planning grew, the values of the Garden Cities and wider utopian tradition seemed to have got stuck in a combination of financial retrenchment and a government that did not see its role as planning for the nation. It is right to acknowledge that both Garden Cities, Letchworth and Welwyn, had developed at a slower rate than hoped, largely because of lack of capital investment. Much higher returns could be made by investing in speculative house building than the 5% returns envisaged in Howard’s model. The 28

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Garden Cities themselves made compromises in design and delivery of which some of the pioneers would no doubt have disapproved.The 1930s and early 1940s marked the passing of key pioneers – Howard, Carpenter, Unwin, Geddes, Parker – and inevitably perhaps reduced the energy of the movement. The impact of the Second World War transformed every aspect of British society and laid the foundation for the welfare state.This was partly because of a realisation among government that the demands of total war on the civilian population required a clear commitment to the improvement of people’s living conditions after the war was won. It was also the result of the energy of those such as the poet and campaigner J.B. Priestley who publicly pressed the government not to repeat the broken promises which followed the First World War. In Priestley’s highly influential BBC broadcasts during the darkest days of the war, you can hear calls for collective action, for fellowship, and crucially, that land and property and their profits should be for the benefit of the community. His condemnation of private property wouldn’t have been out of place on St George’s Hill in 1649. While these radical voices proved powerful, the actual ground work for a new planning system was more pragmatic. Planning was now seen as a central part of reconstruction and tackling the cause of poverty, which the Beveridge Report16 had identified. It was key to housing the nation, to rational infrastructure and efficient industry and to achieve these aims planning must be democratic, powerful and comprehensive. The key to its effectiveness was a measure which flowed from a quite conservative committee led by a judge (Uthwatt) who concluded that the only way to control land was to nationalise the right to develop it. From 1947, landowners lost the right to develop land without the permission of the democratically elected local council. Landowners whose land was directly affected were given cash payments in compensation from a £350 million fund despite the fact the nation was essentially bankrupted by the war.The fact that granting planning permission increases the value of land was recognised and because development rights now belonged to state so did the values created by them and these were taxed for the benefit of the community. Comprehensive planning, New Towns and national parks all flowed from the 1945 Labour government along with the assumption that it would be the public sector that played a leadership role in building a new society. 29

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We have come full circle to where this chapter started with Lewis Silkin, invoking the legacy of utopia to launch a massive programme of New Towns to meet the nation’s housing needs.Yet in that moment of triumph, there was a hint of the ultimate fate of planning. Despite Silkin’s brilliant speech about utopia which included artistic, cultural and social aspirations for these new communities, where social division would be invisible, not one word of these objectives made it into the legislation. Instead, the emphasis was design and delivery. The rhetoric of the utopian tradition had been invoked, but its values and principles were assumed and not fixed in law.

Lesson from the postwar legacy While the evolution of planning and the utopian values which once inspired it are complex, after 1945 it can be generalised as a history of decline and fall. This is odd because planning proved very successful in conserving the countryside, in building housing at a rate three times that which we manage to do today and creating New Towns which, by and large, paid for themselves through comprehensive land value capture. What more could people want than utopia which pays for itself? In truth, the consensus didn’t last long so that by 1952 key elements of the reforms package, like taxing land values created by the state, had been abolished, much to the relief of landowners. This is not simply a story of the planning movement being thwarted by vested interests. There were also real mistakes. In fact, new utopian ideas were introduced which proved to be disastrous not just for some of the people who lived with their consequences but for the wider reputation of planning. Modernist design and highrise social housing were both seen as part of a cost effective way of transforming British society using the white heat of technology.They were often based on quite abstract design concepts like ‘streets in the sky’ which were very different to the vernacular tradition of the Arts and Crafts movement. In the postwar period there was a strong argument between the Garden City movement that wanted homes with gardens, and the modernisers who argued for a European model of cheap high-rise social housing as solving the ongoing shortage of housing at prices the nation could afford. Both sides had a point, but the poor quality of much of the high-rise development came to a head in the now totemic collapse of Ronan Point tower block in 30

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East London.This was only part of wider reaction in the community to urban motorways, and to monolithic modernist shopping centres which seemed to place design technology over human beings in exactly the kind of way that the Arts and Crafts tradition had deplored. Most importantly many people didn’t, after the novelty had worn off, like their new environment. The New Towns themselves began to be criticised for their impacts on the inner cities. It is now part of planning mythology that New Towns were in part to blame for the decline of inner cities and the consequent acute social problems which emerged from the 1970s. Jane Jacobs’ book The death and life of great American cities17 was a direct assault on the Garden City movement and suggested that the complexity and diversity of urban spaces and the dynamism which results could not be planned and was in fact damaged by too much planning. Jacobs’ book is just as critical of big corporations, but it was used by the emerging ideology of the New Right as proof of the failure of planning and of the utopian values of the Garden City movement. There is an element of truth in Jacobs’ allegations in that modernist interpretations of the utopian ideals for improving society often do appear monolithic and controlling. Part of the fun and vibrancy of all communities is what happens informally around the edges and we return to this problem in relation to utopia in Berlin in Part Three of the book. It is important to note that Jacobs’ work and the wider critique of the New Right with which it has come to be associated offers a fairly extreme view that markets provide the solutions and planning and utopian ideals cause the problems.The picture, as with all things, is much more complex. New Towns did attract investment and skills, some of which did come from inner city areas, and it is true that they often did not take those in greatest social need.There is no doubt that insufficient thought and money was invested in inner city renewal and in considering the future economic basis of these communities. Cities across the globe saw declines with or without decentralisation policies because of changing patterns of investment and technology. Large areas of renewal did happen in older cities which would have been impossible without the New Town programme. It is also significant that much of urban unrest was based on the underlying cause of inequality and racial segregation mixed with poor conditions, often in the private rented sector. 31

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By the early 1970s the New Towns programme was effectively coming to an end and a focus was switching to urban policy. It is arguable that the utopian values that had done so much to shape the origins of the New Towns had been dead for some time. Public policy debates were focused on elements of the good life, like jobs and decent housing, but despite individuals and groups advocating Garden Cities the utopian ideals fell out of public debate and have not been revisited since. Ironically, the structures of planning went on being embedded in law and practice. Political interest in comprehensive planning since 1980 has had moments of resurgence, but they have been brief. As Chapter 2 has suggested, the politics of the New Right in which the state is regarded as an unwarranted restriction on both the freedom of the individual and market have been triumphant since 1980.This is part of wider political change in the West, and planning as a state actively has been a victim of that change. The fact that few, if any, politicians defend what planning is trying to achieve is perhaps mainly because it has been severed from its utopian roots and therefore from a clear set of social principles. Planning now tries to justify its activity as helping markets be more efficient or mediating community politics. It sees itself as a discipline of managing today without any sense of shaping the quality of the future. It is little wonder people ceased to care about its fate. One last echo of the utopian tradition did emerge in the 1980s in the rise of sustainable development as a dominant policy goal for governments in many parts of the globe. Sustainable development itself emerged out of the core concern that the Earth’s resources were being depleted at such a rate as to compromise the wellbeing of future generations.The core objectives of sustainable development are the idea that social, economic and environmental progress must be pursued in an integrated way, applying the principles of social justice and democratic decision making, and careful management and distribution of natural resources. All of these principles would have been recognised and fully embraced by the utopian tradition which is perhaps why the planning movement seized on sustainable development with real enthusiasm. It is also true that the emphasis in sustainable development on resource use was a significantly new element in the ambitions of the planning project. Climate change is

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the clearest example, where global consumption of fossil fuels has led to planetary change that will reshape the lives of future generations. The green movement used the principles of sustainable development to warn of a growing global environmental crisis and by the 1990s books like Tomorrow’s world18 highlighted the consequences of over consumption. The implications of sustainable development policy, however, including the fair distribution of resources and drastic changes in how we supply our energy, proved too challenging for the dominant free market model in the West. The green movement has moved to easier single issues and governments, while retaining the rhetoric of sustainable development, show no real sign of taking the steps necessary to establish either social justice or prudent resource use. In fact, in relation to energy, as Part Two of this book illustrates, we have moved in the opposite direction. In some cases, like that of national planning policy in England, there is little attempt to disguise the real object which as Yvonne Rydin’s book The future of planning19 points out, is simply economic growth. Even where sustainable development remains a policy objective, there are few if any examples of where the long-term viability of the planet, and therefore our society, carries more weight than short-term economic gain.The exploitation of shale gas in Britain and the US is one clear example of this pattern. There is one other significant feature about the sustainable development debate. It was an idea which did not touch the lives of ordinary people in any real way. It did not speak to people’s lived experience. Brilliant though the numerous books were, they would not be found, as Morris was, in the homes of working people. It was and remains a debate between policy makers and academics. Perhaps, partly in response to the way sustainable development has been neutralised as an idea, there has been growing debate about environmental justice and outcomes for particular excluded communities defined by race, gender and class.This idea which has its roots in the US African–American Civil Rights movement highlights the close relationship between poor environmental conditions and those excluded from society by race or class. This has led to active debate about just sustainability, the key argument of Rydin’s book, which brings a sharper focus to outcomes for people. From an international perspective some have argued that sustainable development is a damaging and convenient policy 33

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smokescreen because it fails to challenge the basic problem of the uneven distribution of power and resources.20 For others the idea has become more about the process of making decisions rather than a clear statement of how society should be developed. For clarity we believe the heart of sustainable development is the notion of equitable distribution of resources now and for future generations. As such sustainable development fits within the utopian values discussed in this chapter. Ironically for the planning movement this attempt by some in planning community to weld social outcomes back into what planning is about is essentially where Engels, Booth and Webb were in the 19th century. Justice, both procedural in terms of fair process, and substantive in terms of reducing inequalities, were key ideas of the utopian tradition. Equity and diversity remained a ghost in the machine in English planning policy until 2012 when national policy finally removed any reference to poverty, social justice and equity.21 Significantly, this passing of the last vestige of the utopian tradition went unnoticed by the planning profession, so far had we drifted away from our core values. There are no easy lessons from our utopian history, but there are some striking features.The first is that in forgetting the past we have made our ambitions smaller. We live in a unique historical period when utopia is no longer even a subject for disagreement. We seem to have air brushed it out of our understanding and with it the ability to talk hopefully about the future. There has always been a balance between finding ways of solving the real practical problems of each generation and a set of ideals devoted to achieving a better life. History seems to suggest both are necessary.We may fall short of our high ideals, but having them makes us achieve more and keeps us honest. Planning has forgotten how to be creative not just in how we design the future, but in how art and literature communicate that future. Finally, and perhaps of deepest concern, there is no British utopian university, no table, like the one in Edward Carpenter’s house, where people talk about the business of creating a better society. So while we have the practical challenges to face, we lack any of the vision and principles of our grandparents. While we can do so much better by simply being better organised, we will not reach our full potential until we rediscover the values and the passion of the utopian tradition. 34

PART TWO

The lie of the land!

4

The nature of the challenge For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s futures. And we are all mortal. (John F. Kennedy, 1963)1 Britain has many outstanding assets. It remains an economic world power, particularly in the knowledge economy, and is one of the most culturally rich and diverse places on Earth. Britain also faces a growing set of challenges. It is an increasingly divided nation in which social mobility and poverty remain engrained and where access to the basics, a decent job and a house can seem like a pipe dream.2 The unequal nature of Britain goes beyond simplistic arguments about a North–South divide. We are a starkly divided nation in terms of long-term regional performance, despite rhetoric about rebalancing the economy from successive governments. Cuts to public investment have had different impacts on different parts of England, with many Northern economies disproportionately affected. Chapter 5 explores this problem in more detail. Alongside these growing divisions, the nation faces huge pressures on housing as our population grows. In England alone the population has risen by 3.5 million people in the past decade3 and the nation’s population is ageing. While we have seen the largest growth in any 10-year period since census-taking began, however, the variation between regions is significant – London’s population, for instance, grew by 851,000, but the North East’s by only 10,000. Chapter 6 attempts to reveal the true scale of the housing crisis in Britain today. As set out in Chapter 7, the nation also faces major environmental challenges; from summer hosepipe bans – a regular reminder of the 37

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shortage of water in parts of the country, particularly in the South East – to the very real threat of climate change. We now have a growing understanding of the nation’s vulnerability to extreme weather events, increased temperatures and sea level rise and how these changes will affect some of our key cities and our best agricultural land. The international failure to secure meaningful reductions in carbon emissions means that we now have to confront our readiness to deal with dangerous climate change. Many places are planning for the wrong future, over the wrong time scale and with insufficient resources and urgency in relation to flood defence. Some of our key coastal cities, like Hull and Portsmouth, will face a bleak future without strong action now. Inevitably, the global impact of climate change and resource depletion will have major implications on how we live as we try to grapple with food and energy security. Redistributing our population to avoid flood risk areas or water shortages is an increasingly pressing problem and requires policy makers to think about Britain as a whole. There is also an urgent imperative, with potentially a major benefit in terms of our economic development, to make clear decisions about the future of our national energy, transport and infrastructure priorities, so that both business and the public sector can plan with certainty for future investment. In Chapter 8 we explore the longstanding failure by all governments in recent decades to address public legitimacy and consent in the way that we organise the nation. We have lost public trust in planning and our collective ability to change places and the way we live for the better. All of these challenges are clearly not just a moral endeavour, they are about creating places with humanity and importantly, they are about being practical – understanding resource constraints, reducing poverty, building beautiful homes in inclusive communities and providing essential services for all. Ultimately this requires us to tackle the real issue of public consent. Part Two of this book is therefore about developing a detailed understanding of each of these challenges: • growing inequality • the housing crisis • climate change 38

The nature of the challenge

• economic transformation • a disconnected politics. Part Three of this book, Chapters 10 to 14, then explores the solutions to the challenges set out here and is firmly in the ambitions of utopia. If we want to ensure everyone benefits from a good quality of life, how do we, working together, begin to address the challenges that face our nation? Box 1: The condition of the planet: Britain’s global context While this is a book about Britain, it is important to recognise the wider global context of our nation’s future. There is a great deal of debate about the economic processes of globalisation and the current crises which have led to recession and retrenchment. This agenda is plainly of critical importance in the wider context of models of wealth creation and the degree of scope for nationally autonomous decisions. There are also now competing critiques of our dominant economic model from both the left, in terms of redistribution and resource constraints, and from the right, in terms of further liberalisation and deregulation of the market. There are other longer term shocks to the system which are even more critical and have a much stronger scientific basis. Most obviously the critical threat posed by climate change and the multiple social and economic impacts which flow from it. There is scientific evidence of mass extinction, ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification and wider resources depletion which all require urgent action. Global economic and environmental change will significantly impact on patterns of migration, food and energy security and levels of investment. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Fifth Global Environment Outlook (GEO 5)4 report provides a detailed scientific justification for concerns about resources and is complemented by a strand of academic commentary about the increasing likelihood of ecosystem tipping points which may lead, without strong policy action, to the sudden collapse of life sustaining natural services such as fisheries.5 One aspect of this challenge is new and that is the time-limited nature of action. For example, the reduction of increasing global carbon emissions

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must take place urgently, that is to say, within the next decade, to avoid the kind of impacts which would make even radical adaptation measures largely redundant. The global context is also key for issues such as demographic change, and food and energy security. It would not, based on current evidence, be safe to assume that Britain can go relying on significant food and energy imports. We may also have to deal with unexpected patterns of EU and international migration.

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5

A divided nation It is the very poorest of the young who are suffering the most, but the living standards of the average young person in Britain are also deteriorating and young people’s hopes are evaporating. (Danny Dorling, 2013)1 British society is particularly unequal. This inequality has many differing aspects. It is partly about the growing differences between the income of the rich and poor or the number of children judged to be living in poverty. The disparities between health and education outcomes flow from these inequalities. Almost 13 million people are living in poverty in the UK, however there have been big shifts in terms of which groups are experiencing poverty.2 Due to a sustained and ‘unprecedented’ fall in their living standards there are, for the first time, more people in working families living below the poverty line (6.7 million) than in workless and retired families in poverty combined (6.3 million).3 Inequality is about individual experience, but it is also about the difference between those places on the up and those in what can seem like terminal decline. Places are different and reflect their history and geography. Their wellbeing also reflects our political priorities and investment decisions which flow from them. For example, for almost 40 years governments all kinds of political persuasion have prioritised the development of the South East of England. Despite much rhetoric from successive governments about ‘rebalancing the economy’ in Britain, all of the signals show a reverse trend. A study of the current government’s 2011 autumn statement on investment in transport infrastructure highlighted the scale of this disparity with 84% of planned spending going to London and 41

Rebuilding Britain

the South East and just 6% going to the North of England.4 When you look at what this means for transport investment spend per person the outcomes are revealing. The deal for Londoners is that over £2,700 was allocated per person (more than for all of the other regions together), where as if you live in Yorkshire and the Humber the spending is around £200 per person. The worst outcome of all is in the North East, where each person would have the equivalent of just £5. The logic of decisions by government, like the one illustrated above, is that the South East region is part of the demographic and economic core of Europe; that geography cannot and should not be undone. We agree, but the region needs to be managed to maintain its attractiveness and vitality and we also need a vision to support the country as a whole. London and the South East of England do not have a uniform geography and the chances of living a decent life are far from equal. As ever, the picture is complicated. For example London provides numerous examples of extraordinary wealth and entrenched poverty in the same boroughs and sometimes even on the same streets. Despite this complexity, as a general rule our nation is divided between North and South. Many ‘peripheral’ parts of western and northern England are facing relative decline and while some of the ‘Core’ Cities, such as Manchester, are doing relatively well, places around them are struggling. In many parts of the North and West of England social and economic conditions may get worse because of changes to regeneration policy, while economic concentration in the South East is set to intensify.The geographer Danny Dorling has expressed the position by concluding that while in South East there are islands of poverty in a sea of relative affluence, in many parts of the North the position is precisely reversed.5 The phrase ‘managed decline’ has become fashionable and it is, perhaps, not an unreasonable position to accept that some communities will get smaller as people move to more affluent places where there are employment opportunities. It however cannot be fair to write off people and communities, condemning them to a futureless existence. We believe that there are a number of reasons why ‘managed decline’ cannot be a sustainable future; first, it is immoral and in human, second, it is not practical. Change, of course, will happen, 42

A divided nation

and the purpose of places changes over time, but our task is to offer pathways to hope in a changing world, not simply to give up on communities. Attempts to intervene in the decline of places are often condemned as throwing good money after bad. It is true that regeneration has its successes and failures, but Britain has avoided the worst of the US experience precisely because it still clings to a stronger sense of solidarity and social justice. We do not need international comparisons to make the point. Anfield in Liverpool, and other former industrial towns and cities, show what happens when we collectively, as a nation, decide to look the other way (see Case Study 1). In recent decades, the most significant UK government investment has been a regeneration programme called Housing Market Renewal, which operated in areas of low housing demand. This programme was introduced in 2002 in order to rebuild housing markets and communities in parts of the North and the Midlands where demand for housing is relatively weak – areas which have seen a significant decline in population, dereliction, poor services and poor social conditions. The intention of the strategy was to renew failing housing markets and reconnect them to regional markets, to improve neighbourhoods and to encourage people to live and work in these areas.6 Despite the good intention behind this regeneration programme, the stop-start nature of investment, dependent on different political priorities, has had a devastating impact on communities. The final cancellation of the programme in 2010 signalled the abandonment of much of the investment in our ex-industrial cities and has left thousands of people surrounded by obsolete and boarded up terraced properties that are effectively ghost towns.

The impact of welfare reform While all governments have failed to fully learn from the successes and failures of planning, housing and regeneration policies in the past, there is growing evidence that many of the current government’s responses are exacerbating inequality. There is emerging evidence that housing and welfare reform is having significant consequences across a ranges of issues. These 43

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Case study 1: Anfield in Liverpool Anfield is located in the North of Liverpool in the North West of England. It is an inner-city community, characterised by neighbourhoods of terraced streets, and is one of the highest profile Housing Market Renewal schemes. Liverpool was once an economic powerhouse, a thriving and successful port throughout the 19th century and during the first half of the 20th century, making it a key trading point between the industrial North of England and the rest of the world, and leading to the growth of a strong manufacturing industry in the area, alongside the shipping trade. By the 1960s, however, the advent of containerisation in the shipping trade left Liverpool’s docks too small and too shallow for deep-sea cargo ships, and as European trade became more central to the UK economy, Liverpool found itself ‘on the wrong side of the country’7 and increasingly uncompetitive. At the same time, structural changes in the global economy left Liverpool’s manufacturing industries in sharp decline, and severe economic, social and environmental difficulties followed. Liverpool’s population nearly halved from the 1930s (when it peaked at 846,101) until 2001, when it fell to 439,5008. In the 1980s, unemployment rates in Liverpool were among the highest in the UK.9 Between 2001 and 2011 Liverpool’s population decline reversed and the city experienced major investment, particularly in the leisure, culture, retail and tourism industries. While some parts of Liverpool are recovering and beginning to prosper, it is still the highest-ranked local authority in the Index of Multiple Deprivation and has been consistently ranked 1 or 2 since 2000. Pockets of deep poverty remain in Anfield and many inner-city areas. These are communities which are still recovering from the impacts of structural change and have not shared in Liverpool’s relative economic success. The Census 2011 revealed the scale of deprivation in Anfield. Over half of the community (60%) is within the most deprived 10% of areas in the country. If you live in Anfield you can expect to have a shorter life than the average in Liverpool and over a third (36.3%) of the adult population have no qualifications. Perhaps the most worrying trend is the increasing rate of child poverty in Anfield, with 43% of the area’s children currently classified as living in poverty (a figure which has risen from 40.7% in 2006). The child

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A divided nation

poverty rate reaches 60% in some neighbourhoods in the south of Anfield, almost double the average rate in Liverpool of 33%.10 The main policy intervention in Anfield to date has been the ‘Housing Market Renewal’ initiative. Anfield was designated in 2002 to address housing market collapse characterised by high vacancy rates, abandoned properties, high concentrations of social housing, properties in disrepair, and low house prices. The aim was the use £40–50 million of public money to lever in £300 million of private sector investment. Contrary to popular belief, the scheme was widely supported locally. When the programme was scrapped by government in March 2011, however, rows of abandoned properties and deserted streets were left in Anfield, making the task of housing regeneration a major challenge.

