Without the state

John Madin

A fascinating BBC film from 1965 about the Birmingham architect, John Madin. I went to Birmingham in 1966 and two people on my course had spent the past year working in his practice.

Envy

I've just subscribed to Sky, after much resistance over the years on my part. Idly skimming through the hundred's of channels now available I was struck by a number of things.

First (and the reason behind my reluctance to date) is the huge quantity of plain crap.

Second, the large number of channels devoted to property. I don't mean creative or useful programmes like Grand Designs or Property Ladder, or mildly entertaining like the many variants on Location Location. The ones I mean seem to have no purpose other than promoting envy - 'this house is huge, way out of your price bracket and you are never ever going to get anywhere near it."

Are people really interested in the grotesque ego trips of some unknown rapper, or the often hideous monstrosities erected in sunny locations across the world? I know I can turn these programmes off, but the poor unfortunates who have to see these things every day don't have that luxury.

Third, the huge quantity of plain crap (yes I know I have said this already, but there is just soooo much of it...)

Look around you

There is a view of art that places it at the top of human endeavours, represented I suppose by people like Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, Van Gogh, Rembrandt. However the existence of such elevated work does not invalidate art produced by us lesser mortals.

Oscar Wilde is supposed to have said, in response to a question about why America had such high levels of violence, “because you have such awful wallpaper”. This seemingly flippant response masks an essential truth, enumerated recently on TV by Stephen Fry, that we seem to be the only species able to make the place uglier by our efforts. Not everything we do of course – I think the sublime qualities of the English countryside must surely count as one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time.

Nevertheless, the environment we create for ourselves is often impoverished and at worst downright ugly - even unhealthy. We know as a race we can do better.  The challenge is to create the conditions in which that can happen. Artists surely have a part to play and while a 21st Century Michaelangelo would be nice we can't rely on that so it will depend on all of us to raise our sights - at least occasionally - from the cashbook to the world around us.

Property is theft

My recent post on road pricing made several references to Simon Jenkins book ‘Landlords to London’. Rereading this book for the post and also as a counterpoint to ‘The Voluntary City’ made me realise the real significance of the great London Estates. Most of these were originally in the ownership of the Church until the Dissolution under Henry VIII. When he seized Church properties he distributed them among members of his Court in return for favours granted and for political benefit.

The estates thus created lasted by and large into the modern era. The development of these estates set the pattern for modern London – the city we see today. It is salutary to realise therefore how much that London is thus built on theft – pure and simple theft. We don’t need to think about how the Church acquired their property, or about esoteric theories of primitive accumulation because of the clear break created by Henry’s theft from them.

Worth remembering next time someone tells you how the private sector is so much better than the state at promoting development. Ask them where that property came from.

Condos with built-in rental suites

This looks like a great idea: Condos with built-in rental suites.

What does planning really do?

Jane Jacobs’ book “Death and Life of Great American Cities” is often described as a major attack on planning. It is ironic therefore that it was probably this book above all other things that got me into planning…

I was moved to recall this by a post (some time ago now) on Undernews about Urban Planning and New Orleans (found via Kevin Carson’s excellent blog)

The problem with urban planners is two fold. First, they work for the wrong people, the government, rather than for the citizens. As local governments have become more corrupt and more beholden to the interests of a small number of developers and other businesses, urban planning has inevitably come to reflect these perverse priorities.

Second, urban planners believe in sweeping physical solutions to social problems. The idea, Richard Sennett has written, goes back to the 1860s design for Paris by Baron Haussmann. Haussmann, Sennett suggests, bequeathed us the notion that we could alter social patterns by changing the physical landscape. This approach was not about urban amenities such as park benches and gas lighting or technological improvements such as indoor plumbing but about what G. K. Chesterton called the huge modern heresy of "altering the human soul to fit its conditions, instead of altering human conditions to fit the human soul."

Smith’s stricture quoted above is probably accurate enough about the UK too, although a major driver here was a concern for public health. Major rebuilding in the Haussmann manner for us waited until the 1960s rather than the 1860s, but with rather less success – certainly aesthetically and almost certainly socially too.

Smith’s post contains at the end a great checklist of ways to do it better. I particularly favour this one:

Get everyone involved. Keep the planning open and welcoming. Plan for everyone and with everyone. Don't just use the best known local civic organizations. Even elementary school children can help plan a community. Seniors and the disabled have perspectives that get easily ignored. And asking alienated adolescents what they would like is a lot smarter than finding out later what they don't.

One of the things I rapidly learnt when I started work in planning was that many planners are indeed rigid and authoritarian- but by no means all. Many know they are not doing a good job but are forced into a procrustean bed of rigid regulation. It is easy to say of course that they should get out – while some do just that, others stay on and fight as best they can from within.

The hardest thing in life is to learn which bridge to cross and which to burn.

(Laurence J Peter)

It isn’t getting any better or easier though. This government’s increasing centralisation – despite its rhetoric – means that planners in local government have less and less time, less and less freedom to work with people rather than simply duck and run to the next job.

A major problem is that many planners and most of government still see planning as a technocratic process – moreover as a process that can come up with answers. In practice however most problems facing planners – at least in the circumstances that faced Jacobs and that face planners in most big cities today – don’t have solutions or pat answers that can be delivered simply by spending enough money. They are wicked problems [edit: second link updated] that change every time you attack them.

Some problems are so complex that you have to be highly intelligent and well informed just to be undecided about them. (Laurence J. Peter again)

Big money generates political kudos (or the converse if you are in opposition) but not answers – something Jacobs told us in 1961 and that Christopher Alexander has told us time and time again since.