Image courtesy of the TCPA

Planning out poverty, a 2013 study by the TCPA, concluded that the cancellation of the programme has played the most significant factor in the fate of the community. Despite the use of some transitional finance to continue limited physical regeneration, the programme was essentially cancelled with around 25% of the work completed. The effect was to leave some areas cleared but not redeveloped, some areas of abandoned streets, and, perhaps most shockingly, some streets inhabited by only a handful of remaining residents.11

Image 4: The cancellation of the Housing Market Renewal initiative in 2011 has left rows of abandoned properties and deserted streets in Anfield, making the task of housing regeneration a major challenge.

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include increased rent arrears and the creation of demand for singlebedroom properties, and, in the long term, adverse unintended consequences of the reforms that not only impact directly on poorer communities, with the potential break-up of community ties and family networks, but also have significant implications for longerterm place-shaping. A central plank of the government’s Welfare Reform Act 2012 was a new mechanism to address ‘under-occupancy’ in social housing, commonly referred to in the media as the ‘bedroom tax’ or the ‘under-occupancy penalty’. The concept behind this policy is that many social housing tenants are living in properties that are bigger than their needs. The policy came into force in April 2013 and is targeted at working age social tenants in receipt of Housing Benefit who are now getting a reduction in their benefit entitlement if they live in housing that is deemed to be too large for their needs. The ‘bedroom tax’ has created concern across the country that long term residents are being forced to move to other parts of their local communities, or in some cases to other communities entirely, because of a lack of availability of one- or two-bedroom homes. In the longer term, little consideration has been given to whether these policies might undermine attempts to secure regeneration and greater social cohesion in poorer communities. Not surprisingly, many people are reluctant to move from their homes. Research published in The Independent newspaper by campaign group False Economy shows that many households are deferring decisions on moving and are incurring debts in order to stay in their existing communities, with as many as 50,000 people facing eviction by the autumn of 2013.11 Other welfare reforms include the introduction of a benefit cap, which limits total welfare payments to £500 a week for families. The ‘cap’ will mean that many households are unable to afford their current accommodation, particularly in areas of high rents.According to London Councils, a membership organisation representing London’s 32 borough councils and the City of London, 49% of all those affected by the benefit cap in the UK will be in London.12 Research has also revealed that since April 2010, the use of ‘bed and breakfasts’ to house homeless families beyond the six week legal time limit has risen by 800%.13 This type of temporary accommodation

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A divided nation

is often deeply inadequate, with families often crammed into one room and sharing a kitchen. Although we do not yet know the combined impact of the welfare reforms, it is clear from the emerging analysis that people are being displaced. This in turn may lead to new patterns of demographic change, raising questions about the type and tenure of housing available in an area in receipt of displaced families and the relationship between the host and new community.

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6

The housing crisis …home ownership is slipping further and further out of reach, no matter how hard people work or save. This means young people are living at home well into their thirties, desperate to get on in life but unable to afford a place of their own. Meanwhile, more young families are stuck in rented housing under constant threat of being evicted, worrying about whether they’ll have to move again...Today’s broken housing market isn’t the result of the credit crunch or mortgage lending, but decades of underinvestment in building the affordable homes we need. (Campbell Robb, 2012)1 Britain is facing a chronic undersupply of housing with devastating effects on individuals, families, communities and the social and economic wellbeing of the nation. The number of households in England is projected to grow to 27.5 million over the next 20 years,2 and research has shown this means we need over 240,000 new homes each year.3 The population is also ageing: by 2033 over a third of households will be headed by people aged 65 or over.4 These figures are the best estimates we have, based primarily on data derived from the latest census (conducted in 2011). These numbers are not politically derived or made up by house builders. All forecast figures are just that and do not give a perfect view of the future. Many advanced nations are experiencing population decline. In the UK, however, there is no credible argument that we should not be building more homes, not just to meet the new household formation, but also to provide decent homes for people currently living in overcrowded and poor conditions. 49

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House building rates are at incredibly low levels not seen since the 1920s. In the year to September 2013 the total number of new homes built in England was just 107,950, less than half the amount needed to keep up with household formation.5 Over a similar period (April 2012 to March 2013, when the latest government data is available) the number of affordable homes built was 42,830 (the total number of affordable homes is the sum of housing built for affordable rent, social rent, intermediate rent, and affordable home ownership).6 The primary cause of this decline in house building is financial, both in terms of private investment to deliver development and mortgage availability. It is also further compounded by the drastic cuts to the funding of social housing. There is no doubt that the need for affordable homes is growing. There are 1.8 million households on waiting lists for social housing.7 Over half a million households are living in overcrowded conditions in England8 and it has been estimated that poor housing costs the National Health Service at least £600 million per year.9 We know improved planning and better housing provision have long been identified as essential for improving the health of communities, reducing health inequalities and cutting costs for the taxpayer. Without dealing with health and housing together, both are set to get worse.

Housing quality The quality of our homes matters as much as the quantity. Research by the Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has revealed that Britain has the smallest homes in Western Europe.10 The average home in the UK is 85 square metres compared to 115 square metres in Holland and 137 square metres in Denmark. A 2013 public attitude survey commissioned by the RIBA not surprisingly reveals that people want bigger, brighter homes.11 The poll found that 80% of the public would be more likely to choose a home that meets minimum space standards and that a lack of space is the main reason why people living in homes built less than 10 years ago are considering moving home. The quality of our homes is defined by more than just the internal space. They need to be properly insulated, affordable to heat and resilient to extreme weather, such as flooding (issues that are picked 50

The housing crisis

up in Chapter 13). Our homes also need to be beautifully designed in order to ensure they are desirable and acceptable to local communities. While aesthetics are clearly subjective, the look of new build housing in Britain has not, on the whole, been highly regarded in recent decades. Speaking on BBC Newsnight in November 2012, Planning Minister Nick Boles MP described the design of many of our new houses as ‘ugly rubbish’ or ‘pig ugly’. He went on to say ‘Because we don’t build beautifully, people don’t let us build much. And because we don’t build much, we can’t afford to build beautifully.12 A key criticism is the lack of imagination and sensitivity in much new build. This is symptomatic of the housing market in Britain, which is dominated by a small number of volume house builders. While some of these developers work closely with architects, most use uniform ‘off the shelf ’ housing modules.As a result new developments often look like generic ‘toy towns’ with little respect for the local landscape or traditional materials. We also have the most outdated methods of construction in North West Europe, using brick and block when other countries, such as Germany, are using high tech prefabrication.

Growth and renewal Alongside building more homes we also need to think about the quality of our existing homes and communities. Many communities, particularly in our ex-industrial towns and cities, are in desperate need of regeneration and renewal, as highlighted by the Anfield case study (Case study 1) in Chapter 5. We are now in a situation, however, where the current government has moved away from area-based regeneration initiatives. Perhaps the most striking example of the impact of national policy changes is provided by the closure of the Housing Market Renewal programme (see Chapter 5). Cancellation of this programme has had a dramatic impact on communities and in some cases has required a complete re-evaluation of the future of the area, and of what could be achieved and when. The confusion and delay that the cancellation of this programme has caused have set back progress and undoubtedly blighted the lives of the remaining residents. National funding is now directed at employment and away from place-based regeneration.13 Combined with local government 51

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austerity, this means that there is no longer any sense of a national urban policy for our most excluded communities. A campaign to bring ‘empty homes’ back into use highlights that of the 710,000 empty homes in England nearly half of them are long term empty.14 Some of these homes will be empty for transactional reasons, for example they are being refurbished for sale or rent. Other empty homes are stuck to some extent, however, and some have even been totally abandoned. For communities living next to empty homes a raft of unwelcome social issues can follow including petty crime, fly tipping, and vandalism and the wider consequence can be the closure of nearby shops and services. Whether we renovate properties or demolish and rebuild communities is a complex issue. It depends on the quality of the existing homes in an area – addressing issues such as damp, poor insulation, insufficient foundations and enough space – alongside meeting community aspirations. The UK’s building stock, which is being replaced at a rate of 1% every year, represents a big challenge in the fight against fuel poverty as well as an environmental challenge.

The rural challenge The lack of affordable housing is not just an urban issue. Figures by the government’s affordable house building agency, the Homes and Communities Agency, show there were just 820 rural affordable houses under construction in England in 2011/12 and 2,188 in 2012/13.15 A 2013 study by the National Housing Federation, the organisation that represents affordable housing providers, has revealed that over the past decade there has been a drop of nearly 9% in the number of 30to 44-year-olds living in rural areas from 2.6 million to 2.3 million. Average rural house prices rose 82% from £126,016 to £228,742 over the same period, and are now 18% higher than in urban areas.16 Younger people are simply being priced out of many rural areas and forced to move in order to bring up their families. This demographic shift, caused by a lack of affordable housing in our rural areas, means that many of Britain’s villages are now populated by ageing communities, resulting in the closure of the local school, shop, post office or pub and a shortage of carers living locally to support the older people. 52

The housing crisis

Social housing stigma The role and perception of social housing in Britain has changed drastically in the last 70 years. A 2009 study, ‘Growing up in social housing in Britain: A profile of four generations, 1946 to the present days’ shows how dramatically our housing system, and public attitudes toward it, have changed.17 For example, 55% of British people born in 1946 spent at least some time in social housing in their childhood. Today 18% of all households in England live in social housing. It is all too common an experience that people living in social housing today are now condemned to live in soulless housing estates so often bolted on to the edge of a town or city, where they have no say over their housing, no security of tenure and a stigma attached to them thanks to the endless tabloid headlines selling the myth that ‘benefit scroungers’ are holed up in five bedroom mansions in Kensington. Indeed, a 2013 Trade Union Congress (TUC) survey found public attitudes to welfare and benefits to be largely based on ignorance and prejudice.The poll revealed that on average people think 27% of the welfare budget is claimed fraudulently, while the real figure is 0.7%.18 What the tabloids fail to mention in the ‘scrounger’ stories is that a key function of social housing is to provide accommodation that is affordable to people on low incomes: the people who work in our hospitals, drive our buses and run our nurseries. It also provides a range of functions for people at risk of poverty and provides vital security to people who are disabled or unemployed.

A lack of consensus While there is no doubting the scale and urgency of the unprecedented housing crisis which now confronts us, it is also apparent that there is little consensus on a coherent housing supply model for the future which might encompass issues of social justice, investment patterns, housing quality, tenure patterns, and planning policy. There is also little consensus among the public. A number of public attitude surveys in the UK show a growing awareness of the scale of the housing crisis, but while there is recognition about the national shortage of homes (for example, 80% of us agree that ‘there is a housing crisis in Britain’), only 44% agree that ‘there is a housing crisis in my local area’.19 The background political and economic 53

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context to housing provision is now complex and contested. For a large section of society, house price inflation has become a desirable if not essential part of their financial future, and it has been a significant contributor to UK economic growth, fuelled by cheap credit. For others in society, the same process has led to a dramatic decline in affordability.As a result there is no longer a clear political consensus about meeting the key needs of existing and future generations for a decent home even though 90% of the public agree that, ‘it will be harder for today’s children to buy or rent in the future’20 The dominant policy model for dealing with affordability and social housing has been a free-market approach, where a proportion of social housing or affordable market housing has been provided by a form of ad hoc taxation secured through planning agreements.This market-based approach, however, has led to a drastic decline in the provision of social housing in the wake of the economic downturn. The question for our nation is not whether we need to build more homes, the question is where to build them, how we fund them, what the mix is and how do we ensure they are high quality.The path we are currently on cannot answer these questions; it will not succeed, so we urgently need to forge a new way forward.

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7

The climate change challenge Climate change is an all encompassing threat, directly affecting the environment, the economy, health and safety. Many communities face multiple stresses with serious social, political and security implications, both domestically and abroad. Millions of people are uprooted or permanently on the move as a result. Many more millions will follow. (Kofi Annan, 2009) 1 Climate change is the greatest long term challenge facing human development. It is causing 300,000 deaths a year across the globe and is affecting the lives of 325 million people. By 2030 the number of people affected by climate change will double to 660 million, impacting on the lives of 10% of the world’s population, according to a report, The anatomy of a silent crisis, produced by former United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s thinktank, the Global Humanitarian Forum. Of the fatalities due to weather-related disasters, 99% are in developing countries, according to the study. Within developed countries, climate change disproportionately affects the most vulnerable groups in society (the elderly, the disabled, and lower-income households), as well as having a major economic impact. Climate change is clearly our biggest economic and social challenge because without climate stability, we cannot forge a society that is sustainable and fair in the long term. In whatever sector we work, we must forge practical and rapid paths to a sustainable low-carbon future.We understand the science – and we know that climate change can be tackled by shaping new and existing developments in ways

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that reduce carbon dioxide emissions – but as a nation we are not acting anywhere near fast enough. We need to work nationally and internationally to secure progress on addressing climate change even if such agreement seems unattainable. We also desperately need to galvanise local action and to take personal responsibility. This is all the more complex with a fragmented planning system, severe opposition to some forms of renewable energy, such as onshore wind farms, and successive government’s prioritisation of economic growth over sustainable development, missing the opportunity to create a vibrant, sustainable low-carbon economy.

Climate science There continues to be some scepticism about climate change among a minority of politicians, academics and corporations who get a disproportionate amount of media coverage. The core science, however, is unambiguous. The most authoritative global source of evidence on climate change science comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socioeconomic impacts. It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socioeconomic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change and involves thousands of scientists from all over the world. The fifth major assessment of scientific evidence underlying global warming, published by the IPCC at the end of 2013, stated that warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased.2

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The climate change challenge

© 2014 Paul Glendell Photography (www.glendell.co.uk)

The IPCC’s previous assessment report, issued in 2007, predicts with very high confidence that climate related hazards will mostly increase throughout Europe, but that these changes will vary according to regional geography.3 The report states that up to 1.6 million people annually will be threatened by sea level rise and by coastal flooding related to increasing storm incidence and severity. Flash floods are expected to increase throughout Europe, and winter floods are likely to increase in maritime regions. Frequent and prolonged droughts, along with increased risk of fire, will result from warmer and drier conditions in Southern Europe and the Mediterranean region. The report also indicates that across Europe short duration events for rainfall are likely to increase. In urban areas, owing to extensive urban sealing – commonly seen throughout the suburbs with the paving over of front gardens so people can park their car – there will be increased surface water flooding (fluvial flooding).4 This is a major problem in Britain and was a major contributor to the floods of 2007 (see Case Study 2) and 2013/14.

Image 5: England is experiencing more frequent flooding. Four of the five wettest years recorded in the UK have occurred since 2000 and the winter of 2013/14 was wettest ever recorded.

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Case study 2: 2007 floods in England In the summer of 2007 communities in England – from South Yorkshire and Hull to Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and the Thames Valley – experienced severe flooding. This was the wettest summer since records began, with extreme rainfall consisting of short, intensive downpours. The results were devastating for many people; 13 people died, around 7,000 people were rescued by the emergency services, 55,000 properties were flooded and half a million people were left without mains water or electricity. One of the regions most affected by the summer floods was Gloucestershire, where a water treatment works was knocked out of action resulting in 350,000 people being left with no mains water supply for over 2 weeks. Sir Michael Pitt was appointed by the then government to independently review the 2007 floods in England and he set out the context by comparing the domestic situation to the global picture of flooding for the same year. In 2007 there were over 200 major floods across the world affecting 180 million people, taking the lives of over 8,000 people and costing over £40 billion in damage. Of these worldwide floods, the floods in England ranked as the most expensive with a cost to the economy of £3.2 billion, according to the Environment Agency.5 The insurance industry picked up the majority of the bill with the remainder of costs being covered by central and local government, businesses and individuals.6

The impact of climate change in Britain The environmental geography of Britain is shaped by an interlocking web of ecosystems, landscapes, catchments and soil types, all of which reflect underlying geological and climate factors.7 All of these factors are shaped by human interaction which has been the dominate source of change over the past millennia. Many species and ecosystems have seen rapid decline since 1950.8 Inside this general picture the impact 58

The climate change challenge

of climate change has rapidly become the most important feature in current and future change. The impact of climate change in Britain – such as sea level rise, flooding and drought – will make some of our key cities and highest grade agricultural land vulnerable. The global impact of climate change and resource depletion will also have major implications as we try to grapple with food and energy security. This raises a series of serious questions.Are large populations, currently living in coastal towns and cities going to have to be moved out of flood risk areas or moved out of areas because of the shortage of water? Is agricultural and horticultural practice going to have to be radically changed to ensure we have enough food? In order to answer these questions, we need to understand how the current and future impacts of climate change will affect different parts of the nation in different ways. Our ability to do this rests on our analysis of the current climate change science and our ability to understand this science in terms of the vulnerabilities of particular places, localities and regions, and how we manage risks in a proportionate and effective way. In terms of scientific understanding, the UK Climate Impacts Programme produced a set of climate change projections in 2009 which provided a sophisticated picture of a range of future outcomes for the nation.These outcomes are cast as a range of probabilities and relate to a range of emissions scenarios which themselves relate to the IPCC’s fourth assessment projections for global emission pathways.9 The projections underpin the UK government’s policy framework, forming the basis of the Climate Change Risk Assessment and the National Adaptation Programme which was published in 2013.10 These figures, however, have not been updated since 2009. The UK Climate Impacts Programme 2009 projections present challenges on extreme weather, heat and sea level rise which require urgent policy action.These projections were predicated on a range of emissions scenarios which now look increasingly improbable because of a failure to secure international action on emissions reductions. In practice, the observable carbon emissions have exceeded the highest IPPC fourth assessment pathway. There is now an active debate being put forward in the fifth IPCC assessment round about what this might mean in terms of climate impacts. The goal of stabilising global temperatures to two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial 59

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levels – the safety rail for climate change – is now wholly unrealistic.11 Going beyond two degrees centigrade takes the impact debate into new territory of dangerous climate change which would have even more devastating consequences. We should remember that the average temperatures have not been two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels for about 115,000 years, when global sea level was at least five metres higher than today and the icecaps were smaller.12 By comparison the last time global temperature was five degrees centigrade different from today, we were gripped by an ice age. It is worth noting that the 2009 UK Climate Impacts Programme projections did not fully engage with a ‘beyond two degrees centigrade’ scenario. For key impacts such as extreme weather, heat and sea level rise, there is now an urgent need to reconsider Britain’s vulnerabilities. According to the Met Office, four of the five wettest years recorded in the UK have occurred since 2000 and the winter of 2013/14 was wettest ever recorded.13 We have also had the seven warmest years over the same period.The wider impacts of this new scale of climate change are complex but three issues are of immediate importance: 1. Human populations, health and wellbeing

The final report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution14 provided a comprehensive investigation into demographic change and its impact on the environment. There is now a renewed and urgent need to re-examine the future population distribution in Britain in light of these critical vulnerabilities and to decide on the future of those communities most at risk. As Britain experiences more extreme climate events, weatherrelated deaths and diseases could increase unless urgent action is taken. In early August 2003, the UK, like many other countries in Europe, experienced a heat wave with the temperature gauge topping 38 degrees centigrade in Kent. An analysis of the impact of this heat wave on mortality in England and Wales, found a large short term increase in mortality, with a 16% increase in excess deaths.The impact was greatest in the London region, due to elevated concentrations of ozone and particulate matter, where deaths in those over the age of 75 increased by 59%.15

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It is not just heat waves that cause excess deaths in Britain. At the other end of the thermometer is the impact of cold weather. Cold winters, combined with rising fuel bills and recession-related financial insecurity, have led to the most vulnerable people in society, from children to pensioners, suffering in cold homes each winter. Extra winter deaths in England and Wales in 2012/13 were estimated at 31,000; an increase of 29% from the previous winter.16 With the sharp rises in wholesale energy prices being passed on to consumers, there are a growing number of households suffering from fuel poverty (defined as households who spend more than 10% of their income on fuel). For many households, the choice is bleak between heating and eating and there are now over two million children ‘growing up cold’ in England.17 One of the main root causes of fuel poverty in Britain is our inadequate, energy-inefficient housing stock. It is not acceptable that millions of people in the UK are suffering in cold homes each winter. As Chapter 12 sets out, improving the energy efficiency of homes is a must – it will deliver social benefits as well as help to ensure that our climate change objectives are not missed. 2. Food and water

Sea level rise and potentially higher than anticipated temperature rises have major implications for England’s food productivity, as do the quality and availability of water resources. Pressure on land is particularly acute in the South and East of England, where population is expected to grow most, but where water is scarcest and most of the best farmland is found. In particular the 2010 Foresight Land use future report18 identified 40% of our Grade 1 Agricultural Land as being at, or below, sea level in a concentration around the Wash on England’s East Coast. The Environment Agency, the organisation responsible for managing water resources in England and Wales, have highlighted that there is ‘less water available per person in this region than in many Mediterranean countries’ and that ‘within less than thirty years there will be a major water shortage in the South East unless we reduce the amount of water we use or find new resources.’19 Across the globe, climate change is already having an effect on world food prices due to extreme whether events. Within decades the effects on British agriculture are likely to be severe with increased 61

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extreme weather events, such as floods, likely to cause significant problems.20 Climate change will potentially impact on crop yields, livestock management and the location of production. Soil fertility will be affected by the depletion of organic matter resulting from climate change. Forests are also likely to be affected in terms of productivity and the geographic range of tree species. There will be additional pressure on fisheries and aquaculture, with potentially severe impacts on coasts and marine ecosystems. The defence of agricultural land should be seen in the context of these global pressures which implies much greater pressure on productive land for both food and energy crops. 3. Biodiversity

Our responses to climate change will need to consider the wider impacts on biodiversity both directly and the measures likely to be needed for large scale adaptation. These measures, in relation to flood defences, could result in a major loss of foreshore habitats, for example. We need to make space for nature through corridors which allow for migration. We may also need to return some farmland to salt marsh to ensure the future of our biodiversity.

The economic cost of inaction Extreme climatic events have significant economic and social impacts, especially where infrastructure is damaged – for example, on domestic and commercial buildings, transport, and energy and water supply. The Global Humanitarian Forum’s Anatomy of a silent crisis report found that global economic losses due to climate change currently amount to more than US $125 billion per year, rising to US $340 billion annually by 2030.21 In 2006, the former World Bank chief economist and the then head of the Government Economic Service, Sir Nicholas (now Lord) Stern, highlighted in his report The economics of climate change that the costs of taking action to address climate change – both through mitigation and adaptation – would be much lower than the costs of inaction over the medium to long term.22 These costs are real and happening now. Across the European Union the direct economic losses from flooding between 1980 and 2011 cost more than 90 62

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billion Euros. In 2013, the European Commission estimated that the cost of not adapting to extreme weather will be at least 100 billion Euros (£85.57bn) per year in 2020 and 250 billion Euros in 2050 across the whole of the European Union.23 In England, the 2007 floods cost the economy £3.2 billion, as set out in Case study 2. At the time of writing this book many parts of England are again under water.We do not yet know the full extent of the costs of the winter flooding in late 2013 and early 2014; however the Association of British Insurers latest estimate is that ‘UK insurers will pay out £1.1bn in flood and storm claims for the period from 23 December 2013 to 28 February 2014’.24

What is holding back progress? Climate change is not being embedded in decision making because of a lack of national and local political commitment alongside insufficient delivery frameworks and financial support. The message about the need to address climate change as an urgent priority simply has not reached the majority of decision makers. Many of our communities remain completely untouched by positive solutions, such as green open space, energy demand reduction and renewable energy, which would help to show that climate change is both real and manageable. While the IPCC continues to provide the international evidence base for climate change, there is a lack of leadership in Britain today. The Climate Change Act, introduced by the government in 2008 with cross-party support, made the UK the first country in the world to have a legally binding, long-term framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Since 2008 when the legislation was introduced, however, a backdrop of global economic change, austerity measures and changing political priorities has resulted in insufficient action and seen climate change fall down the government’s ‘to do list’. The current government has abolished the Sustainable Development Commission and the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, key agencies that were responsible for providing independent evidence on climate change in Britain. Much of the local government performance management framework has also been scrapped. Councils no longer have key national indicators on carbon dioxide emissions and climate change adaptation; these were 63

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useful mechanisms to enable the compilation of a national picture of progress towards meeting sustainable development objectives. Alongside the abolition of the above agencies and frameworks the government has localised the planning system. This presents a critical challenge in relation to sea level rise and flood defence in England. For example, the most vulnerable part of England’s coastline, stretching from the Humber to the Thames, is subject to thirty affected local planning authorities with no joint strategic approach. This institutional response is inadequate given expected sea level rise and requires a strategic response on a bigger scale than even the previous regional strategies allowed for. Delivering national priorities on a purely local basis is explored in further detail in the chapter on ‘rebuilding trust’ which sets out the current challenges with planning in England today.

Failing to mitigate Increasing fuel poverty is just one impact that a changing climate has in relation to energy. Increasing summer temperatures will add to the demand for cooling, and the impacts of extreme weather events may affect electricity distribution. This means that climate change will have a direct effect on both the supply of, and demand for, energy. We are also vulnerable to the geopolitics of energy, with much of our energy being imported. Renewable and low carbon energy technologies are an important part of the solution to decarbonising our energy supply, but deployment of these new energy technologies is woefully inadequate. All this brings into focus a crucial question: Is the distribution and management of Britain’s towns, cities and countryside fit to face the climate change challenges of the future?

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Economic transformation ...difficulties always arise because the city’s economy – perhaps the largest determinant of how and when change occurs – depends on national and international market forces that are beyond the power of the city to influence, thereby making other factors more difficult, complicated, and politically contentious. (Kristina Ford, 2010)1 Economic transformation has defined the fabric of Britain’s towns and cities over three centuries. The nation’s current distinctive regional disparities lie in the economic geography of the 19th century based on the rapid growth of industrial manufacturing in the North of England, South Wales and the central belt of Scotland. The decline of manufacturing and industries like mining has led to a long period of economic transition which still defines the performance of many places and regions. By contrast the concentration of economic, political and cultural activity around London and the South East makes England one the most geographically polarised of the advanced nations. The Barlow Report2 provided a clear picture of this economic geography and a platform for postwar intervention. In the postwar period, town planning and regionally-focused economic development were more or less successfully integrated. This intervention was complex, including direct control of growth in the South East and direct investment in the ex-industrial north. It also included the decentralisation of public services and government departments and a reconsideration of new towns policy to incorporate designations in areas requiring regeneration: the new town of Peterlee in the North

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East of England is one example of attempts to modernise and diversify the local economy while providing improved housing conditions. Over the last 30 years, EU regional policy, through structural funds, provided a driver for a continued regional approach to promoting a more balanced nation. Since 1979, however, there has been an acceptance in England of the predominance of the greater South East as an economic driver of the UK, based increasingly on financial services. Efforts to focus and accommodate growth in the South East have proved controversial but there is no sense of any attempt over the last 30 years to fundamentally rebalance the economic geography of the UK. Hence the growing acceptance of the ‘managed decline’ of many ex-industrial communities. There are two marked features of the postwar approach to regional economic inequalities: First, the lack of consensus and continuity of approach in regard to regional economic development, with the periodic creation and abolition of regional structures and policy. For example, the end of regional offices in 1954, the establishment of Regional Economic Planning Councils in 1964 and their abolition in 1979, followed by the comprehensive abolition of government offices and housing market renewal pathfinder areas in 2011. Second, the lack of a clear link between regional economic development and regional or national spatial planning. Again, the approach to regional planning has lacked any sense of long-term continuity in the post war period. Regional Strategies, for example, had an operational life of less than five years before their effective abolition in 2010. The degree of success of this complex set of interventions and approaches is now the subject of dispute. On the one hand, it is true that the objectives of regional economic convergence have proved elusive. While there was progress in regional convergence in the postwar period it did not fundamentally rebalance the UK economy.This has led some commentators to conclude that regional policy has been a waste of resources. It is however also true that decentralisation and investment sustained some communities whose survival would otherwise have been in doubt. For example, the UK government’s decision to locate the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) headquarters in Swansea has provided a major employment source and supported the local economy. It is also clear that the absence of any kind of sustained regional policy since 1980 66

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has been accompanied by a prioritisation of economic activity in the South East.

The North–South economic divide Chapter 5 made it clear that complex regional disparities go beyond simplistic arguments about a North–South divide. Undoubtedly, however, parts of the north and the midlands are characterised by ‘archipelagos’ of worklessness and related poverty – cities, towns and former mining communities, which some have labelled ‘post industrial’, present some of the most acute social problems in England today. A range of indicators on health, education, crime and employment outcomes all confirm a growing gap in economic performance. Research conducted by TWRI Policy and Research in 2012,3 a consultancy based in Tyne and Wear, compared 10 city regions’ fulltime employment rates, illustrating wide divergence in performance with Birmingham showing one the fastest rates of decline, with a distinctive pattern of lower than average performance from Liverpool and Sheffield. The study reveals that Liverpool and Sheffield were operating at a lower level in 2010 than they had been at the end of the early-1980s recession. While such disparities are stark they should be read in the context of the continued importance of the wider economy outside the South East. A study undertaken by the Core Cities think tank, a group which represents England’s eight Core Cities, underlined that these cities are vital economic hubs.The Core Cities are Nottingham, Liverpool, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield, Manchester and Bristol. 16 million people live in the Core Cities, they generate 27% of the country’s wealth and are home to half of the country’s leading research universities.4 On a best-case scenario, Core Cities then estimated they could generate 752,000 more jobs, a reduction of 98,500 in the number of unemployed, alongside substantial savings in welfare benefits. Their worst-case scenario was a population decline of 58,000 with the potential for higher ‘worklessness’ and an accelerated drift to London and the Greater South East.5

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Economic futures If the first and second industrial revolutions led to a distinctive legacy of geographic disparities, there are signs of a ‘third’ revolution with interesting spatial challenges and opportunities. There is a growing commentary of the prospect of a third industrial revolution driven by the convergence of a number of technologies such as renewable energy, clever software, novel materials, more dextrous robots, new processes and a range of internet services. The 3D printer can run unattended, and can make many things which are too complex for a traditional factory to handle. An engineer working in the middle of a desert who finds he lacks a certain tool no longer has to have it delivered from the nearest city. He can simply download the design and print it….Nanotechnology is giving products enhanced features, such as bandages that help heal cuts, engines that run more efficiently and crockery that cleans more easily. Genetically engineered viruses are being developed to make items such as batteries. And with the internet allowing ever more designers to collaborate on new products, the barriers to entry are falling6 The Organisation for Economic Co-opertation and Development (OECD) has recognised the contribution that such new technologies could play in the context of de-carbonising the global economy and the employment opportunities which it could drive. Significantly the OECD 2012 Green Growth Strategy recognised the boost to manufacturing which de-carbonising could deliver if supported by smart regulation.7 The ‘third industrial revolution’ will have global and national spatial implications. The flight of manufacturing to low-wage countries may have peaked with production, increasingly moving back to rich countries partly because labour costs are a less significant element of production and because products are so sophisticated that it helps to have design and production teams in the same place. Boston Consulting Group has estimated that in areas such as transport, computers, fabricated metals and machinery, 10–30% of the goods 68

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that the US now imports from China could be manufactured at home by 2020, boosting American output by $20 billion to $55 billion per year.8 This creates an interesting spatial opportunity for industrial growth which is not determined by primary resources or energy consumption, but by access to the knowledge economy and by the quality of life which localities can offer. It re-frames the question as to whether the South East of England has, by necessity, to be our only engine of growth or whether opportunities lie elsewhere. The question is, are we going to take advantage of these new opportunities by working out what they mean for our future?

Can poorer regions buck the trend? The prospect of a new technological revolution, which may reframe our geographic choices, is complemented by a challenge to the orthodoxy that less developed English regions are on the one hand a drag on the national economy and on the other, that regional performance must always be judged by the degree it converges with the South East. The 2012 OECD report Promoting growth in all regions makes a powerful case not just for government intervention on the basis of equity and resilience, but because less developed regions are important contributors to national growth in the OECD nations.9 The report highlights the needs for tailored policy packages which address the multiple causes of poor economic performance. Significantly, while connectivity remains a major issue, the report highlights the need to consider labour market fragmentation and the lower levels of human capital. Policy coordination and consistency were highlighted as a key to success at the national and regional levels.

A nation without a plan Britain has no unified industrial strategy where the future challenges of technological and business change can be considered alongside transport infrastructure or housing growth. Unlike other countries, we no longer have the ambition to shape the most efficient alignment of the public good with private sector investment patterns. Instead, we have a confusion of separate policy documents controlled by differing government departments, none of which have responsibility for a single investment strategy. 69

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It is true that government’s current position towards regional economic policy is guided by headline commitments to ‘rebalance’ the economy away from ‘one corner’ of the nation, reducing our reliance on any one economic activity.10 There have been large scale cutbacks in regional investment and the creation of new investment vehicles such as the Regional Growth Fund, which is targeted on employment generation. With the abolition of Regional Development Agencies, Local Enterprise Partnerships have been introduced with some powers to coordinate economic growth and transport strategies. These new partnerships cannot formally write development plans, however, and have limited accountability (an issue which is explored in the following chapter on a ‘disconnected politics’). The areas covered by Local Enterprise Partnerships are not always well related to the local economic geography. While at their best they will offer opportunities for particular localities to coordinate economic development they are not, and could not, be a vehicle for national or regional economic ‘rebalancing’ since they have no remit nor incentive to coordinate activity between themselves. They will not therefore have a bearing on variable regional performance. City-regional Local Enterprise Partnerships may have more influence in places like Leeds and Manchester where they complement existing local government partnerships. There are, however, no clear linkages between these new investment measures and spatial planning and in the absence of Regional Spatial Strategies, there is no regional spatial approach to economic development. By abolishing eight Regional Development Agencies, alongside Regional Spatial Strategies and government offices in the regions, the government has clearly created an administrative and policy void in both planning and economic terms. For the Department for Communities and Local Government, the very term ‘region’ has been consigned to history. Change is possible and the German economy is much more spatially balanced than our own, but that performance is partly based on the postwar constitution which is a federal system of government. This provides powerful lessons and cities capable of shaping their own future.

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A disconnected politics ...the real problem is not that working-class voters have switched their voting preferences but that they are not voting at all because there’s too little at stake, the correct political prescription is to do the opposite: ... to emphasise not ‘order and national greatness’ but care and economic justice (George Monbiot, 2012)1 People are not engaging in politics and certainly not in planning. A stark comparison can be drawn between the postwar consensus on development and the highly polarised arguments today which play out over issues such as housing and wind farms. This process is part of a profound change in civil society, manifest in declining political participation. Clearly, planning is not solely responsible for this wider political trend, but planning decisions are acknowledged to be one of the greatest catalysts of local political activity because of their direct impact on people’s lives.The problem is that, on the whole, the public have lost faith in planning. Planning cannot function in a democratic society without the consent of the public. Achieving this consent has, and continues to be, the most significant challenge in the planning reform process, and it remains the top political priority. Securing consensus is problematic because over the last 40 years there has been much less agreement in society about the benefits of development.This is related to a decline in the trust that people have in professionals to make decisions on their behalf and a perception among some that national issues, or developer profits, will always outweigh community aspirations. 71

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The British land use planning system was created with strong democratic governance. Key decisions on plan-making and development management are embedded within local authorities, both functions that require democratic approval.The supposed failures of planning (for example, to build enough housing) are in practice largely a product of local democracy – a failure of local democracy rather than a failure of planning. Representative democracy may be the bedrock of the accountability of planning, but since the 1960s there have been increasing demands for greater participative democracy in decision-making. These demands have been reflected in some key procedural rights in planmaking and in wider attempts at direct community engagement such as ‘Planning for Real’®.2 The case for participation has been in two parts: first, people have a right to participate in local decisions as well as vote for decision-makers; and, second, participation leads to better decisions. This debate illustrates one of the greatest challenges regarding people and planning: what is the right balance between representative and participative democracy? How much power should local people have, and what are the limits to that power? The last 20 years of planning reform has been dominated, on the one hand, by attempts to localise planning decisions and, on the other, by efforts to speed up and streamline the planning process, particularly for major infrastructure. The last Labour government pushed ‘new localism’ and published a raft of policy on community involvement, introducing Statements of Community Involvement in plan-making. The current government has pushed further by abolishing the unaccountable Infrastructure Planning Commission, a national body established to assess major applications for key infrastructure projects such as power stations, ports and motorways. The government has also abolished regional planning, focusing the system only on local plans and a ‘revolutionary step’ to introduce procedurally powerful, but complex, neighbourhood plans.

‘Larger than local’ planning Much of the debates in recent years, and resulting legislative and policy changes to planning, have been around how to achieve the

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most effective balance between strategic housing policy and an emphasis on the localism approach. The current government committed to removing the regional or strategic tier of planning in 2010 and the Localism Act 2011 provided the legal framework in order to provide the government with powers to abolish the regional strategies.The basis of the arguments which have underpinned the government’s drive to remove strategic planning for housing lies in the loss of democratic legitimacy in planning and an assumption that regional housing targets contributed directly to a failure in delivery,3 because of resistance to them from local communities. The increase in England’s housing stock in 2007–08, at almost 200,000 new homes per year, however, was the highest annual increase for almost 20 years, when the regional framework in England was just starting to emerge. As set out in Chapter 6, in the year to September 2013 the total number of new homes built in England was just over 100,000.4 Reforms to planning are not the sole reason for the phenomenal drop in housing building – the global financial crisis resulting in a lack of development finance and mortgage finance are the key features – but they are clearly having an impact. England is now unique in North West Europe in having no effective national- or regional-scale planning.This is a major barrier to the delivery of sustainable development because our planning system is disconnected from the reality of our functional geography. England is less efficient and less fair as a result, and, crucially, is less able to adapt to the challenges which confront us in terms of demographics and climate change. For example, this lack of national or strategic oversight creates a number of uncertainties about how housing need is assessed. With no national or sub-national derived target mechanism to deal with overall housing needs or particular social housing needs, how do we plan for the right amount of housing for those on low incomes, our ageing society, or particular ethnic groups, such as Gypsies and Travellers? How do we deal with international, national or interregional demographic change? How can we access the relocation of housing pressures from areas of high demand and limited capacity to areas of greater opportunity? When considering climate change and renewable energy, rather than housing, a series of similar questions and uncertainties arise. 73

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The current government has proposed two principal alternatives to replace the function of regional planning and housing targets.These are voluntary co-operation driven by a new legal duty, and the New Homes Bonus incentive. The new ‘duty to cooperate’ was introduced through the Localism Act 2011 and requires that councils and public bodies, such as Highways Agency,‘engage constructively, actively and on an ongoing basis’ to develop strategic policies.5 Implementation of the duty to co-operate is still at an early stage, but emerging views are that it is failing to deliver any form of recognisable strategic planning. While there are good examples of cross-border co-operation between some councils, such as the Great Manchester combined authority, there are also examples of significant unresolved problems, particularly relating to housing.6 There has been speculation over what role Local Enterprise Partnerships might play in assisting cross-border co-operation for strategic planning policy for housing. Local Enterprise Partnerships (as referred to in Chapter 8 on Economic Transformation) are new government agencies that have been developed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, as set out in the Local Growth White Paper published in October 2010. These partnerships have a wide variety of scope and geographic areas. There have been suggestions that Local Enterprise Partnerships could play an important role in co-ordinating cross-border subregional work on housing through the preparation of joint planning strategies. Indeed some of these partnerships have acknowledged the need for housing and economic development to be properly integrated, but the degree to which the focus will be on spatial planning and housing is not yet clear. There is also the fundamental question that these new partnerships, which are business-led with council input, lack democratic accountability (a key criticism of the recently abolished regional strategies). The government’s second approach to driving growth and cooperation between councils is a new incentive called the New Homes Bonus.The New Homes Bonus is designed to be a ‘powerful, simple, transparent, predictable and flexible’ incentives scheme to encourage and reward local authorities to deliver more new housing.7

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The Bonus came into force in April 2011 and offers local authorities an incentive to stimulate housing development by matchfunding additional Council Tax for each new home completed for the next six years. There is an additional bonus of £350 per annum for six years for all new units of affordable housing. The New Homes Bonus, however, has been widely criticised for a number of reasons. A report by the government select committee that examines public accounts found that there is ‘no credible data to show New Homes Bonus is working’.8 It is hard to predict the degree to which entrenched local opposition is susceptible to benefits which accrue to local authorities, particularly in communities not reliant on public services. There is also the significant issue that it is not ‘new’ money. In fact, the New Homes Bonus is substantially a redistribution of existing funding withdrawn from central grants paid by government to local councils. The Rt Hon Margaret Hodge MP, Chair of the Committee of Public Accounts, said, ‘so far the areas which have gained most money tend to be the areas where housing need is lowest. The areas that have lost most tend to be those where needs are greatest.’9 This raises questions about the impact of such incentives which do not support regeneration nor seek to reduce inequality.10 The original idea of incentives for growth was to compensate communities for the increased pressures on physical and social infrastructure, such as local schools and roads, to ensure that service provision was maintained or even improved.The New Homes Bonus money is not ring-fenced, however, and therefore it is likely to be attractive to cash-strapped local authorities with the likelihood that such money will be spent largely on sustaining core services rather than building new homes and investing in supporting infrastructure.

Neighbourhood planning Neighbourhood plans are part of the centrepiece of the government’s ambition to engage the public. There are contradictions in the government’s approach to empowering communities, however, with consultation times for key national planning documents having been drastically reduced and in some cases public consultation has been completely removed.

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What do all of these changes to planning mean in practice? They mean that England’s political geography is now characterised by fragmentation, with government withdrawing from regional policy, and a localised system evolving. There are over 300 councils in England and a position where there is no linkage between highlevel national policy and the actions of councils, who are severely resource constrained due to deficit reduction, is neither practical nor in the best interest of the sustainable development of the nation. The current picture in England reflects the longstanding failure by all governments in recent decades to address public legitimacy and consent in the way that we organise the nation.

What is the value of public participation? Over the last decade, despite much rhetoric about the Big Society, localism and the introduction of a new neighbourhood tier of planning, there has been much less clarity about the value of public participation. In fact, there has not been a comprehensive review of people and planning since the Skeffington Report11 in 1969. It is hard to see a clear narrative on the rights and responsibilities of the public. Words such as ‘consultation’, ‘engagement’ and ‘participation’ are often used interchangeably, despite their radically different meanings. For example, the word ‘consultation’, which means the passive communication of information, is used interchangeably with ‘participation’, which means the public having real power to shape decisions. While localism, the mantra of the current government, implies a fundamental shift of power, in practice this power, as reflected in neighbourhood plans, is strictly bounded by the need for conformity with national policy.The National Planning Policy Framework (the current government’s overarching policy framework) does not use the word ‘participation’ but it does talk about ‘involvement’ and ‘empowerment’. The government’s National Planning Practice Guidance uses the word ‘consultation’. Neither document contains material concerning good practice in participation. Confused? We are.

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Why bother engaging with planning? How the public actually feels about planning remains poorly understood. The recent protests over fracking in parts of England illustrate the real and potential force of public discontent with some forms of development. By way of contrast, there is also some indication of real enthusiasm among those engaged in neighbourhood planning. What is clear is that there is an obvious, but largely unexplored disconnect between people and planning. This is distinct from the question of how many – and how meaningfully – people participate in decision-making, and goes to the heart of the power and remit of planning. Can planning actually make a difference to the kinds of issues which touch people’s lives? These are often localised in nature and include bus services, dog dirt, litter, areas of dereliction, and the proliferation of betting, alcohol and fast-food outlets. It is probably a safe assumption that the majority of people do not understand the institutional boundaries between service and delivery. In so far as they relate to it at all, the public mostly see planning merely as part of the council monolith, and we wonder why people do not engage with the planning process. Perhaps this is a reflection of a wider apathy, but we would suspect, at least in part, that this is the result of a rational view that planning is unable to tackle many of the issues people really care about. It is also significant that the deregulation of permitted development (allowing shops to be converted into homes without planning for example) is removing control over many of the issues about which communities care most.12 The micro-level is the most important in terms of human psychology and wellbeing, but almost no resources are devoted to it through traditional planning. The concept of neighbourhood planning brings this into sharp focus because, while it is procedurally powerful, little or no consideration has gone into the possible outcomes of such plans in relation to people’s actual lived experience, particularly in areas of social exclusion. There are, of course, legal limitations of planning and resource constraints, both of which mean that meaningful dialogue with communities can be difficult to achieve.The core principles of why people should participate in planning13 – set out below – nonetheless

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remain essential to democracy and building a better future and are explored in more detail in Chapter 11: • people have a basic right to participate in planning if we are to have a vibrant, open democracy; • participation leads to better decisions, informed by local knowledge and aspirations; • participation can empower people to take responsibility for the future. • Participation can reduce conflict and promote social cohesion by promoting shared understanding; • all forms of planning must be set within the context of representative democracy, which is the ultimate arbiter.

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PART THREE

Practical steps to building a better society

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A fair and efficient society ....reducing inequality would increase the well being and quality of life for all of us. Far from being inevitable and unstoppable, the sense of deterioration in social wellbeing and the quality of social relations in society is reversible. Understanding the effects of inequality means that we suddenly have a policy handle on the wellbeing of whole societies. (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009)1 We have a clear sense now of the scale of the challenge which faces us. It is equally clear that this challenge has both a practical and moral aspect. The question now is what can we do about it? Part Three sets out five practical steps needed to build a better society: • • • • •

a fair and efficient society rebuilding trust building the homes we need providing a resilient and low-carbon future paying for utopia.

Each one of these on their own would make a difference to our future but in order that we avoid repeating our past mistakes we also need to consider a new way of living and organising ourselves which values cooperation as much as we currently value competition.

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A fair and efficient society The drive to reverse the inequality of our nation is an enormous challenge. The processes that caused it are complex and related to the fundamental economic and social foundations of our society. Reform of education and the welfare system are plainly central to this action and we have seen how changes to housing benefits in England have had direct and negative impacts on thousands of people’s lives. In seeking to reduce inequalities, however, a whole range of actions that relate directly to planning can make a real difference. We have seen that poor housing has a direct impact on life chances of children and access to rewarding work can define someone’s wellbeing. Access to affordable energy can transform the wellbeing of the vulnerable and localised economic spending can make communities more resilient. We have also seen that inequalities between places have negative consequences for both rich and poor communities. This result is not just shocking in terms of economic inequalities, but the skewed and wholly irrational use of our national infrastructure. Put crudely, it is neither fair nor efficient nor practical for London and the South East to continue to be the focus of rapid population growth. Some of these solutions are discussed in more detail in following sections.

A new purpose for planning Chapter 9 highlighted the consequences for people of the slow abandonment of the social purpose of planning. We can now be clear that the English planning system is now little more than a weak kind of land management service. The legal underpinning of English planning contains no explicit social objectives and national policy has abandoned equity and social justice as a goal. If we are serious about dealing with both efficiency and fairness, then we need to transform the practices and objectives of planning, restoring to them the values and objectives of the British utopian tradition. We also need to restore efficient and inclusive structures to planning so, put simply, it reflects the reality of the nation’s geography.

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New legal objectives The first major task in restoring planning is to put principle back in legal objectives. We have seen how it was a major mistake to focus our planning laws on process and not include clear objectives which provide a kind of moral compass for successive generations. This is not to say that such legal requirements are enough on their own to deliver change but they are part of the foundation of action. England’s planning system has very weak overall legal objectives to contribute to sustainable development because it allows the definition of sustainable development to be set out in policy not in law. As a result politicians can change its meaning at whim and effectively remove it as they did in the current National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Other amending legislation has created two further duties on climate change mitigation and adaptation, and good design, however there are no explicit social objectives for planning in English law. Other nations in Britain have had a more open debate about such legal requirements and Wales has a statutory duty for sustainable development. While progress in Wales in delivering sustainable development has been slow, the legal duty has significantly kept the debate alive. Outside Britain other countries such as New Zealand have enshrined a purpose for spatial planning into their Resource Management Act 1991. There are many other international examples of planning systems which are founded on a clear legal purpose. The planet’s third largest economy, Germany, has an extensive Federal Building Code (Baugesetzbuch, Bau GB 1997) which sets the structure and detailed operation of the German planning system. It also contains a statutory purpose for the system: Land-use plans shall safeguard sustainable urban development and a socially equitable utilisation of land for the general good of the community, and shall contribute to securing a more humane environment and developing and protecting the basic conditions of human life.2 The German legislation goes on to recognise the specific needs of the young, the old and the disabled as well as historic and cultural 83

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Box 2: A purpose for planning in New Zealand The Resource Management Act 1991 has one specifically defined purpose, to promote the sustainable management of natural and physical resources. In Section 5 of the Act, ‘sustainable management’ is described as: managing the use, development and protection of natural and physical resources in a way, or at a rate which enables people and communities to provide for their social, economic, and cultural well-being and for their health and safety while – a) Sustaining the potential of natural and physical resources (excluding minerals) to meet the reasonably foreseeable needs of future generations; and b) Safeguarding the life-supporting capacity of air, water, soil, and ecosystem; and c) Avoiding, remedying or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment. The Act also talks about the cultural rights of specific communities and, while all this is relisted to management of land use, it provides such a system to be framed by a wider social awareness of outcomes.

assets and the need to support local businesses and renewable energy. While there are, of course, many other key factors for the success of Germany in delivering some of Europe’s most sustainable places, it is significant that there is a clear legal foundation for this success. A legal purpose for planning forces our hand into a precise set of language which has to be comprehensive, effective and hopefully lasting.

A lasting settlement The British government has always resisted a purpose for the English planning system, preferring to keep any objectives in their power to change when convenient. A legal obligation provides, if not a permanent, a much more lasting settlement of what on earth we are meant to be trying to achieve. It would be easy to leave the 84

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argument without offering a suggestion about what the purpose should be. This reflects on the debate in part about the evolution of the notion of sustainable development and its relationship with the Garden City and utopian principles. Box 3 sets out what a legal definition of planning in Britain might be.

Box 3: The purpose of planning: a new legal definition 1 The purpose of the planning system is to positively promote the long term and equitable organisation of land and natural and human resources in order to achieve sustainable development. 2 In the Planning Acts, sustainable development means managing the use, development, and protection of land and natural resources in a way which enables people and communities to provide for their legitimate social, economic and cultural wellbeing while sustaining the potential of future generations to meet their own needs. 3 In achieving sustainable development, planning should: a positively promote social equity by ensuring the outcomes of planning decisions meet the needs of all parts of the community, b positively identify suitable land for development in line with the economic, social and environmental objectives so as to improve the quality of life, wellbeing and health of people and communities, c contribute to sustainable economic innovation, d protect and enhance the natural and historic environment, e ensure a long term sustainable pattern of resource use, f ensure radical cuts in carbon emission in line the Climate Change Act 2008 and fully contribute to building long term climate resilience, g positively promote high quality and inclusive design, h positively promote the artistic and cultural development of the community, i ensure the planning system is open, transparent participative and accountable.

Legal objectives will not, on their own, deliver the kind of change required to put equity at the heart of planning. National policy will also need to be refocused on social justice to reflect these new legal objectives. Generalised objectives will not be enough, however. 85

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Detailed policy will need to encourage a new understanding and practises which focus on fair outcomes. This will mean an honest and meaningful assessment on how things like new economic development can benefit the existing community with all possible measures taken from transport to education to make the opportunities real for those most in need. Rydin describes this imperative in her vision for a reformed planning system: This will involve a degree of asymmetry within the planning system, since it requires the needs and desires of lower-income communities and the just sustainability agenda to be prioritised. Under such reforms there would be a presumption in favour of proposals that meet these needs and that could be argued to be in line with Just Sustainability aims. (Rydin, 2013)3 What would the practical outcomes of this be? Legal agreements through planning to secure local employment; new employment development that is easily accessible by foot and public transport; relationships forged with new employers and local schools and colleges at early stages to ensure the maximum possible benefit to the local community; and a recognition that the creation of minimum wage or zero hours contract jobs is not enough to provide a real future for our young people and wider communities.

A new kind of planner Beyond law and policy comes the vital task of rebuilding the entire notion of what planning means, returning it to the visionary interdisciplinary practice it once aspired to be. The planner’s job is not done when the plan is made or the planning consent given. Neither should they work within fixed boundaries of land management. The implication of a system founded on social justice is a planner who can, as a matter of course, understand law and the technical aspects of building better places but who also knows how to listen to the varied communities they will encounter. In short the skill of community development has to be at the heart of planning. While professionalisation has had some benefits it has placed a boundary 86

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between planners and the people they plan for that now needs to be broken down. Above all, planners must unstick themselves from being the amoral technocrats they have become to being an active moral and political force in our society. There is a tension here between competing corporate and professional ethics and views and aspirations of communities. There is no perfect resolution to this except that planners should be honest and transparent about the values they bring to the table and their role in shaping the future. It will sometimes be our role to challenge the values of those around us if their views undermine action on things like equality and climate change.

A new structure for planning Providing a strong principled purpose for planning is always likely to start an argument. Providing for a logical and effective structure for planning is one necessary step to deliver not just the ambitions of social justice but in meeting the immediate and political challenge of climate change and economic transformation. We need to think about five key questions in building the structure of an effective planning system: 1. Do we understand our own geography? 2. Are we planning at the right scale? 3. Are we planning over the rights timescales? 4. Are people properly involved? 5. Are we integrating all the necessary branches of government? We have already concluded that in England the answer to all these questions is a resounding no. The real question is how we might put this right.

A national plan for England There has been a long debate among planners about the need for a national spatial plan or framework which is a common feature of many advanced European economies. The idea of planning the nation as a whole so that for the first time we can work out how housing, transport and flood defences can be delivered simultaneously in order 87

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to bring maximum efficiency and fairness might seem self-evident but it has been regarded as politically unacceptable because of the perceived interference with market forces. The decision to organise ourselves at this bigger scale is a practical rather than ideological question. Solely market-led approaches to dealing with flood risk would, for example, see many communities undergo rapid decline as insurance costs rose and property values fell. So far we have been unable to find historical or contemporary examples of exclusively private sector solutions to the kind of problems identified above. We also need to acknowledge that the scale of the challenge goes beyond the capability of existing structures that deal with land use planning. It requires a much more ambitious agenda based on recognising the nature of the challenge and working back to the kinds of structures and laws we need.This requires a thorough reflection on the current remit and purpose of planning and recognition that its legal and policy fragmentation between differing scales is unhelpful.

The importance of international comparisons The debate about the future spatial development of England needs to consider both historic and international examples of successful interventions. For example the US pioneered state-led democratic planning in the 1930s through projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority which were extremely successful in terms of the rapid deployment of cutting edge energy technology. Perhaps most obviously we are bordered by two nations, Wales and Scotland, who have developed both the culture and policy approaches of national spatial planning. Even those nations associated with unregulated ‘free’ market approaches are planning more effectively than England. The High Speed Rail Board in NewYork State was created in 2010 to guide the transformation of the 263 mile long Empire Corridor. By state law, with a public communications and technical remit, it is charged with reporting to the Governor and the Legislature, within two years, on a fully developed and consensus plan for the financing of the plan and the organizational entity that should oversee the State’s high speed rail program.4

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The Australian government’s National Food Plan published in 2012 is another example of a national approach to facilitating development in the context of challenges of climate change and demographic change in South East Asia.5 The purpose is to integrate government and private action for mutual benefit over the long term.

Do we understand Britain? The first step to organising ourselves is to ensure we have the institutions that allow us to understand the nation. At the same time that England was abolishing the Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution, the Swedes were establishing the Commission for the Future of Sweden.6 The Royal Commission of Environmental Pollution was one effective model of how academic and other expert evidence must be drawn together to advise governments.The Committee on Climate Change’s role in advising the UK government provides a useful model, but we need one body that can look across all the issues and with the independence and authority to bring strong evidence to the attention of politicians and the public.

A different kind of government There is also a need for the integration of spatial policy at the national level through a new ministry which would clearly mirror the function of the post war Ministry of Reconstruction. Such a ministry would need to integrate policy, finance and delivery to enable the kind of change necessary to deal with, for example, sea level rise or a series of new Garden Cities.

A nation running out of time The scale of the challenges facing Britain is very likely to increase over the rest of the 21st century. These challenges may confront us as incremental change or more likely as a series of economic and environmental tipping points beyond which our responses will be crisis management. We need responses which deal with 50- and 100year timescales as a matter of course. It took fifty years to upgrade our flood defences in the aftermath of the 1953 North Sea tidal 89

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surge. Decisions to defend or abandon many communities need to be made urgently because, as the 2010 Foresight report pointed out, ‘Deciding how to balance these competing pressures and demands is a major challenge for the coming century, and one that is all the more pressing due to the time that may be needed to roll out new land use policies.’7 Our failure to have a comprehensive spatial approach to dealing with those issues of a distinctively strategic cross-border nature will reduce the nation’s resilience to environmental shocks, reduce economic efficiency and exacerbate social inequality. As Sir John Beddington points out in the Executive Summary of the Foresight Land use futures report, ‘Without significant policy changes, the drivers of change will interact to create growing tensions and conflict between sectors, with serious implications for the UK’s wellbeing and prosperity.’ The questions raised by the Foresight reports and by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution have gone unanswered and institutional changes have diminished the capacity of England to organise itself effectively. Solutions to these problems are readily available but require a significant culture change, increased ambition and greater collaboration between the sectors and among government departments.The culture of thinking about the geography of our nation is the first step to rebuilding our national organisational capacity. To create a fairer and more efficient society we need to create a sense of the nation, starting with having a clear plan for all our communities within the context of a national framework.

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Rebuilding trust in planning ‘Get to know the people. You will never understand yourself or your work until you do.’ (Edward Carpenter in a letter to C. R. Ashbee, 1886)1 There is no doubt that securing public legitimacy is the most important task in developing a new planning system. In a democracy, development cannot take place without broad public consent and this is the focus of the following chapter. Securing public legitimacy is the key to developing a new planning system which people believe in. The model for any future governance structure will need to address both forms of democratic accountability and procedural rights for individuals and communities. It will need both a representative and participative aspect, but it will also need the kind of effective powers and duties to ensure change happens fairly. National government action is already secured by democratic accountability; action at this scale is a matter of political will rather than a lack of democratic mechanisms. Restoring trust in planning means responding to the changes in society which have made us more diverse and the new technology which means communities of interest are more likely to be found online than in the church hall.We recognise that in many areas there is little interest in formal politics, and that groups often mobilise around single issues. Renewed interest in cooperatives, mutualism and transition towns, however, speaks against an entirely bleak prognosis. Rebuilding trust means grasping opportunities at all levels, from working with local community groups to a national debate on the housing and climate change crisis.

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This project will fail, however, if it ignores the reality of the very uneven distribution of power in our society. Part of this uneven picture is the power national parliament has over communities; this is simply the reality of democracy even if politicians are reluctant to acknowledge it. Parliament is sovereign and in the absence of a federal constitution, like the US or Germany, or powerful local government, like France, it is Parliament that has the final say on the objectives of the planning system and key decisions on infrastructure like high speed rail. The second key aspect of the uneven distribution of power is between communities and individuals and the corporate sector. The process of planning brings this imbalance into sharper focus. While there are good examples of the private sector working with communities, on the whole the technical, legal and communication resources which the corporate sector bring to planning far outweigh the resources of most communities. While vociferous and effective community lobbies do exist, they tend to be dominated by well resourced higher earners.The uneven strength of community groups, based on their social capital, can contribute to the location of so many bad neighbour developments in our poorest communities. It is also important to be clear that not all community participation produces progressive outcomes.This can be very challenging for the ideas we have articulated about the value of community empowerment but campaigning against homeless shelters or rehabilitation centres for exservice men all play against the values of social justice and long-term sustainable development which should be at the heart of planning. All this makes the job of being a planner complex and requires us to think about values and power and about how our democracy works. A great deal has been written about the subject of governance and whether planning can be made more collaborative or has to face up to deep conflicts which underlie it.2 This is not a book about how to change the constitution of Britain. The level of complexity in thinking about people and planning is enough to induce a migraine.We can however see four broad strands of changes that would help rebuild public trust: • greater devolution of power to regions, cities and communities; • greater clarity about how representative and participative forms of democracy are meant to fit together; 92

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• a much stronger role for planners in community development; • strong citizens’ rights. The first of these is to devolve much greater power to our regions and cities and communities, recognising that as a general rule decisions about the future are best taken as locally as possible. This has happened, at least in part, in relation to the nations of Scotland and Wales. The forthcoming vote on the independence of Scotland, due to take place in September 2014, will be a seismic moment in Britain’s future. While there are some tentative moves to devolve national budgets to our cities, there would need to be a dramatic shift of our centralised system so that, with safe guards, cities and localities could have the power to effect change. National government would still have to play a strong role in the process of coordinating this devolution of powers and setting a strong national framework which would ensure the fair and balanced development of the nation. The empowerment of local government in England, many of which have very little real discretion over the budgets they set, could have a positive impact on participation in local politics, because a local vote would actually count for real change. There is no doubt that the very odd structure of local government in many parts of England, with both county councils and district councils and very local parish councils, needs urgent reform. Changing structures is an easier objective than changing culture, but at all levels of government we need to be clear about how different forms of democracy work together. Representative, participative and direct forms of democracy are all at work in the planning process. Direct democracy can be seen in referendums on neighbourhood plans where the electorate is voting for a specific proposition. Representative democracy is still the dominant model, with elected politicians representing our views for fixed terms. Participative democracy is much harder to define. In theory, participation is the most active and empowering form of democracy, in which citizens come together to make decisions and have real power to change outcomes.The idea that citizens have real power marks participation out from the passive idea of consultation, where planners just ask people what they think about a number of options. The benefits of participation are that real learning can take place between people in a locality and planners and developers can make decisions which 93

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support the wellbeing of the community. Much of planning practice should be based on this active idea of participation which suggests ongoing relationships with communities and not simply sticking leaflets through doors every five years. The problem is that no one has quite worked out how participative democracy should fit with representative and direct democracy. Let’s say that a group of a hundred people work hard on a neighbourhood plan in their parish of 1,000 people. They spend two years working on the plan raising the money to pay for the process. They decide to have a community wind turbine. At the referendum, 51% of the wider electorate votes against the plan.That is a positive democratic decision but a nightmare of demoralisation for those who have put in the effort in to participate in shaping the neighbourhood plan. The point is that both direct and representative democracy place a real limit on participative democracy. That can be frustrating, but it also has to be right, whether we like it not. Elected representatives working within the law have to be the final arbiters of decision making. It doesn’t matter how few people turn out to vote in elections or how politicians can be captured by powerful interests, the representative system is our only safeguard against very vocal minorities hijacking local politics. So how on earth can this complex web of ideas help us rebuild trust? The early pioneers like Kropotkin3 and Carpenter4 saw people increasingly taking their own decisions to the point where the national state became insignificant. We appear to be a long way away from that point, but we can make progress by introducing some honesty into the debate. We need to be honest with communities about who has the power to make what decisions. For instance, neighbourhood plans can’t stop a Nuclear power station being built and communities who are concerned might be better off using political activism than the planning process. We need to use participative techniques to their best effect in building long-term relationships between communities and planners through making local and neighbourhood plans. The positive benefits of mutual learning and empowerment are real and all the more effective if politicians are fully part of the process. There are clear examples of communities being squashed by powerful vested interests but there also many examples of real achievement where 94

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communities plan not just for themselves but for future generations. Of course participation is time consuming and can be expensive, but there are no short cuts to rebuilding trust in planning. Planners should also have a central role in mediating and challenging how power operates in decisions. It is not our role to passively observe or even worse, reinforce the exercise of the powerful over the powerless. Neither is it our role to be silent when groups seek to use the planning systems for regressive means. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and planners must challenge assumptions based on prejudice, which lack any evidence, or are just plain illegal in terms of things like race, gender or disability equalities. Planners can do so much more to forge links with communities, from speaking normally to people and not burying them in jargon, to embedding community development skills in what they do.The role of the planner is to break down those professional boundaries between planning and people so that planning is creative, a straightforward tool for building the future of communities. The fact that most people and many politicians no longer have any idea what planning is for or how it is meant to work remains one the greatest barriers to the future, The final component of our democratic model is clear citizen rights in the planning process. There are already some rights that an individual has in law to make objections to development plan policy. In the European Union the Aarhus Convention has set out a framework of rights to information, participation in decisions and legal challenge.5 This is a simple framework but while progress has been made on freedom of information, rights to participate are more vaguely drawn. The right of legal challenge in planning is so prohibitively expensive that it is only open to affluent people and to the private sector. The issue cannot be ducked, however, as a perception of unequal rights will undermine any attempt to rebuild trust. The fact that only developers can appeal planning decisions when they lose continues to give the impression of a system stacked in favour of the private sector. So a new planning process is needed – one which catches the mood for change, in which planning is seen as part of a wider project of reinvigorating local democracy. That means retaining the broad infrastructure – a plan – that can capture local aspirations. It also means a new kind of planning, however, in which boundaries between community knowledge and professional planners are actively 95

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eroded, so people can see the point of planning and planners plan with, and not just for, communities. If we fail to re-establish trust in planning, what is the alternative? People will vote with their feet. Already by the year 2000, 15% of the housing stock in the US was in so-called ‘common interest’ (including gated) communities. In effect, the public planning system has been abandoned in sizable areas of the US, and there are cogent arguments which respond to many of planning’s perceived failings in support of similar private governance solutions here in the UK.

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Building the homes we need For the vastness of the task which seems to frighten some of my friends, represents, in fact, the very measure of its value to the community, if that task be only undertaken in a worthy spirit and with worthy aims. (Ebenezer Howard, 1898)1 We all want a good quality of life for ourselves, our friends and families, and our communities. There are many positive aspects to community life, but we all know of things that could be made better. Part of making that happen is about making sure our communities have decent homes, plenty of green space, good transport, and access to things like cinemas, pubs and sports pitches. This chapter explores how we can go about building and renewing our communities. The scale of Britain’s housing challenge is set out in Chapter 6. It is clear that we urgently need all types of new homes, from family houses with gardens through to apartments. We also need all types of housing tenure, ranging from social housing (subsidised rent), intermediate tenures (such as part rent, part buy schemes) through to high quality homes available for private rent or purchase. Many younger people want to move out of their parents’ homes, particularly in their late twenties and thirties.They want to embark on the first steps of housing independence, whether renting or buying, and many people are looking for somewhere affordable to bring up a family. Many of the older generations are looking to comfortably ‘downsize’, but with the ability to stay in their local community and with enough space for the kids and grandchildren to visit. Ultimately, whether young or old, we all want to live within positive, healthy, vibrant communities. Alongside providing enough homes, we also 97

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need to create jobs and support growth in sustainable locations and bring about a transition to a green economy. We must enhance the natural environment and ensure it is accessible so that we can enjoy it. In solving our housing crisis we must learn from the past and ensure we do not repeat our mistakes. In our desperation to build, we must remember that the decisions we make about the built environment cannot easily be undone. In many areas, a history of badly planned and poor-quality development has resulted in a breakdown of community trust and a lack of local consensus about the need for new development, despite the escalating housing crisis.A lot of people are worried by new housing and development – partly because they feel they have no control over it, but partly because it is often rather ugly. It can also bring new pressures on vital things like roads, schools and health services that may already be overstretched. Understandably there is community resistance to yet more anonymous ‘bolt-on’ housing estates, and councils are often caught in the crossfire between local concerns, private sector ambitions and national requirements. These local disputes, however, rarely focus on either the scale of local housing need or the huge opportunities to both renew our villages, towns and cities and to create beautiful, vibrant and sustainable new communities. In making the case for new development, we often also fail to set out the alternative – that not going for well-planned growth in the face of continuing population increase in parts of Britain will lead to intensifying pressures on councils and communities as they face overcrowding, failing infrastructure and a lack of investment. In other parts of Britain, particularly in our rural communities, a failure to develop will have a different impact, the closure of local pubs, post offices or schools, as people are forced to move out of the area due to a lack of decent, affordable housing. Crucial to creating the conditions for more and better housing is having a new debate, both nationally and in every community, based on honest information about opportunities and constraints.

A new housing supply model The foundation of a new housing supply model must begin with a political acceptance of the acute shortage of homes when compared with both current real needs and future projections of demographic 98

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change. The scale of housing delivery required to meet these needs will require development levels not seen since the 1950s.2 We must also remind ourselves of the profound impact that poor housing has on people’s lives and life-chances. Social housing needs must be met regardless of short-term fluctuations in housing market conditions. Given the scale of the challenge, the direct provision of a high-quality social rented sector would do more than anything to meet the acute needs which currently cause homelessness and overcrowding, as well as substantially increase the affordability of market housing by creating a real choice of tenures. Longer term, we need to look at European-style patterns of tenure, with a well regulated but vibrant private rented sector component.We also need to break down the assumption that housing development is automatically an environmental cost. We now have the technical capability to develop places which can deliver environmental benefits through zero-carbon standards or accompanying green and blue infrastructure, offering multiple biodiversity benefits. A high-quality evidence base is vital in constructing a new housing supply model. Meeting housing needs arising from our growing and ageing population change will require a major expansion in housing provision, but this can be squared with sustainable development only by dealing explicitly with regional inequalities and economic disparities across England.The continued development of the Greater South East will inevitably meet powerful constraints from congestion and resource shortages. The redistribution of these pressures can in part be achieved through looking at the country as a whole and thinking about the future distribution of England’s population. Addressing inequality and the opportunity to think about the bigger picture is explored further in Chapter 10.

Quality versus quantity – a false economy Building the homes the nation needs is not just a numbers game. It is vital we do not sacrifice quality in order to build quickly. We need to ensure new homes are beautifully designed, locally distinctive and sustainable, that means building homes that people want to live in and communities want to have in their neighbourhood for many years to come.

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As Chapter 6 highlights, Britain has the smallest homes in Western Europe. Ensuring new homes have decent space standards has a simple solution, regulation. London is currently the only place in England with minimum size standards for newly built private and social homes. Arguments against space standards are that they will drive up costs however the minimum design standards in London, the most buoyant housing market in Britain, demonstrate that having space standards can work without suppressing development. We need to build beautiful homes. That means celebrating local distinctiveness and, where possible, encouraging new entrants into the housing market, including local builders, self-build projects and co-operatives. The big housebuilding companies in the UK will continue to have an important role to play in meeting our housing need, but we must demand more in terms of design and innovation in building techniques.

21st century Garden Cities and suburbs One of the solutions to the housing crisis draws on the origins and the best of town and country planning, put into a modern context of sustainable communities – Garden Cities and Suburbs for the 21st century. The Garden City ideals were shaped by people who believed that there could be a better, more sustainable and more cooperative way of living. The big achievement of the Garden City movement was to turn idealism into real progress. Development at Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities and at Hampstead Garden Suburb showed it is possible to build attractive places which encourage a better way of living for everyone. They also used new, practical ways of both paying for this progress and giving the community a financial share in the place where they live. The Garden City movement inspired the development of new communities both in the UK, including the postwar New Towns, and abroad. The Garden Cities have stood the test of time and remain highly desirable living and working environments today. The ideals which underpin these communities are more relevant now than ever. It is therefore not surprising that significant momentum has been gained both politically and across the built environment sector on recognising 100

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the potential of the Garden City approach to development over the past couple of years.

Case study 3: Welwyn Garden City Experience shows that a strong vision of high quality and sustainability is essential in delivering places that will stand the test of time and positively influence behaviour and promote healthy lifestyles.

Image courtesy of the TCPA

The vision for Welwyn Garden City was of being able to walk to work in clean airy factories and offices without tedious and time-consuming journeys; housing layouts would ensure a social and demographic mix; and the town would be small enough for everyone to be within walking distance of the centre in one direction and open countryside in the other. At a projected population of some 30,000, with a net density of 12 houses to the acre, Welwyn was to be big enough to support a diverse economic base and various facilities. Ebenezer Howard’s vision was expressed in a masterplan drawn up by Louis de Soissons, who was also the principal architect for Welwyn’s housing. As a result, a strong design character ran throughout the development, which is still largely maintained today.

Image 6: The Garden Cities provide a unique blend of town and country allowing not just access to the natural environment but bringing that environment into the heart of the city. Beautiful tree lined streets in Welwyn Garden City provide space for wildlife, natural shade and clean air.

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Box 4: Garden City principles As set out in the TCPA’s 2013 community guide ‘How good could it be? A guide to building better places’3 Garden Cities are places where: • the community is in control – people have a direct say in planning their future; • the community owns development land and local facilities and gets income from the profits of development and from providing things like energy; • we build beautiful and affordable housing in neighbourhoods imaginatively designed so that the kids can walk to school, and buying a pint of milk means just popping round the corner; • we encourage an exciting nightlife and offer opportunities for people to get involved in the arts and sport; • we encourage mixed and diverse communities for people from all backgrounds; • we can grow our own food, either at home or in a community garden, farm or allotment; • we create fantastic green spaces for people and wildlife; • we create local jobs to reduce the need to travel long distances to work; • we provide plenty of opportunities for safe walking and cycling, supported by convenient public transport.

We believe that well planned new communities, based on the Garden City principles, provide an opportunity to create high-quality inclusive places. By adopting the Garden City approach, there is an opportunity to rebuild trust in the development process, offering people a better quality of life by allowing for the highest sustainability standards, economies of scale, and better use of infrastructure. The Garden City principles set out in Box 4 are a simple list of ways that places can either be created or improved. In each case, they are the result of over a hundred years of people thinking about the future and how they want to live. They are intended to spark people’s imagination about the future – not to suggest that one size fits all.The principles are applicable to different models of large-scale development, including towns, urban extensions, and villages – and the right solution will vary from place to place. The principles can 102

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also be applied to smaller, inner-urban regeneration sites, although opportunities to maximise the benefits of Garden City governance models and land value capture may be fewer for smaller sites.

Housing renewal and investment Meeting the nation’s housing need is as much about revitalising our existing towns and cities as it is about new growth. London and our regional cities have seen a great renaissance over the last 20 years. Economic change has underpinned it, but the job is far from complete. A sustained effort by a vibrant planning and housing movement, linked to the diversity and integration of the population, is essential to ensure that all our urban areas improve the quality of life of their inhabitants. Alongside economic growth, we must refocus planning on reaching the most excluded and vulnerable in our cities and ensure our communities are resilient to climate change. If we want to ensure the long-term success of our cities we need a strong national vision for our urban areas, we need to provide real opportunities for meaningful partnerships at the city-regional level and we need a new focus on area-based approaches to regeneration at the local level. Despite much rhetoric from successive governments about ‘rebalancing the economy’ many of the signals show a reverse trend as explored in Chapter 5 and Chapter 8. It is in the national interest to see growth and renewal supported across the nation and to reduce spatial social and economic inequalities. We are too small an island to do otherwise. So, if we really are committed to re-balancing the economy, a national framework would be an important mechanism. It would help guide national infrastructure investment, setting out the indicative timing, broad location, and scale of key infrastructure projects. It would examine national inequalities, by laying the foundations for a better economic balance between London, the greater South East, and the rest of the country. It would address the challenges arising from population change in different parts of the country, providing strategic guidance on housing needs and demands; and it would inform investment and spending across government, delivering much needed coherence and providing added value to the myriad 103

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of individual and corporate decisions and actions across government and the wider public and private sectors. This is not about top-down imposition. Our towns and cities need the certainty that their strategies, plans and aspirations are reflected in – and underpinned by – a wider framework for England based on the needs of sub-regional (or city-regional) and local economies. Alongside a national plan, there is also a need for a clear urban policy on renewal and for place-based interventions which specifically deal with the multiple problems faced by many communities. It is clear that previous rounds of comprehensive interventions, such as Housing Market Renewal, could themselves have been better integrated with wider local services.4 Government needs to review the value of place-based regeneration with a view to publishing a clear articulation of future urban policy for England. A new model should be at the heart of this new urban policy, drawing together community governance, continuity of approach, broader planning powers and the wider integration of related health, education, policing and local authority powers and institutions. This would essentially result in a new form of area-based planning which seeks to combine planning powers and in particular placebased delivery vehicles, with a much greater sense of social outcomes and community governance. This is not a new concept, but the emphasis and outcomes would be tailored to tackle specifically those areas facing complex social exclusion, where multiple and powerful intervention may be considered necessary. With strong national and local leadership and by refocusing planning legislation, policy and practice, there is an enormous opportunity to promote greater social inclusion and resilience to climate change in our cities which will underpin the economic success of our nation.

Living in a thriving countryside Cherished for its distinctive landscapes and diverse wildlife, rural England is home for over 12 million people and at least half a million businesses. It has a strong recreation economy and is an open-air factory for growing food and providing essential eco-services such as water, flood control, recyclable energy and carbon sinks.

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While many people want to ‘escape to the country’, rural England is facing huge demographic, economic and environmental challenges. Many of the rural challenges are also experienced in our urban centres, such as a chronic affordable housing shortage and adapting and mitigating to climate change.There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution, however, and rural England is itself a diverse place. Therefore, we must recognise the unique challenges and opportunities that our rich and varied countryside offers and through the planning system we must ensure that development – planned and delivered in the right place at the right time – improves quality of life, providing homes and jobs, while protecting and enhancing the countryside and open spaces important to all of us. Rural communities, with their strong traditions and experience of community-led initiatives, have much to gain from housing growth and renewal, provided that it is implemented in a constructive, inclusive and practical way. Indeed, they are in a position to lead the way in showing how a ‘bottom-up’ approach can work. There are demographic, social, economic and environmental challenges facing rural areas, however, which cannot be resolved by local communities alone.These wider challenges, such as meeting the housing needs of a growing and ageing population in our rural communities, needs government to take a longer view and provide bespoke investment and policy support. In order to recognise the opportunities for ensuring the long-term resilience and vibrancy of rural England we need well designed, connected and sustainable development in the countryside, including new Garden Cities. We also need to recognise that rural economies are varied and have great potential for growth. They are relatively well placed to respond flexibly to changes in world markets and growth technologies, provided that the infrastructure is supported and improved, for example, by providing small workplace units, fast broadband and helpful support for home working. Rural planning policies should recognise and facilitate the potential for rural economies to change and grow. Rural areas have a crucial role to play in growing food and providing eco-services in a world facing the threats of climate change. The food security imperative means that future rural policy must support farms in growing food more efficiently while also delivering essential eco-services such as water, drainage and flood 105

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control, renewable energy and carbon sinks (this is explored further in Chapter 13).

Meeting a full range of housing needs Whether we are building new communities or regenerating existing places we must meet the full range of housing needs through a varied housing offer which includes high-quality social, affordable and market homes. Many of the solutions are not new. Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities included co-partnership housing models which provided a unique form of tenure, combining features of a tenant co-operative with a limited dividend company. A section of the masterplan for Welwyn Garden City was given over to self-build plots, which provided some variation in design compared with the predominant designs of architect Louis de Soissons. Self-build plans were passed across de Soissons’ desk and consequently the final designs were not as varied as might have been expected, although the Garden City did achieve a consistency in the narrative of housing design. Self-build (or custom build housing) has been identified as a major tool in the government’s strategy to solve the UK’s housing crisis. While there are good smaller scale examples of self-build in Britain – such as the community-led Ashley Vale self-build project located on a former scaffolding yard in Bristo1 (see Case study 4) – as a nation we currently lag behind those in Europe, where the model is flourishing (see, for example, Case study 5). In the Netherlands, the approach to self-build is not dissimilar to Ashley Vale, but it is on an entirely different scale.The big difference between Ashley Vale and Almere (see Case study 5) is that in Almere the local council took on the lead, planning the area, installing all of the infrastructure including the roads and utilities and ultimately selling the plots. In addition to self-build plots, the full portfolio of community-led housing models (for example co-ownership, co-housing, Community Land Trusts, and co-operatives) could also be considered.As with selfbuild, this is an area in which the UK lags behind the rest of Europe, where community-led housing is well established.These models have the added benefit of the potential to share skills, to co-invest, and to secure jobs and housing for local people. 106

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Case study 4: Ashley Vale self-build project The Ashley Vale self-build project is located on a former scaffolding yard near central Bristol. This community-led project originally came about in response to proposals by a volume house-builder to build 35 ‘identical houses’.5 Local people wanted to avoid this type of generic house-building and formed an action group to try to influence the process and to help local people build their own homes. The group of local residents formed the Ashley Vale Action Group (AVAG), a non-profit company limited by guarantee, and in 2001 they successfully purchased the Ashley Vale site. The formation of the company was beneficial to the landowners as they were able to deal with a single body rather than a collection of self-builders. A total of 41 homes had been created by 2011 comprising 20 self-build plots, six self-finish bungalows, six self-finish flats, three work units, a community room, a communal garden, and a communal recycling facility. Affordability was an important factor in the success of the project and the majority of the self builders were first time buyers. Plots cost between £30,000 and £45,000 (secured by a 10% deposit) and with typical build costs of between £35,000 and £100,000 – resulting in an average build cost of £500 per square metre. The approach in Ashley Vale has addressed the three pillars of sustainability: economically the homes are affordable and the project brought a disused site back into use; environmentally the homes have high standards of insulation, there are solar panels and a community pellet boiler for the six flats; and socially the self builders have built a community along with their homes, providing support and advice for one another.

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Case study 5: Self build in Almere, the Netherlands Located to the south west of Almere city centre, on land reclaimed from the sea in the 1950s, this new community is an innovative experiment of large-scale self-build (occupying 100 hectares).6 It demonstrates what is achievable by planning at scale. By early 2012 around 1,000 self-build homes have been built, and 3,000 more are planned. The new community has been comprehensively masterplanned by the local council, which has have provided all of the infrastructure, including the roads and utilities. This is self-build on a large-scale with different districts including terraced areas, canal side homes, homes with large gardens, areas for living and work and an area specifically for housing developers who build apartments blocks for collectives of people. Despite experiencing a depressed housing market in the Netherlands, the Almere self-build project has continued to progress; it has managed to ride the constrained financial climate more successfully than conventional private market housing.

Image courtesy of the TCPA

The community in Almere continues to grow and at this stage the lessons of this large-scale self-build project are not yet known. What is clear, though, is that the diverse self-build housing options available have attracted a wide mix of people, from teenagers to pensioners.

Image 7: Self-build in Almere, the Netherlands, where the local council has had a leading role in planning the area, installing the infrastructure including the roads and utilities and selling the plots to individuals and collectives.

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Providing a resilient and low-carbon future ‘I am a firm believer that climate change is real, that it is impacted by human behavior and carbon emissions... And as a consequence, I think we’ve got an obligation to future generations to do something about it.’ (US President Barack Obama, 2012)1

Economic and social opportunities in a low carbon society We cannot eliminate the impacts of climate change, but we can invest now in mitigation and adaptation to reduce the risks we face and limit human suffering. Taking strong, bold steps to address and adapt to climate change need not invite economic gloom or widen inequality. In fact, the opposite is true. With the right leadership, policies and renewable energy technologies, we have the ability to radically reduce carbon dioxide emissions, promote green growth, improve energy efficiency and create more resilient communities in a socially equitable way. We understand that politicians and policy makers often feel caught between conflicting goals when taking measures to tackle climate change. The economy is often played off against the environment, particularly in the media, but they are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, we have all seen journalists interviewing politicians in flooded homes knee-deep in water saying that ‘we must take urgent action on climate change’. On the other hand we see the same politicians being interviewed in the TV News studios saying that taking action on climate change will create higher energy costs,

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slow economic growth and lower standards of living. In fact, with the right approach, the reverse is true. The good news for communities, councils and businesses in Britain is that we have an extraordinary renewable energy resource.

A new energy mix In Britain we have relied on large, centralised fossil-fuelled power stations to provide our energy for generations. According to government figures, coal produced 39% of the UK’s electricity in 2012.2 This is not just bad for climate change in terms of emissions, but it also makes us geopolitically vulnerable as we are increasingly importing fuel. Our long-term energy security is a fundamental reason to diversify our sources of power. In addition, over a third of our current energy generation capacity is set to retire over the next 20 years and therefore we need to start planning for new energy generation now. With an abundance of natural resources – wave, wind, hydro and solar – Britain has a ready-made solution: renewable energy.We have over 11,000 miles of coastline and are the windiest country in Europe. Scotland has been leading the way in Britain with 29.8% of electricity generated by renewables in 2012 compared to only 8.2% in England, while in Wales and Northern Ireland renewables accounted for 8.7% and 15.9% respectively.3  The Scottish government has committed to 100% of the country’s electricity to be generated by renewable energy by 2020, with half of electricity used to come from renewable sources by 2015. While improving energy efficiency is a relatively easy sell – in addition to reducing emissions it saves on energy bills and improves energy security – renewable energy and other low carbon options are more contentious. For example, fierce opposition to onshore windfarms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland are holding back progress, as the figures show. The slow uptake of renewable energy has also been hindered by insufficient funding for research and development of new technologies, an inconsistent policy framework, a need to transform the electricity transmission network and a lack of opportunity for communities to meaningfully reap the benefits. Scotland’s embrace of renewable energy, on the other hand,

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demonstrates the benefits of political commitment to tackling climate change with a clear delivery framework based on robust evidence.

Political leadership and recognition Climate change is, by a considerable order of magnitude, the biggest threat to Britain’s future in the 21st century and politicians must stop squabbling about the need to act. We are confronted by a scientific reality that carbon emissions are rising faster than anticipated and that impacts are likely, therefore, to be more severe than even the current high emission scenarios projected. Our current policy responses have some merits, particularly the Climate Change Act 2008, but high level policy lacks a national expression (there is no national plan), and localised policy lacks appropriate coordination and scale. To succeed under a changing climate, individuals, organisations and governments will have to make significant changes to both policy and practice. Through international, European, national, regional and local policy there must be clear consensus on the need for mitigation and adaptation. Government must address this head-on to ensure we have long-term effective action. Fairness and justice must be at the heart of the debate about ways forward, alongside an acknowledgement of the need for risk-taking and innovation. There is also the urgent need and a major benefit to growth in making clear decisions about the future of national infrastructure priorities so business can properly plan for investment.  Of course there are technical challenges, like transforming the electricity network, but we have world class engineering capability in Britain. The investment needed to re-engineer the national grid – for example to link up on- and offshore wind farms – will be delivered if government provides long-term certainty about Britain’s future energy mix and consistent fiscal support for renewable energy technologies. Around 80% of UK carbon dioxide emissions are produced as a result of locally based activities, such as heating and powering our houses and local transport, and therefore local action is an essential part of the solution. We need our politicians to provide the policy and financial support the gravity that the climate change challenge presents. Anthony Giddens’ book, The politics of climate change highlights how problems 111

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related to individuals’ and governments’ immediate experience of climate change – such as heatwaves, drought, flooding, and storms – are now making it more likely that climate change impacts will be taken seriously and attract active policy interest.4 For example, the 2003 European heatwave and Hurricane Katrina made a significant impact on the governments and citizens of developed countries, owing to public concern sparked off by these ‘close to home’ climate-related disasters. Only a small percentage of the people in developed countries, like the US or UK, agree with the statement ‘My life is directly affected by global warming and climate change’, but, nevertheless, political momentum is growing in response to the need to adapt to a changing climate.5 We must build on this urgently and not wait until the flood water is lapping at the door before politicians and policy-makers take a long-term approach.

The pivotal role of planning Planning can make a major contribution to tackling climate change by shaping decisions which reduce carbon emissions and positively build community resilience. Planning is the pivotal delivery framework for energy demand reduction and renewable energy and for addressing problems such as extreme temperatures and flood risk. It has the potential to get the right development in the right place, in a fair and transparent way. This process can play an important role in behavioural change by influencing, for example, travel patterns. As the case study of the Vauban neighbourhood in Freiburg, Germany, demonstrates (Case study 9) planning can – with the right corporate and political support – be part of the solution to the climate challenge. Councils have a responsibility to help to secure progress on meeting Britain’s emissions reduction targets, which are set at the European and national level, through direct influence on energy use and emissions. They can do this by encouraging energy efficiency and renewable energy and by bringing others together and encouraging co-ordinated local action. As the Planning and Climate Change Coalition guide for councils sets out, a ... key part of any local authority strategy to encourage economic recovery and improve energy security should 112

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be to help to reduce the costs of buying in energy – by identifying renewable and local sources of energy, and also by reducing the amount of energy used. Planning can also give local communities real opportunities to take action on climate change by encouraging community-based development and active participation in plan-making, and by helping them to reap the rewards of green development.6 So while national policy needs to set the framework and provide a strong direction of travel, it is at the local level, through plan-making and development management, that councils and communities can make a real difference in supporting the transition to a low-carbon future. Councils, working with communities, can help to shape places with greater resilience to the impacts of climate change. Increased resilience will reduce future costs both for businesses and for households.7

A new localised energy market Energy is now a global political issue with security of supply and fuel poverty dominant concern for all nations. England’s energy market is dominated by six major international companies and their supply of energy has proved to be a highly profitable enterprise. Energy prices have risen steeply in recent years partly because of tariffs for renewables but mainly because of increased wholesale prices of fossil fuels. As we reach peak oil, prices will only increase impacts, particularly on those least able to pay. Public debate has focused on removing the very tariffs we need to transform our energy supply to low carbon sources rather than looking for examples which can stabilise prices and keep energy profits in the local economy.8 Seizing the opportunity of decentralised renewable energy generation can also provide new income streams for communities and councils; a particularly welcome source of revenue in an era of local government budget cuts. Re-municipalising energy generation and supply is becoming increasingly common across mainland Europe and it is a significant opportunity for councils in Britain (see Case study 6). 113

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Case study 6: Re-municipalising energy from Birmingham to Hamburg Almost all of the energy generation plants and electricity transmission networks in British cities were built by local councils in the prewar era. Birmingham is perhaps the best example of this municipal entrepreneurship. Energy generation and distribution were nationalised after the war and energy supply and distribution ceased to have any local connection with people’s lives. Upon privatisation in the 1980s, the whole system was placed in the hands of multinational companies. Many European countries followed a similar path, but in Germany not only have some cities retained their ownership of key utilities but there are signs of strong desire by communities to own their own energy companies. In late 2013, the population of Hamburg, Germany’s second biggest city, voted to buy back the energy grid in their Hanseatic city. German federal law requires that municipal authorities invite bids from new companies, including communities, who wish to run the local grid once the fixed term 20-year contracts come to an end. The population voted to re-communalise electricity, gas and district heating networks which are currently in the hands of multinational energy companies. The scale of transformation in Germany is truly dramatic. Since 2007 there have been about 170 municipalities which bought back the grid from private companies. Cities such as Frankfurt and Munich who kept their energy companies in public hands are now showing healthy profits while also having 100% renewable energy targets. It is significant that over 50% of total investments in renewable energy come from private individuals and farmers. Germany now has 650 energy cooperatives. Much of this remarkable transition was driven by the right support; with a feed-in tariff every citizen, community and region is able to profit from investments in renewable energy. The energy transition thus adds local value in terms of socioeconomic development on the local level. This form of true participation leads to acceptance – and acceptance leads to investments. The great benefit is that profits are now internalised in local economies rather than leaking out to international corporations.

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The citizens of Hamburg were also driven by the motivation to spur local development. As the current energy grid operators are multinational companies, profits were leaking out of northern Germany. Under democratic control, citizens will have greater powers to keep the socioeconomic value in the region. Munich is another example of the success of municipally owned energy. The Cities Utility company made profits of over 200 million Euros in 2012 while sales increased 13% to 4.5 billion Euros. By 2014, Munich will produce renewable power to meet the needs of all the city’s households and its public transport system, or 40% of total consumption in a city dominated by heavy industry. It does this partly by investing billions of Euros in renewables projects all over Europe.9

By securing the benefits of energy generation locally – through energy service companies (often called ESCos) and community cooperatives – it is possible to have a new debate about the merits of both energy efficiency and renewable energy solutions. ESCos can provide a broad range of energy solutions, including designs and implementation of energy savings projects, retrofitting, energy conservation, energy infrastructure outsourcing, power generation and energy supply, and project management. Councils from Aberdeen to Southampton and Woking have successfully demonstrated how to establish ESCos which have levered in long term investment in decentralised energy projects such as district heating (see Case study 7) Council run ESCos are certainly not a new idea. Local authorities have pioneered decentralised municipal energy generation for over a century. In 1898, the same year Ebenezer Howards published his groundbreaking blue-print for Garden Cities, the Bloom Street power station in central Manchester opened. It operated for almost a century (see Case study 8). Communities can be empowered to secure radical cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by helping shape new development. By considering the location and layout of new development, the highest energy efficiency and sustainability standards can be incorporated through the use of decentralised energy; creating allotments to grow food locally; reducing the need to travel, particularly by private car; and ensuring most trips are made by walking, cycling or public transport. 115

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Case study 7: Woking Borough Council – Thameswey Energy In 1999, Woking Borough Council established an energy and environmental services company under the trading name, Thameswey. As a core part of delivering carbon reduction targets, set out in the Council’s ambitious Climate Change Strategy, Thameswey provides effective solutions across both public and private sectors. In 2001, Thameswey built its first combined heat and power energy centre supplying both electricity and heat to its civic offices and surrounding businesses within Woking’s town centre. The Woking town energy centre is an Energy Services Company which is 90% owned by Thameswey and 10% owned by a Danish company which specialises in operating decentralised energy stations. Thameswey Energy have also delivered a range of other projects, including a solar photovoltaic system at a local residential home and a fuel cell combined heat and power (CHP) project in Woking’s Pools in the Park. They are also creating an energy centre based in Central Milton Keynes connecting to a range of developments.

Case study 8: Bloom Street power station, Manchester Bloom Street power station in Manchester was the most advanced power station of its kind in the country at the time it opened in 1898. Developed by the Manchester Corporation, it powered the city’s trams and street lights and was powered by coal brought into the city along the Rochdale Canal.10 The Manchester Corporation continued to innovate, recognising that the waste heat from the power station could be a valuable resource for local businesses, and in 1911 Bloom Street became the first power station in Britain to introduce Combined Heat and Power (CHP). Through a network of underground pipes, Bloom Street supplied low pressure steam to local textile businesses and entertainment venues such as the Ritz Ballroom and the Palace Theatre. It was operational for almost a century, closing in 1989 due to consumers switching to conventional boilers, rendering the station uneconomical. 116

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By taking an area-based approach, whether planning a new community or considering regeneration opportunities for an existing neighbourhood, low and zero carbon solutions can be designed at scale. An advantage of this approach is that combined solutions can be developed, rather than each building being considered in isolation. Local facilities, such as schools, community and commercial buildings, and public and green spaces, can provide economies of scale when installing low and zero carbon technologies. In order to seize the opportunity, planning and design process needs to become carbon aware so that there is a clear understanding of the relationship between development decisions, energy use and carbon emissions.11 Planning and place shaping can help ensure that new development minimises vulnerability and provides resilience to impacts arising from climate change. Planning is also about ensuring that local communities are given real opportunities to take positive action on climate change, in particular by encouraging community-led initiatives to reduce energy use and deliver renewable and low carbon energy.There is a huge opportunity for co-operatively-owned energy generation in Britain. For example, in 1997 the first co-operativelyowned wind turbines, located in Cumbria, became operational and since then, over 7,000 individuals have invested more than £16 million into community-owned wind turbines.12 It is worth emphasising that these measures simultaneously achieve other social objectives. For example, increased public transport use and safe cycling options are good for breaking down boundaries between local neighbourhoods and enhancing mobility for young people, and local food sourcing can provide an opportunity for community engagement and healthier lifestyles. The Freiburg case study (see Case study 9) illustrates how the sustainable transport strategy for the neighbourhood of Vauban underpins wider objectives. Through taking a car-free approach to the new community, a raft of other objectives are met, the streets are more sociable as children are safe to play, lower car dependency and safe cycle routes encourage exercise and reduce carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions; and the infrastructure is more robust in the face of climate change with green routes and permeable surfaces to prevent flooding in the winter and to provide shade and cooling in the summer.

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Case study 9: Car-free development in Freiburg, Germany The neighbourhood of Vauban in Freiburg was planned as Europe’s largest ‘car-free’ development. In the 1970s the historic centre of the city was pedestrianised and over the following decades a network of cycle routes was developed. On-street parking is very limited in central areas, so those arriving by car are required to pay to use public car parks. Combined with an extensive regional public transport system of integrated light rail and bus services, there is little need or incentive to own a car in Freiburg (see Image 8). The neighbourhood of Vauban began in the 1980s and the final population is expected to be around 5,500 in 2,000 new homes. Reducing the need to travel is an important aspect of the development which is mostly small apartment blocks. The ethos of the residential areas is that the pedestrian comes first and cars must therefore drive at a walking pace with car access only permitted for deliveries. There are lots of local amenities such as schools, nurseries, small shops and businesses, all within walking distance of the homes and while some residents work within the neighbourhood, many work outside, travelling by public transport or cycling. Freiburg has an extensive cycle route network made up of a mix of cycle lanes on roads, traffic calmed streets and some off-road cycle tracks. At the main railway station there is space for 1,000 bikes in the cycle park. When moving to Vauban, many residents gave up their cars for two reasons. Firstly, the council helped incentivise residents to join the car club brokering a deal with transport operators for a free family travel pass for households that gave up a private car. Many of the 2,500 members of Freiburg’s car-sharing club live in Vauban. Secondly, residents of Vauban who own cars are required to contribute to the cost of infrastructure that the car uses (car parking and roads) which works out at around £12,500 plus a monthly management fee.13 The combination of parking restrictions and pedestrian friendly streets means that children playing and cycling in the streets in Freiburg is a common sight (see Image 9).

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Image courtesy of the TCPA

Image 8: Freiburg in Germany has an extensive tram system, many of which travel along green corridors, and a cycle route network made up of a mix of cycle lanes on roads, traffic calmed streets and some off-road cycle tracks.

Image 9: The car-free approach in Vauban in Freiburg, Germany, has resulted in more sociable streets as children are safe to play, as well as promoting exercise and reducing carbon dioxide (CO2 ) emissions.

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Children playing hopscotch with chalk and riding bikes in the streets of our towns was a common sight in Britain until the 1980s when it started to decline. There is a positive trend to reintroduce ‘play streets’, however, where roads are closed to traffic for up to three hours a week to allow children to play safely.14 Playing Out, a not-for-profit information and advice resource, is driving forward new ‘play streets’ to help increase children’s safe access to informal play in residential streets.15 Playing Out has helped residents ask councils to designate new ‘play streets’ and so far 24 councils have signed up in Bristol, Brighton, Hertfordshire, Oxford, Reading, Sussex and Norwich. Not only are ‘play streets’ a positive way of providing health and social benefits for children, they are driven by parents and neighbours who then steward the street closures which helps foster community cohesion and a sense of belonging.

Building resilience Much of the discussion around climate change is about reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but preparing for the effects of climate change is just as important. Some degree of climate change is already inevitable, and it is likely to have a range of impacts, including hotter summers and increased risk of flooding or droughts. These effects can have devastating consequences, as seen in the floods in Cumbria in 2009 and in Gloucestershire in 2007. The sea, the weather and wildlife do not respect local authority boundaries and therefore we need a coordinated approach to climate resilience at the national and sub-national level. For example, low lying countries such as the Netherlands have fought back the sea for centuries and thrived. Management of water in the Netherlands is based on meticulous study and hard science with flood prevention measures, such as dykes along rivers, planned to such a robust degree that the Dutch are putting offices and shops on top of them.16 We need to make the economic case for climate change adaptation. The European Commission estimates that each euro spent on flood protection could save six euros in damage costs.17 We need to positively build community resilience to the impacts of climate change. Green infrastructure – parks, allotments, gardens, drainage systems and green roofs – have a role to play in bringing together crucial considerations of biodiversity, heat, water, healthy 120

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living and transport needs to create environments in which people will want to live and work in the future. Parks are important not only for climate change adaptation, but also for health and wellbeing – a park acts as a reservoir for storm water, a shelter from the sun, and a place in which to take exercise.A study by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), however, found that public parks and green spaces are chronically undervalued in England.18 According to the CABE report, because of a combination of historic cost accounting and depreciation, most councils in England assign their public parks a notional asset value of just £1 each, making them financially invisible and leading to repeated under-investment. In reality, a single park’s physical assets – excluding land value – can have a value well over £100 million and can offer huge environmental benefits. In a changing climate, the role of parks has never been more important.

Improving the building stock We also need to think about the quality of our existing homes. The UK’s building stock, which is being replaced at a rate of 1% every year, represents a big challenge in the fight against climate change and social objectives, such as fuel poverty. When it comes to building new homes it is time we thought differently. Cooler countries such as the UK have traditionally focused primarily on securing winter warmth.As the climate changes, however, it is likely that we will find our urban areas less suited to the emerging new climate. Risks – high temperatures, flooding, threats to water resources and quality, and unstable ground conditions – must be planned for and adapted to, ensuring that sustainable housing growth and regeneration is founded on the best environmental data and built to the highest standards. Many of the measures are low-tech and publicly popular as they save on energy bills and improve the quality of our environment, for example installing loft insulation, using more energy efficient household appliances, re-introducing parks into urban areas, and making car park surfaces permeable. Malmö in Sweden has prioritised climate change adaptation measures in both the regeneration of existing neighbourhoods and new developments, which has had multiple social benefits as a consequence (see Case study 10). 121

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Case study 10: Malmö, Sweden The City of Malmö was a partner in the EU funded TCPA-led project called GRaBS (Green and Blue Space Adaptation for Urban Areas and Eco-towns) which provided valuable opportunities for council officers and politicians from across eight EU member states to learn from each other through study visits. Visiting developments at Augustenborg and Bo01 and Western Habour was inspiring and provided practical transferable lessons.19 Augustenborg, once a run-down 1950s neighbourhood, has been redeveloped and reenergised as an ecologically, socially and economically sustainable quarter, with climate change adaptation playing a key role. Green and blue spaces have been incorporated into the regeneration plans to address issues such as surface water flooding (fluvial flooding) due to increased rainfall intensity. With extensive community participation, innovative new surface water systems, green roofs, gardens and recreation areas have been a regeneration catalyst for the area.20 (see Image 10). Malmö’s Bo01 and Western Harbour areas demonstrate how an old industrial estate and docklands can be transformed by collaborative, highquality urban design into leading national and international examples of environmental city living. The Bo01 district is supplied by 100% locally generated renewable energy and offers a low-carbon lifestyle with excellent public transport and cycling facilities and an ecological playground (see Image 11). Malmö’s experience highlights how sustainability is not just about environmental infrastructure: Malmö has transformed itself from an industrial city to a knowledge-based city, with a university of 20,000 students (the eighth largest in Sweden). As Augustenborg and the Western Harbour illustrate, there has also been a strong focus on social sustainability, with parks designed to act as a focal meeting point for all, in both regeneration projects and new developments.

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Image courtesy of the TCPA

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Image courtesy of the TCPA

Image 10: Augustenborg in Malmö, Sweden, once a run-down 1950s neighbourhood, has been redeveloped and reenergised as an ecologically, socially and economically sustainable quarter, with climate change adaptation playing a key role.

Image 11: The Western Harbour area of Malmö in Sweden demonstrates how an old industrial estate and docklands can be transformed by collaborative, high-quality urban design, into a leading international example of environmental city living.

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Paying for utopia Roads are made, streets are made, railway services are improved, electric light turns night into day, electric trams glide swiftly to and fro, water is brought from reservoirs a hundred miles off in the mountains – and all the while the landlord sits still. Every one of those improvements is effected by the labour and cost of other people. Many of the most important are effected at the cost of the municipality and of the ratepayers. To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is sensibly enhanced. He renders no service to the community, he contributes nothing to the general welfare; he contributes nothing even to the process from which his own enrichment is derived….And all the while the land monopolist has only to sit still and watch complacently his property multiplying in value, sometimes manifold, without either effort or contribution on his part. And that is justice! (Winston Churchill, 1909) 1 While there will be many counterarguments about the need for a better society, the most devastating is that it is simply unaffordable. Yes, it would be nice to live in inclusive and resilient places, but our economy simply cannot afford the cost. The truth is just the opposite. Many of the measures in relation to housing and climate change have real long-term cost savings both in terms of people’s health and well being and in terms of the cost of damage caused by extreme weather. Building highly adaptable housing for older people means that they can remain independent for longer, with cost saving 125

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to tax payers. Building municipal and community renewable and low carbon energy schemes can provide valuable new income streams in addition to reducing carbon emissions, helping alleviate fuel poverty, and improving the nation’s energy security. Building resilient communities means that cost of flooding in terms of insurance will fall. Indeed future investment in land will be defined largely by its resilience to climate change. One of the most obvious failings of our current speculative development model is its inability to account for these benefits in assessing the viability of development schemes.Viability is now seen only in very limited terms and in relation to short-term profits for the private sector. As a result, the development industry has been successful in removing or down grading requirements for things like affordable housing. In practice, this shifts the cost of the real unmet need for social housing from the private to the public sector balance sheet to be met through the cost of, for example, housing the homeless in temporary accommodation. Even if this kind of short-termism were transformed, however, it would not provide an immediate or sufficient source of investment. The good news is that there is a solution.The positive and tangible source of paying for utopia is capturing the value of land for the community. In Part One of this book we set out that land is the source of all primary wealth and the uneven distribution of land and profits of land is a major source of global inequality. We also noted that there has been a debate for 500 years in Britain about land and freedom and efforts for the fair distribution of land. Whatever our doubts about the legitimacy of landownership, however, the debate now is not about any crude notion of nationalising land but on fair forms of distribution of the profits from land. This was the heart of Howard’s project in developing the Garden Cities, and in outline the model works like this: land is bought from the landowner at its existing use value. The land is then developed for a new community raising the asset value of the land from existing use, for example from farm land, to its use for housing and commerce. As the infrastructure for the site is developed the land becomes more valuable. The sale of land plus the income from rents and leases of the newly built homes and facilities provides both capital assets and ongoing income streams which can both repay the debts for financing 126

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such development and provide a long-term income. This is in stark contrast to the prevalent development process where increased land values, which result from the grant of planning permission or benefits from the public provision of infrastructure, accrue to landowners and developers as a form of betterment. Long-term loans at low interest rates, known as ‘patient investment’ are required, because increased land values are realised only once development is underway.These longer term loans are an integral part of the new towns model. Land value capture allows for repayment of the loans and the recycling of values into future community wellbeing. The capturing of land values allows for development and growth of new communities to be partly or wholly self-financing. It is also worth remembering that whatever we build in the future will require finance so this is not about whether we spend or not, but how cost effective that spend is and how different financial models result in radically different outcomes for people. Before exploring how land value capture has worked in the past, it is worth noting how Britain’s speculative development operates now. At its core, the current development model is a speculative one, with landowners, developers, local authorities and consumers all playing key roles. For the landowner, the name of the game is to secure as much speculative value, over and above current use value, as is possible. The ultimate expression of this is when planning permission for housing is granted which massively increases the landowner’s asset values without any development taking place. The scale of the gap in land prices between current use value and housing was estimated in 2010 during the depths of recession to be £15,400 a hectare for agricultural land and £1.75 million for land with planning permission. These figures excluded London.2 We have already established that these values do not belong to the landowner because they result from the grant of rights (the right to develop) which are owned by the state.Very often developers will buy or option land and they will take the risk or gain planning permission, and consequently the landowner will receive less of the final value but take less risk. At the same time, developers who successfully secure planning consent will also capture an aspect of the land value; again, this value is created by the state. It is important to note that some of these values are already taxed through section 106 requirements or 127

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Community Infrastructure Levy.These are locally decided charges on the developer but the level of the charge is influenced by how much developers will pay for land, and can depress land values. Both policies have to pass through the viability test, and this can be problematic where developers have paid high prices for land. In areas of high demand, the value involved can be extraordinary. Once land is granted planning permission, developers operate on a basic residual valuation model, setting costs against income to determine the financial viability of a site. It is this viability test which is now written in English planning policy and means that the local community can require no policy or outcomes that compromise viability.The outcome of this has been a drastic effect on the supply of affordable homes. A 2013 study by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that ‘60% of the biggest housing developments currently in the planning system are falling short of local affordable housing targets.’3 In Britain the private sector has over the last 30 years been required to build some affordable homes alongside the high value homes for sale. Normally this was around 30%. In the economic downturn private sector developers lobbied government to remove these requirements because they unduly affect their viability. They have also lobbied to have other environmental standards removed based on the problem of viability. It must, as politicians often say, be common sense that it is better to have some building than none at all, but that fails to get behind what viability in the speculative model actually means. For starters, we know that landowners are receiving payments for rights and values (betterment) they do not own, and this cost falls on the development process and skews viability.The comparison of how land costs affect housing in new towns and our current speculative delivery model is stark. The proportion of the cost of a new home under our current development model made up by land can be as high as 40% of the final cost whereas the land costs were only 1% in the new town of Milton Keynes.4 This allows for the delivery of social housing at lower costs or the capture of greater asset values for the community. We also know that residual valuation changes depending on the profits margin that developers decide are core to their business model. This margin has reach around 20% of build cost for some the largest house builders in England. If returns were 10%, then overall viability 128

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would change and a good deal more affordable homes could be built. The point is that viability is discussed as if it is the product of unchallengeable economic law when key factors of the production of houses, like land, and key assumptions, like profit margins, are subject to choice which, in the case of the cost and availability of land, are open to political change. Comparisons with Europe, discussed below, are useful here because unlike the British model, developers can have a long term interest in the quality of the property they build. Because of the active role of public sector in de-risking development the private sector can trade lower returns for much higher commercial certainty.

Lessons from history Founded over a century ago in 1903, Letchworth Garden City provides one the best examples of whether land value capture can work over the long term. It illustrates the highs and lows of land value capture which has always been at the heart of the utopian tradition. The most important lesson is that as a non state-led development, seeking long-term investors, Letchworth struggled to develop at the pace which Howard had anticipated. This undercapitalisation in turn led to much longer pay back terms than expected. As a private undertaking rather than any part of government policy, Letchworth did not benefit from any coordinated financial or wider policy support. The town also suffered by what might be summarised as hostile takeover bids by those seeking to change the objectives of the Garden City and seek faster speculative returns. In the 1960s, new legislation allowed for leasehold housing to be bought by the tenants, reducing the long-term revenues available for reinvestment in the community. Despite all this, Letchworth is still able to use its commercial assets derived from land value capture. Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, an industrial and providential society, holds assets of around £130 million. Each year the Heritage Foundation reinvests millions of pounds in social activities from regeneration to health and culture, costs which would otherwise to some extent have fallen on the public purse. For example, in 2011 the Heritage Foundation reinvested over £3.3 million which helped support the local art deco cinema, a new community hub and a day hospital, among many 129

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other activities.5 This provides a valuable and distinctive mutualised approach to development and management of new communities which, despite real challenges, has led to one the most successful places in the UK today.

The New Towns The New Towns did not take forward all aspects of the Garden City principles and have been much criticised for aspects of their design. They did, however, deliver homes on a grand scale in self-sustaining communities rather than suburban sprawl. Unlike Letchworth they were backed by government finances and could deliver growth at what now seems like extraordinary speed. There were three phases of New Towns over the 25 year length of the programme and there is significant difference between each phase. Broadly, the first phase of post war New Towns, like Harlow and Stevenage, were financially very successful while the final phase, including Milton Keynes, suffered both from more challenging macro-economic circumstances and from the forced sale of their assets.

Financing New Towns New Towns were financed by 60-year fixed rate loans from central government. These loans were secured by HM Treasury on the money markets and passed on at the same rate of interest to the Development Corporation who built the towns. Development Corporations had very strong planning powers and could compulsory-purchase land and commission development.6 During the 1950s, the first generation of New Towns paid low interests rates of around 3%. By the early 1970s, however, much higher interest rates (16%) were affecting the financial performance of New Towns. For the first New Towns, land was bought by each Development Corporation at near existing use values (normally agricultural price levels fixed at 1939 prices), and which provided the New Towns with the financial as well as physical foundations for subsequent development. Infrastructure had to be installed in advance of the housing and so New Town construction required significant finance over the long term. As development took place, however, the asset value of the town increased dramatically and incomes from sales and 130

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rents allowed the debt to be paid off.The surpluses generated by the more financially successful first generation of New Towns were used in a variety of ways. Harlow became a significant lender of money, for example to the Thames Water Authority, and so generated further significant sums in interest payments. As a result of these growing surpluses, Harlow, Bracknell and Stevenage were all required to pay their loans back early to the Treasury in 1975. The New Towns were not solely state financed. Private sector developers were also drawn in by special deals from the Development Corporations to attract retail traders, for example, through rentfree periods. The rents were later converted into commercial rates. Some retail centres were later sold off to private companies but the public sector played an important role in providing initial infrastructure, which acted as a means of encouraging confidence in the development, giving credibility to the development, and reducing perceived risk. The financial fate of the later New Towns was more mixed. Development Corporations were stuck with expensive and inflexible loans from government and were not allowed to borrow from the private sector on other terms. In addition by 1981, new government policy was forcing the early sale of New Town assets to the private sector before they had reached the full value. As a result, New Towns like Milton Keynes ran up significant debts.7 The Treasury then wrote off part of the debt early, incurring additional penalty payments of £65 million, but effectively closing the account 40 years before the loans expired.The only analogy which comes close is a bank forcing you to pay back your entire mortgage cost half way through your term and then charging you a penalty fee for early repayment. Some of the remaining New Town assets ended up with the government-backed Homes and Communities Agency. These were valued at £1billion in 1997 and have gone on yielding income into departmental budgets for other programmes. HM Treasury never evaluated these income streams which would have serviced the loans over the full period and therefore saved substantial penalty payments.

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Paying for ongoing maintenance With the winding up of Development Corporations and the disposal of their assets, responsibility for the ongoing maintenance fell to the local authority. The Development Corporations were encouraged to transfer ‘community related assets’ to the relevant local authorities, or to another approved successor body, such as a charity, for example, the Parks Trust in Milton Keynes. These assets included parks and open spaces, meeting halls, and sports facilities. As community related assets, they tended to be non-profit making, so the transfer was normally accompanied by an endowment of cash or incomeproducing assets, sufficient to maintain the asset indefinitely.8 This was not enough to deal with the special regeneration needs of many New Towns, which is because they were built in one go over a short period, all of their built environment wears out at the same time. A report to the House of Commons Transport, Local Government and the Regions Committee (2002) highlighted the growing problem of the obsolescent infrastructure, and that a significant policy change is needed to tackle issues of run-down public facilities, deteriorated public spaces and ageing housing estates.9 The Letchworth model demonstrates the value of retaining some long-term assets to supplement the local tax base for the renewal of new settlements. Despite the complex financial performance in the later generations of New Towns, the research to date suggests that overall, they were outstanding value for the money.10 The basic financial figures, as the Reith Committee pointed out, must be read in the context that government would have incurred costs in whatever growth option it decided to back. So the issue becomes not whether such schemes can be wholly self-financing (although the mark one New Towns appear to have got close to this aspiration), but the cost effectiveness of differing options for housing. On this point the literature is quite clear that the New Towns programme offered the most cost effective option by building in effective long-term betterment and land value capture. Finally, and most important of all, no one has ever attempted to assess the wider economic values, in terms of jobs, homes and economics activity which the new towns generated. The overall lesson is really important that when you can buy land at current use 132

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value and with low and stable interest rates, new and renewed places can pay for themselves.

Updating the financial model for new settlements Land value capture remains our best prospect for building utopia and combines the best of the Garden City tradition which means assets in trust for the community and the drive for 21st century New Towns, backed by government. This could yield truly stunning results. The key components of this model would be strong public sector leadership creating certainty about the prospects for new and renewed communities. Using a modernised form of Development Corporation to do this work allows for effective delivery. Crucially, you need either a local authority or Development Corporation with power to compulsory purchase land as a last resort. Up front public finance would be essential. Unlike a piecemeal speculative approach, however, the use of a Development Corporation allows for much greater investor certainty over a longer period and so allows for the greater prospect of long-term institutional investment. This kind of investment has been identified for many years but requires, in return for lower rates of return, a level of security of delivery which only a long-term public authority can provide. This raises the prospect that the loans vital for growth to take place could be secured from the private sector.This is not to say that some measure of upfront public sector loans is not key to generating investor confidence, but that, unlike the New Town programme, new communities of the future could seek finance from a variety of private institutional investors capitalising on the political stability which the UK offers. The Dutch model in Box 5 describes the possibilities of this approach, but many European nations have other effective forms of harnessing land value capture.

Can this work for existing places? Capturing land values works best in new settlement and comprehensive redevelopment of existing places, where Development Corporations are being used for regeneration. There is no doubt that financing smaller regeneration schemes is a more complex process, but it is not impossible. Other sources of income from energy, as we have 133

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seen in Chapter 13, work far better in existing communities where demand for energy is already established.

Box 5: The Netherlands infrastructure investment model The Netherlands is a good model for how to manage housing growth to achieve attractive new settlements and create balanced communities. It illustrates how the Dutch have managed to increase the housing stock by 7.6% in 10 years in some 90 new settlements. A major expansion of Amerfoort, known as Vathorst, has been delivered over the last decade. A Joint Development Company was set up between the Council, as one shareholder, and a consortium of five companies, as the other. The private investors included those who had bought land in the area, but also those who the city wanted to involve because of the good work they had done previously. The Vathorst Development Company (OBV) employs a small staff of fewer than 15 with a Chief Executive from the private sector and a Chairman appointed by the municipality. It works through developers and housebuilders, most of whom are members of the company, and through two social housing companies. It is responsible for: • land acquisition • urban planning • engineering • commissioning infrastructure • allocating sites. On the basis of the business plan for development of infrastructure and disposals, the company borrowed 750 million Euros from the Dutch municipal bank, Bank Nermeenten (BNG) (which is the largest financial body in the Netherlands after the state) at relatively low rates of interest (5%) to be repaid over 15 years. The borrowings are repaid out of the proceeds from land sales, and the company has built up a ‘buffer’ which allows it to act entrepreneurially. For example, it funded the railway company to open a station several years before the population justified it and it underwrote an entrepreneur to open a restaurant.11

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A new debate on land reform Whatever the detail of how new and renewed places are financed, the foundation will be capturing land values for the benefit of the community. Whether anyone has the nerve to interfere with very powerful land owning interests which exist in Britain is another question. Two sets of arguments are very important in responding to this. First, as matter of economic fact, the increased values that accrue to landowners by the grant of consent to develop land or the prospect of publicly funded infrastructure is unearned increment. The value has been created by the community and should accrue to the community. It quite simply does not morally or logically belong to the landowner. The Uthwatt Committee undertook conclusive analysis on this issue and this analysis has never been bettered.12 Second, this would require changes in the law in Britain which relate to how landowners are compensated when their land is compulsory purchased. Both problems can be solved and we should reflect on what we as society could achieve if such values were used for decent housing in resilient communities.

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Tomorrow’s pioneers

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Utopia on your doorstep? Part Three of this book set out just a few of the possible solutions to the key problems which we face. Many of these could be adopted tomorrow if we had the will to achieve them. However, each one of these ideas on its own will not meet the high test of a modern utopia nor will it excite much political interest. The real task is to draw all these solutions together and see what that might offer by way of a new society. This was the vision that those, such as Ebenezer Howard and William Morris, set out over a century ago and it is an extremely hard task. It is a matter of gathering the solutions together shaped by the overriding principle of social justice and delivered by means of the Garden City principles. Imagine the best of modern European design and technologies married with common ownership and a 21st century Arts and Crafts artistic tradition, as if we had layered Freiburg in Germany onto the world’s first Garden City, Letchworth. This task must be achieved not only for new communities but for existing ones where the challenge of retrofitting homes and communities is even greater.

A walk through utopia So what would this utopia look and feel like? Your home would be warm and secure, powered by renewable energy from a local community cooperative or your local council. Energy prices will be stable and communities will be carbon positive, as they export more energy than they use.Your home will have decent sized rooms, with space to eat your dinner at a table, somewhere for the kids to do their homework and enough storage for life’s

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necessities. If you live in a new home, you might have commissioned it yourself, playing a role in its design. You will have access to fibre optics and a work space.Your home will have either its own garden or access to a shared garden or allotment, depending on your preference and providing space to grow your own food.The building fabric will blend the best of new technology with traditional craft design. It will sit on a safe street, surrounded by green space and trees for shade. It will have play space and pedestrians will come first before cars.You will be able to walk to the local school and shop, so buying a pint of milk will also keep you fit. It will be a great place for cyclists who will enjoy safe bike routes, making it easier to take exercise and be healthy with less pollution. It will be rich with wildlife, with development enhancing nature not destroying it. There will be a community café. There will be space to meet and space for solitude. There will be space for art and space for creative chaos.You will be able to book a pool car via an App on your phone whenever you need it or use the tram at the end of the street and you will not need to leave the house until you know your tram is on its way with real-time travel information. Transport will connect together and take you to high speed rail. Rubbish will be removed by an underground suction system and recycled. The neighbourhood you live in will be built to be resilient to a changing climate, using sustainable drainage that creates even more space for wildlife. Existing communities can be greened by growing plants up buildings to both reduce summer temperatures and pollution, and to enhance bird life. Many of assets of the neighbourhood will be held in trust for the community to help fund the maintenance of the street and community activity over the long term. The neighbourhood you are a part of will be set within towns and cities which have localised a large part of their economy from energy services and sit within a well organised nation, where economic and cultural activity is more evenly distributed and not solely concentrated in London and the South East. A nation so organised can be adaptable and resilient to the future by having the knowledge and systems to understand change and forge solutions which will secure our future over the long term. It would be a nation not just with a geographic awareness to know what goes where, but with a clear notion of how it will have to 140

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change in terms of industrial transformation. An industrial strategy would seek to avoid the mistakes of the past where communities were effectively abandoned when their economic usefulness was at its end. Technology will be a driver of social change and the needs of society must, in part, shape how we use technology for the common good. We cannot, nor should not, force people to live in certain ways but we can create the conditions for fulfilling lives, which, crucially, will allow future generations the power to adapt and define their own choices.

Space for creative chaos The kind of utopia we are advocating is not an end state design vision which will be the same everywhere. It is not an abstract idea like ‘streets in the sky’ or some kind of ideological hell where everyone has to live the same way. In the past, the utopian tradition has always run the risk of creating monolithic places which at their very worst can be oppressive and very often just plain boring. Vibrant city life, as Jacobs pointed out, requires a sense of that unpredictable alchemy that can produce the unexpected.1 While you cannot micro manage this kind of environment, you can encourage it by leaving space for people to use as they choose. The best illustration of this is the development of Berlin in the aftermath of the national reunification. Many derelict buildings and spaces were colonised by artists.Tacheles was an example of where art and politics came together with people experimenting with different kinds of lifestyles. The building was part gallery, part sculpture park and part squat, and had been saved from demolition by a grass roots campaign. Ultimately the city authorities closed the building and like many other spaces it has now been redeveloped.2 Berlin is returning to the norm of shopping malls and banal corporate architecture and despite vociferous campaigning there is less and less space for people. On the one hand, it is hard to blame a city trying to recover from divisive past. On the other, its drive for economic ‘normality’ has ironed out much of its cultural distinctiveness. A similar, if sometimes less extreme process, can be seen in all our world cities where a combination of the corporate sector and planners find leaving informal space inefficient or just downright dangerous. So it should be. The communities of the future need space for all 141

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© David Barnes 2014 (www.davidbarnes-photography.com)

forms of dissent if they are to avoid being as bland and boring as many of our current high streets. So taken together this is the utopia we are advocating. Not a blue print, but a rich palate of possibilities founded on a fair distribution of resources.Technology working for us in ways which tackle climate change and builds a resilient and stable future. Living with nature in a way which enhances human wellbeing and biodiversity. Is this really such a frightening project?

Image 12: Berlin has a vibrant street art scene. Communities of the future need space for all forms of dissent to avoid being bland and boring like many of our current high streets.

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Too late for utopia? This book has set out not just why we need to change, but also some of the practical measures we could take now to secure our future. Given that all of this is achievable and affordable right now we have to confront the question: what is stopping us? There is also an unsettling second question, driven more than anything by the climate crisis; how long do we have? Have we passed the point where the struggle for a better society will be replaced by the simple struggle for survival? In short, is it too late for utopia?

Rebuilding our self-confidence The first step in rebuilding a vibrant debate about the future is to stop being afraid to dream like our grandparents. We have become a generation which, despite technological change, has become frightened of possibilities. We may be socially more liberal, but our political ‘bandwidth’ has narrowed dramatically. This is a problem in two ways. We no longer have access to the wisdom and inspiration of the utopian tradition so we no longer understand what it is to think holistically and collectively about the future. Second, we have been persuaded to forget that such ideals led, despite many problems, to real, practical and positive change. The history of the utopian tradition has been more or less erased and with it a vital legacy of hope and achievement. Whether our current politicians like it or not the necessity of action is going to be forced on us by our failures to respond to issues like climate change and poverty. At the time of writing we see how the British government, who have driven deep cuts in the resources of local government and the Environmental Agency, are being forced to 143

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think again because of unprecedented severe weather and flooding on our West coast. This provides a thought-provoking example of where an abstract ideological view that government is somehow bad collides with the hard practical consequences of global environmental change. In such circumstances we will not only have to recreate the structures necessary for effective management of the nation, but consider new and powerful mechanisms for shaping change.

New education It is not simply a reconnection with the utopian principles of previous generations that we need. We also need to reflect on the kind of thinking which led to their practical success. Modern professionalisation and education may have many outstanding aspects, but the determination to draw boundaries around ideas has stifled creative thought about the future. Overspecialisation has led to a lack of any organisation with the sufficient interdisciplinary knowledge to harness the sum of our collective wisdom. This is evident in all kinds of practical ways – such as the link between planning, health and human psychology – and above all by the abandonment of art by the entire planning profession, both in the design of the places we inhabit and in the way we communicate and inspire people about future change.

New economies There is a vast literature on how we can transform our economy to support sustainable development and social justice.1 The public debate between the state and the market has however become pretty sterile. The argument is presented as one of extremes between market efficiency and state bureaucracy or between what is socially desirable and economically viable. In fact, we are suggesting a strong role for a new kind of market in which many core public goods, such as energy and housing, are in the mutual hands of municipalities and cooperatives in the way the German energy market now operates. There would continue to be a strong role for private enterprise of all kinds, but set within the context of a strong social democratic state. This context would yield real benefits for market efficiency by joining up, for example, our infrastructure provision with our housing. In 144

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many nations, this kind of activity is simply taken as read, but in Britain our ideological drive for deregulation rewards speculation rather than the public interest or the long-term productivity and modernisation of the economy. A better way to assess the right balance between public sector and market interventions is based simply on measuring their effectiveness in dealing with the real problems which confront us. In many cases, we have to challenge short-term market pressures to ensure wider long-term economic and social progress. As Lord Heseltine commented on the publication of his 2012 report No stone unturned: In pursuit of growth: I reject the notion that regulation in itself hinders growth. Good, well-designed regulation can stop the abuse of market power and improve the way markets work to the benefit of business employees and consumers A civilised society must provide a clear framework for the behaviour of firms, with boundaries.2

A new debate Success in building a sustainable future will need a new kind of politics and a much smarter and more honest public debate. Much of this depends on how the media deal with issues concerning, for instance, poverty in order to portray a sense of the ‘undeserving poor’. For instance, if people are using food banks, we are told it is because they, rather than our society, have failed. The climate debate takes this distortion to even greater heights with vast sums devoted to undermining the scientific consensus around the processes which are changing the planet. We should undoubtedly be using science much more effectively in framing solutions for the future, but it is still remarkable that news organisations, political parties and politicians can maintain a climate-denying stance. The joint publication of a report by both the US and British scientific academies was an attempt to try re-establish a rational basis for a decisions on climate change, from those whose vested interests have driven them to maintain a flat Earth perspective. It would be funny, if it wasn’t so dangerous.

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A new beginning The job of rebuilding Britain, of building the utopia which this nation deserves, will not be easy. It will be a collision of art and engineering, of high principles and unparalleled creativity. A British film director once described the process of making a feature film as like ‘running out of a burning building saving what you can as you go’.3 Building utopia will be very much like that. There will be setbacks and disappointments and we will probably achieve only a part of our high ambitions. But we will achieve nothing by pretending change is not both necessary and possible. There will also be many who will argue that values such as social justice are too hard to define, as if that in itself was an excuse for inaction. We may not be able to deliver perfect outcomes, but in striving to reach equality we will certainly deliver a more equal society, in the same way that the impossibility of perfect justice is not an excuse not to fight for more just outcomes.4 In any event the future must a be matter of argument and that must be better than the shattering silence that now seems to be the only response to the future of Britain. What would the utopian pioneers have made of our a current situation? They would have recognised much of it: inequality, environmental degradation, and social division.They might well ask what happened to the active role of art and artists in the movement? What happened to the high ideals? More than anything we suspect they would ask why, in the face of the same basic challenges that they confronted, we have now becomes so passive, lacking any ability to see and take hold of the future? Our society is confronted by fundamental change. The climate crisis on its own requires that we reconstruct Britain. The choice is clear: we can drift into this new world unprepared, ill-equipped and repeating and reinforcing the trends of inequality which blight human relations, or we can face the future with practical realism and efficiency and with determination to shape a new society defined by fairness and opportunity. That choice is in our hands, but time is running out fast. Our generation must make choices that will define the future of the next five generations. It is a heavy responsibility, a test not just of us, but of our whole democracy. How should we meet the future? With optimism and excitement, for there is no human enterprise as worthwhile as the pursuit of utopia. 146

Too late for utopia?

Whatever the setbacks of the idealist from time to time in human history we must always keep before us the greater constructive purposes of life. (C. R. Ashbee, 19175)

147

Notes Foreword Former northern and regional affairs editor of the Guardian, and currently chair of the board of trustees of the TCPA.

1.

Chapter 1 1.

See Oscar Wilde, 1891

2.

See DCLG, 2005

3.

See Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009

4.

See Cahill, 2010

Chapter 2 1.

See Carson, 1962: 240

2.

See Oxfam, 2014

3.

See TCPA, 2013c

4.

See DCLG, 2012

5.

See DECC, 2011

6.

See RCEP, 2011

7.

See TCPA, 2012b: 7

8.

See TCPA, 2012c

9.

See Kennedy, 1963

Chapter 3 1.

See Morris, 1884: 134-158

2.

See More, 1516

3.

See Silkin, 1946

4.

See Winstanley, 1649

5.

See George, 1879

6.

See de Tocqueville, 1835: 107–8

7.

See Engels, 1845

148

Rebuilding Britain 8.

See Morris, 1888

9.

See Morris, 1890

10.

See McCarthy, 1994: 548

11.

See Kropotkin, 1898

12.

See Unwin, 1912; TCPA, 2012d

13.

See Howard, 1898

14.

See Howard, 1898: 140-41

15.

See Ashbee, 1917: iv (introduction)

16.

See Beveridge, 1942

17.

See Jacobs, 1961

18.

See McLaren et al, 1998

19.

See Rydin, 2013

20.

See Pieterse, 2010

21.

See TCPA, 2013d

Chapter 4 1.

See Kennedy, 1963

2.

See Government Equalities Office, 2010

3.

See ONS, 2012

4.

See UNEP, 2012

5.

See Barnosky, 2012

Chapter 5 1.

See Dorling, 2013: 23-27

2.

See MacInnes et al, 2013: 6

3.

See MacInnes et al, 2013: 26

4.

See Cox and Schmuecker, 2011: 2

5.

See The Economist 2012b

6.

See Wilson, 2013

7.

See Lane, 1987

8.

See Liverpool City Council, 2008: 21

9.

See Belchem, 2006

10.

See Liverpool City Council, 2012

11.

See Dugan, E, 2013

12.

See London Councils, 2014

13.

See Ramesh, 2013

149

Notes

Chapter 6 1.

See Robb, 2012

2.

See DCLG, 2010a

3.

See Holmans, 2013

4.

See DCLG 2010

5.

See DCLG 2013b

6.

See DCLG 2013a

7.

See Shelter, 2014

8.

See Shelter, 2009

9.

See Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, 2011

10.

See RIBA Homewise website, www.withoutspaceandlight.com

11.

See RIBA, 2013

12.

See BBC Newsnight, 2012

13.

See Heseltine, 2012

14.

See Empty Homes www.emptyhomes.com

15.

See Apps, 2013

16.

See National Housing Federation, 2013

17.

See Lupton, 2009: 3

18.

See TUC, 2013

19.

See Ipsos-MORI, 2013

20.

See Ipsos-MORI, 2013

Chapter 7 1.

See Annan, 2009: ii (introduction)

2.

See IPCC, 2013: 2

3.

See IPCC, 2007

4.

See Wilby, 2007

5.

See Environment Agency/DEFRA, 2010: iv

6.

See The Pitt Review, 2008

7.

See TCPA, 2012b

8.

See Natural England, 2010

9.

See IPCC, 2007

10.

See DEFRA, 2013

11.

See Anderson, Bows, 2011

12.

See Stern, 2014

13.

See Met Office, 2014

14.

See RCEP, 2011

15.

See Johnson et al, 2005

16.

See ONS, 2013

150

Rebuilding Britain 17.

See Energy Bill Revolution, 2014

18.

See Foresight, 2010

19.

See Environment Agency, 2005:1

20.

See Barclay, 2012

21.

See Global Humanitarian Forum, 2009: 20

22.

See Stern 2007

23.

See European Commission, 2013: 3-4

24.

See Association of British Insurers, 2014

Chapter 8 1.

See Ford, 2010: 51

2.

See The Barlow Commission, 1940

3.

See TWRI, 2012

4.

See Core Cities, 2010: 4

5.

See Core Cities, 2010: 3

6.

See The Economist, 2012

7.

See OECD, 2012a

8.

See The Economist, 2012

9.

See OECD, 2012b

10.

See HM Treasury, 2013

Chapter 9 1.

See Monbiot, 2012

2.

See the Planning for Real website: www.planningforreal.org.uk

3.

See Clark, 2011

4.

See DCLG, 2013b

5.

See Localism Act 2011

6.

See TCPA, 2013c

7.

See HM Government, 2014

8.

See House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts, 2013

9.

See House of Commons: Committee of Public Accounts, 2013

10.

See TCPA, 2011: 12

11.

See Skeffington, 1969

12.

See TCPA, 2013d

13.

See TCPA, 2013b

151

Notes

Chapter 10 1.

See Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009: 33

2.

See The Federal Government of Germany, 1997

3.

See Rydin, 2013: 201

See the New York State Department of Transportation website, www.dot.ny.gov/ empire-corridor 4.

5.

See Commonweath of Australia, Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, 2012

6.

See Stockholm Environment Institute, 2013

7.

See Foresight, 2010: 5

Chapter 11 1.

See Crawford, 2005: 28

2.

See Forester, 1997; Healey, 1989

3.

See Kropotkin, 1898

4.

See Rowbotham, 2008

5.

See UNECE, 1998

Chapter 12 1.

See Howard, 1898: 140

2.

See Holmans with Whitehead, 2008

3.

See TCPA, 2013a

4.

See TCPA, 2013d

5.

See Self Build Portal, 2013b

5.

See Self Build Portal, 2013a

Chapter 13 1. US President Barack Obama reiterated the need to address climate change on 14 November 2012 in his first press conference since winning re-election. See Gerken, 2012 2.

See DECC, 2013

3.

See BBC, 2013

4.

See Giddens, 2009

5.

See Wood and Velditz, 2007

6.

See TCPA, 2012a: 4

7.

See Stern, 2007

8.

See Landale, 2013

See SPECIAL (Spatial Planning and Energy for Communities In All Landscapes) project: www.special-eu.org/ Hamburg case study to be published in 2014 9.

10.

See TCPA/CHPA, 2008

11.

See TCPA, 2009

152

Rebuilding Britain 12.

See Willis and Willis, 2012: 5

13.

See TCPA, 2008

14.

See Duffin, 2014

15.

See the Playing Out website, http://playingout.net/

16.

See Kimmelman, 2013

17.

See European Commission, 2013

18.

See CABE, 2009

See GRaBS (Green and Blue Space Adaptation for Urban Areas and Eco-towns) project: www.grabs-eu.org/ 19.

20.

See TCPA, 2009

Chapter 14 1.

See Churchill, 1909

2.

Rydin, 2013: 36

3.

Mathiason, Fitzgibbon and Turner, 2013

4.

Thomas, 1997: 138-39

5.

See Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation, 2011

6.

See TCPA, 2014a

7.

See Sorensen, 1993; Peiser and Chang, 1999

8.

See TCPA, 2014b

9.

See Lipman, 2002: 12-13

10.

See Walker, 1999; Hall, 2004

11.

See Krabben et al, 2011

12.

See Uthwatt Committee, 1942

Chapter 15 1.

See Jacobs, 1961

2.

See Jones, 2012

Chapter 16 1.

See New Economics Foundation, 2014

2.

See Heseltine, 2012: 57

3.

Private conversation with Kenny Glenaan (director) on the set of the film Summer

4.

See Campbell, 2012

5.

See Ashbee, 1917: v (introduction)

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TCPA (Town and Country Planning Association) / CHPA (Combined Heat and Power Association), 2008a, Community energy: Urban planning for a low carbon future, London: TCPA / CHPA, www.tcpa. org.uk/data/files/ceg.pdf TCPA, 2008b, Design to delivery: Eco-towns transport worksheet, London: TCPA TCPA, 2009a, Developing energy efficient and zero carbon strategies for ecotowns: Eco-towns energy worksheet, London: TCPA TCPA, 2009b, GRaBS expert paper 1: The case for climate change adaptation, London: TCPA TCPA, 2011, Policy analysis of housing and planning reform, London: TCPA TCPA, 2012a, Planning for climate change: Guidance for local authorities, London: Planning and Climate Change Coalition/TCPA, www.tcpa. org.uk/data/files/PCC_Guide_April_2012.pdf TCPA, 2012b, The lie of the land! London: TCPA TCPA, 2012c, Creating garden cities and suburbs today: Policies, practices, partnerships and model approaches – A report of the garden cities and suburbs expert group, London: TCPA TCPA, 2012d, Nothing gained by overcrowding! A centenary celebration and re-exploration of Raymond Unwin’s pamphlet – ‘How the garden city type of development may benefit both owner and occupier, London: TCPA TCPA, 2013a, How good could it be? A guide to building better places, London: TCPA, www.tcpa.org.uk/data/files/Community_Guide_ Pamphlet_Side.pdf TCPA, 2013b, Making planning work Paper 1: People and planning, London: TCPA TCPA, 2013c, Making planning work Paper 3: Filling the strategic void, London: TCPA TCPA, 2013d, Planning out poverty, London: TCPA TCPA, 2014a, New Towns Act 2015? London: TCPA TCPA, 2014b, Built today, treasured tomorrow: A good practice guide to long term stewardship models, London: TCPA The Barlow Commission, 1940, The report of the royal commission on the distribution of industrial population, London: Royal Commission on the Distribution of Industrial Population The Economist, 2012, ‘The third industrial revolution’, Leader article, 21 April, www.economist.com/node/21553017

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The Economist, 2012b, ‘The great divide’, The Economist, 15 September, www.economist.com/node/21562938 The Pitt Review, 2008, Lessons from the 2007 floods, London: The Pitt Review/Cabinet Office Thomas, R, 1997, ‘The New Towns – taking a long term view’, Town and Country Planning, 66(5): 138–9 TUC (Trades Union Congress), 2013, ‘Support for benefit cuts dependent on ignorance, TUC-commissioned poll finds’, news release, 4 January, www.tuc.org.uk/social-issues/child-poverty/ welfare-and-benefits/tax-credits/support-benefit-cuts-dependent TWRI (Tyne and Wear Research and Information Service), 2012, Employment change in 10 city regions 1984–2010, Newcastle upon Tyne: TWRI UNECE (The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe), 1998, Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in DecisionMaking and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, Aarhus: UNECE UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme), 2012, GEO 5 Global Environment Outlook Environment for the future we want, Kenya: United Nations Environment Programme Unwin, R, 1912, Nothing gained by overcrowding! How the Garden City Type of development may benefit both owner and occupier, Orchard House, Westminster: P.S. King & Son Uthwatt Committee, 1942, Final report of the expert committee on compensation and betterment, London: HMSO Walker J, 1999, The future potential of and need for New Towns in northwest Europe, presentation to Interreg 2C Conference, December 1999 Wilby, R L, 2007, ‘A review of climate change impacts on the built environment’, Built Environment, 2007, Vol. 33: 31–45 Wilde, O, 1891, ‘The soul of man under socialism’, first published in the Fortnightly Review, republished 1915, New York: Max N. Maisel Wilkinson, R G, Pickett, K, 2009, The spirit level: Why more equal societies almost always do better, London: Allen Lane Willis, R, Willis, J, 2012, Co-operative renewable energy in the UK: A guide to this growing sector, Manchester: Co-operatives UK, www. uk.coop/sites/storage/public/downloads/renewableenergy_0_0.pdf Wilson, W, 2013, ‘Housing market renewal pathfinders’, Standard note SN/SP/595, London: House of Commons Library, www.parliament. uk/briefing-papers/SN05953

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165

Index

Index

A Aarhus Convention 95 affordable housing 50, 52, 128 ageing population 49, 52 agriculture 61–2 Almere self-build project 106, 108 Anfield case study 44–5 Annan, Kofi 55 Arts and Crafts tradition 21–3 Ashbee, C.R. 27, 147 Ashley Vale self-build project 106, 107 Australia 89

B Barlow Report 65 ‘bed and breakfasts’ 46–7 Beddington, Sir John 90 ‘bedroom tax’ 46 benefits (welfare) 46, 53 Berlin 141, 142 biodiversity 62 Birmingham 114 Bloom Street power station 116 Boles, Nick 51 Britain, organisation of 10–13

C car ownership 118 carbon emissions see emissions Carpenter, Edward 22, 91 Carson, Rachel 9

child poverty 44–5 Churchill, Winston 125 cities of 19th century 19–21 core cities 67 empowerment of 93 see also urban areas citizen rights in planning process 95 climate change building resilience to 120–1, 125–6, 140 economic aspects of 58, 62–3, 120, 125–6 impact of 37–8, 38, 39, 55, 58–62 media representations of 145 policy advice on 12 scientific evidence of 56–8, 59, 145 tackling 55–6, 109–10

diverse energy sources 110–11 improving housing 121–3 localised energy market 113–20 political approach 32–3, 63–4, 111–12 role of planning 112–13

Climate Change Act (2008) 63 Climate Change Risk Assessment 59 co-partnership housing models 106 cold weather 61 combined heat and power (CHP) 116 167

Rebuilding Britain common interest communities 96 common land 18–19 communities enclosure process and dispersal of 19 and planners 91, 94–5 and private sector 92 utopian 140 community groups 92 Community Infrastructure Levy 128 community involvement/ participation 72, 75, 92, 94–5, 114–15, 117 community-led housing models 106 construction methods 51 consultation 75, 76, 93 cooperation, legal duty of 74 cooperatively owned energy generation 117 Core Cities 67 creative spaces 141–2 cultural distinctiveness 141 cycle routes 118

D de Soissons, Louis 101, 106 de Tocqueville, Alexis 20 democracy, forms of 72, 78, 93–4 democratic accountability 72, 91 demographic change 37, 44, 49, 52, 60 deregulation 10–11 design of houses 51 Development Corporations 130, 131, 132, 133 development rights 29, 127–8 Diggers, The 17–18 direct democracy 93, 94 dissent, space for 141–2 Dorling, Danny 41 droughts 57, 120 duty to cooperate 74

E economic assets in utopia 140 see also land value

economic costs of climate change 58, 62–3, 120 and long term savings 125–6 economic development 38, 65–6, 69–70 economic inequalities (regional) 37, 65–6, 67, 99 rebalancing 66, 70, 103 economic investment financing New Towns 127, 130–1, 132 and land value capture 126–7, 129–31, 133, 134, 135 regional disparities 41–3 and speculative development 127–9 economies rural 105 transformation of 144–5 see also free market approach emissions de-carbonising 68 and local level action 111, 112–13 emissions scenarios 59, 111 employment rates 67 empty homes 43, 45, 52 enclosure process 18–19 energy efficiency 61, 112–13, 115 energy market (localised) 113–20 energy service companies (ESCos) 115, 116 energy sources 64, 110–11 Engels, Friedrich 20 England, approach to planning 10–13 environment and new housing 99 see also climate change environmental justice 33

F financing of future settlements 133 of New Towns 127, 130–1, 132 and speculative development 127–9 see also land value capture flooding 57, 58, 62–3, 120 168

Index see also sea level rise food security 61–2, 105 Ford, Kristina 65 Foresight report 90 free market approach 9–10, 13, 54, 88, 144–5 Freiburg case study 117–19 fuel poverty 61 future ability to shape 9–10 planning for 3–4, 6–7, 89–90, 143–4

G Garden Cities 4, 23–9, 106 for 21st century 100–3 and land values 25–6, 126–7, 129–30 George, Henry 19 Germany 83–4, 114–15, 117–19, 141, 142 global context 39–40, 55, 68–9 global warming 59–60 government, new ministry 89 GRaBS (Green and Blue Space Adaptation for Urban Areas and Eco-towns) 122 green belt land 7

H Hamburg 114–15 Hampstead Garden Suburb 100 Harlow 131 health and wellbeing 50, 60–1, 82 heatwaves 60 Heseltine, Lord Michael 145 high rise developments 5, 30–1 homeless families 46–7 Homes and Communities Agency 131 honesty 94 housing adaptation of 121–3, 125 building rates 50, 73 debate surrounding 98 energy efficient 61 long term savings 125–6

needs 73, 97–8, 106–8 New Homes Bonus 74–5 new housing supply model 98–9 quality of 5, 50–1, 99–100, 121–3 renewal and regeneration 43, 44–5, 51–2, 103–4, 132 rural 52, 98, 104–6 self-build 106–8 social housing 30–1, 46, 53, 54, 99

and speculative development 127–9 utopian 139–40 see also Garden Cities; New Towns

housing crisis 37, 49–54 Housing Market Renewal 43, 44–5, 51, 104 Howard, Ebenezer 5, 23–6, 28, 97

I individualism 9–10 industrial cities of 19th century 19–21 industrial revolution (third) 68–9 industrial strategy 141 industry, and economic transformation 65 inequality dimensions of 41 impact of welfare reform on 43–7 and regeneration 43, 44–5 reversing 82 see also economic inequalities Infrastructure Planning Commission 72 institutions 89 interdisciplinary knowledge 144 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 56–7, 59–60 international comparison 88–9

J Jacobs, Jane 31 joint planning agreements 11 justice 33, 34, 85–6

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K

N

Kennedy, John F. 14, 37 knowledge 144

National Adaptation Programme 59 national planning in England 11–12, 73, 87–8, 103–4 international examples 88–9, 120 in Scotland and Wales 13 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) 11, 76 natural resources 38, 39, 61–2 energy sources 64, 110–11 neighbourhood plans 75–6, 94 Netherlands 106, 108, 120, 134 New Homes Bonus 74–5 New Lanark 20 New Model Army 17 New Right 10, 31, 32 New Towns 65–6 criticisms of 31–2 financing 127, 130–1, 132 legislation 15–16, 30 New Zealand 83, 84 North–South divide 42, 67

L land, access to and use of 7–8 land rights 17–19 see also development rights land value and Garden Cities 25–6, 126–7, 129–30 and New Towns 127, 130–1 under speculative development 127–9 land value capture 126–7, 129–31, 133, 134, 135 landowners 8, 125, 127, 135 legal objectives of planning 83–6 Letchworth Garden City 25, 26–7, 100, 106, 129–30 Liverpool case study 44–5 local distinctiveness 5, 141 Local Enterprise Partnerships 11, 70, 74 local government, empowerment of 93 local planning lack of coordination 11, 64 to tackle climate change 112–13 localisation of planning 64, 72, 76 Localism Act (2011) 10, 73, 74 London 11

O Obama, Barak 109 O’Connerville 20 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) 68 Osborn, Frederic J. 28 Owen, Robert 20

M

P

Malmö case study 122–3 managed decline 42–3, 66 Manchester 116 manufacturing 65, 68–9 market see free market approach media 53, 145 migration 19, 39, 40 modernist design 30–1 Monbiot, George 71 More, Thomas 15, 17 Morris, William 4, 15, 21–2 Munich 115 municipal energy 114–15

Parker, Barry 22, 27 parks 121 parliamentary power 92 participative democracy 72, 78, 91, 93–4 patient investment 127 pedestrianisation 118 Pickett, K. 81 planners 86–7, 94–5 planning adaptation and long term 12–13 democracy and accountability 72, 73, 78, 91 170

Index

R

ideals and definition of 4, 5, 6 international comparisons 88–9 link with economic development 65–6 new legal objectives 83–6 New Right influence 31, 32 new structure 87 public engagement and trust 38, 71, 77–8, 91–6 role in tackling climate change 112–13 social objectives 82, 83–6, 104 utopian influence see utopian thought see also local planning; national planning; regional planning planning for future 3–4, 6–7, 89–90, 143–4 planning permission 29, 127–8 play streets 120 Playing Out 120 political participation 71, 72, 91, 93–4 population see demographic change post war reconstruction 3, 15, 29–30 poverty 20, 41, 44, 145 fuel poverty 61 power 92, 93, 95 Priestley, J.B. 29 private sector 92, 95, 126, 127–9, 144–5 public attitudes 53 public engagement 71, 76, 77–8 see also community involvement; participative democracy public rights, in planning process 95 public sector, relationship with private sector 144–5 public trust 38, 71, 91–6

regeneration and renewal 43, 44–5, 51–2, 103–4, 132 regional economic development 41–3, 65–6, 69 regional economic inequalities 65–6, 67, 99 rebalancing 66, 70, 103 regional planning alternatives to 74–5 lack of 10–11, 66, 70, 73 regions, empowerment of 93 regulation, role of 10, 145 renewable energy 110, 113, 114, 115 representative democracy 72, 78, 91, 93, 94 Resource Management Act (1991) (NZ) 84 rights see citizen rights; development rights; land rights Robb, Campbell 49 Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution 12, 60, 89 rural economies 105 rural housing 52, 98, 104–6 rural land 7, 18–19 Ruskin, John 4, 21 Rydin,Yvonne 33, 86

S

Q quality, of housing 5, 50–1, 99–100, 121–3

Saltaire 21 science of climate change 56–8, 59, 145 Scotland 13, 110–11 sea level rise 59, 61, 64 section 106 requirements 127–8 self-build housing 106–8 Silkin, Lewis 15–16, 30 social class 20 social housing 30–1, 46, 53, 54, 99 social justice 85–6 social objectives of planning 82, 83–6, 104 South East area 66 space

171

Rebuilding Britain for creative chaos 141–2 housing quality and 50, 100 spatial planning 6 speculative development 127–9 state, relationship with market 144–5 statutory planning system 6 Stern, Lord Nicholas 62 stigma, of social housing 53 sustainable development 32–4, 73, 83–4, 85 Sweden 122–3

utopian thought 4–5 and 17th century communities 17–18 and 19th century industrial cities 19–21 and 19th century land enclosure 18–19 Arts and Crafts tradition 21–3 demise of 32, 34, 143 during inter-war years 27–9 failures of 30–1

Howard’s Garden Cities 23–9 impact of war on 27 and post war reconstruction 15–16, 29–30 success of 16 and sustainable development 32–4

T Tacheles 141 technology 14, 68–9, 111 Thameswey Energy 116 third industrial revolution 68–9 timescale for change 12–13, 89–90, 127 Tocqueville, Alexis de 20 Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) 12 transport investment 41–2 transport strategy 117–20 trust 38, 71, 91–6

U UK Climate Impacts Programme 59 under-occupancy penalty 46 Unwin, Raymond 22–3, 27 urban areas 7 regeneration and renewal 43, 44–5, 51–2, 103–4 see also cities USA 88, 96 utopia challenge of building 146–7 defining 13–14, 17 features of modern 139–41 as personal 4 Wilde’s views of 3 Utopia (More) 15, 17

V Vathorst Development Company (OBV) 134 Vauban case study 117–19 viability 128–9 voluntary co-operation 74

W Wales 13, 83 water resources 61 weather 60–1 see also climate change welfare benefits 46, 53 welfare reform 43–7 Welwyn Garden City 28, 100, 101, 106 Wilde, Oscar 3 Wilkinson, R.G. 81 Winstanley, Gerard 18 Woking Borough Council 116

172

“Rebuilding Britain is a thought-provoking, engaging and accessible way of understanding the choices we face about what kind of country we want to live in and build for future generations. It’s a book which rightly prompts us to act.” Julia Unwin, Chief Executive, Joseph Rowntree Foundation “The 21st century introduced emerging challenges Britain and the world has not confronted before. Issues like demographic change, urbanisation and climate change demand new ways to plan for the present and future. Rebuilding Britain will inspire a generation of planners and leaders to think differently and to embrace their role as guardians of our common future.” Mitchell J. Silver, Commissioner, New York City Department of Parks and Recreation Britain faces extraordinary challenges, from climate change to growing inequality and global economics, but as a nation it has no plan for the future. This unique book asks a simple question: how can Britain organise itself, not just for survival but to build a fairer and sustainable society? The arguments refer to the high ambitions of those who pioneered the planning movement and campaigned for a clear set of progressive values, but whose drive for utopia has now been forgotten. The book takes a distinctive approach to exploring the value to society of social town planning and offers a doorway for how planning, both morally and practically, can help to meet key challenges of the 21st century. It challenges the widely held view that it is impossible to achieve a better future by suggesting that there is real choice in how society develops and pointing to contemporary examples of utopia. This accessible book makes essential reading for students in the built environment and the wider social sciences who have an interest in UK and European examples of sustainable communities.

Rebuilding Britain • Ellis | Henderson

“This is the right book at the right time, providing an eloquent and insightful analysis of the many challenges facing modern Britain. Kate Henderson and Hugh Ellis offer an ambitious formula for rebuilding the nation and a convincing restatement of the essential role of planning in that project, when underpinned by foresight and vision.” Professor Nick Gallent, University College London

H U G H E L L I S & K AT E H E N D E R S O N

REBUILDING

B R I TA I N PLANNING FOR A BETTER FUTURE

Housing / Geography ISBN 978-1-44731-759-3

www.policypress.co.uk

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9 781447 317593

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