Smith again:

Some just released data on Washington DC gives part of the answer. Few places have spent more money and placed more political and psychological emphasis on physical planning as a human solution than the nation's capital. Over the past quarter century or so, billions have been spent on 'economic development' including a massive new subway system, two restorations of Union Station, two convention centers, a major new indoor sports stadium, downtown urban renewal, a redevelopment of Pennsylvania Avenue, increased tax breaks and financial benefits for developers, as well as numerous smaller projects. Yet according to new figures from the Center for Budget Priorities and the Economic Policy Institute, the income of a typical citizen in the city's lower economic quintile has grown exactly $382 in real dollars since the 1980s while someone in the top quintile now earns $70,382 more. Further, there are fewer jobs for DC residents and sales tax revenue - a reasonable indicator of 'economic development' - has barely kept up with inflation.

This isn’t just a criticism that can be levied against the planning system. I posted some time ago about similar failings in the centralised welfare system:

An excellent book called Urban Renaissance by Dr Dick Atkinson looks at the failures of welfare reform. He estimates that about 30% of the population live in neighbourhoods experiencing problems - poor educational achievment, physical decay, unemployment - usually all at once. Something like £100,000,000 are spent in every neighbourhood of about 15,000 people every year. By any standards that is a huge sum. Despite that some of these communities are still in dire need and have been since the 1960s.

Atkinson offers a real alternative. It depends on politicians giving up the power they have accumulated over the years and trusting local people to decide on what they need. Projects like New Deal for the Community and Neighbourhood Management are supposed to do that of course, but with some honourable exceptions they don't seem to be working. Atkinson proposes not a Welfare State, but a Welfare Society where communities in neighbourhoods organise themselves and take control of their own surroundings.

Although I have never worked in the US planning system, over the years I have corresponded with many US planners via USENET and the like. One major difference to the UK system appears to be its focus on rigid zoning and the need to use eminent domain powers (Compulsory Purchase in the UK) to make anything happen. Most of the 1960s disasters in the UK were only possible through CPO too of course! Like the US, the UK system worked for many years on the same idea of separating ‘incompatible uses’ but much less rigidly and because the UK system has much more discretion built into the development control process there are always numerous exceptions and variations. I used to see this a something of a problem because of the loss of consistency, but now I see it as the prime strength of the UK system (even though large sectors of development are still controlled unnecessarily). The typical US outcome of large tracts zoned exclusively for two storey family housing would be pretty much impossible in the UK system - and it should stay that way.

It appears to me that the US zoning system was developed as a way to plan without planning under the guise of avoiding excessive interference in property rights. Paradoxically, it is in practice far more restrictive in its effect than the UK system, which is based on the fundamental idea that development rights belong to the state. (Effectively the right to develop land was nationalised by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.)

In the eight years 1943-1951 five major Acts were passed: Town and Country Planning (Interim Development) Act, 1943, which extended planning control to all land and made it effective in the 'interim development' period before schemes became operative; the Town and Country Planning Act, 1944, which enabled local authorities to tackle their war damage; the New Towns Act, 1946, which provided for the creation of New Towns by means of Development Corporations; the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947, which established a new and comprehensive planning system; and the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, 1949.

Add to this the impact of community associations I touched on here and the rights of your average US homeowner look pretty restricted compared to the UK position.

Managing the street

This post covers similar ground to the previous one on road privatisation, although it was prepared a while ago. I'm letting it stand separately however since it deals with the issue for a slightly different perspective.

The standard libertarian response to the sorts of issues and problems I described in this post is generally either private property or less government – or both. As you might expect I’m not convinced that the answer is so simple. The main problem on this project was not public ownership or regulation – at least directly - but the large number of organisations with a stake in what was going on. With three different local authorities involved, ownership was relevant but it was a minor issue compared to the problems of securing agreement between all the stakeholders.

If you consider a modern shopping mall like say the MetroCentre in Gateshead or Cribbs Causeway in Bristol these are in single ownership. Shop tenants will have rights and duties set out in tenancy agreements covered by contract law. If the mall needs refurbishment, whether for physical or marketing reasons, services provided within the mall like power and phones will be owned – or at least managed - by the property company.

Making the wider world like a managed shopping mall is however simply not practical. Properties are owned in a complex web of relationships extending in three dimensions. In any one street you are will have water, sewers, telephone, electricity, gas, perhaps cable. There may be ‘trunk’ lines as well as services to individual properties. In addition to the cables or pipes, there will be switch boxes, manholes, inspection covers etc above ground. These will have been altered and changed over the years so that none of them are quite where they are supposed to be. They may be a metre or so to the side of where they are supposed to be and they may be only a few centimetres below ground level instead of the metre or so they are meant to be. All this adds up to a nightmare for anyone doing work. A few weeks ago I was without a landline for about three days because Wessex Water damaged the phone line through the village in the course of replacing some storm drains.

The owners of these utilities have the right to turn up, dig a hole for ‘operational purposes’ and then fill it in and move on. They are supposed to reinstate as it was before but for all sorts of reasons, some of which are even reasonable, this doesn’t always happen. Think of the rows that erupted wherever cable companies were in operation laying cable and you get the idea.

When work in the highway is required there are procedures to follow that allow the organisation involved to check what else might be happening. For example if the highway authority intend to resurface they notify the other companies to make sure that they won’t come along a week after work finishes and dig it up again. That’s important - I recall a job some years ago, where the contractors were still working at one end of a street, when the gas company turned up at the other end and followed them along ripping out what had just been done to replace the gas pipes. If the work is an emergency – water or gas leak for example - then the standard procedures don’t apply.

Libertarians are usually dismissive of the activities of public bodies, arguing that they are attempts to interfere with the smooth operation of the market. In the case I described would transferring the ownership of the streets to private companies reduce complexity? I don’t think so - in fact it seems highly likely that there would be an increase.

Whose space?

Perhaps we shall have to go further, and conclude that the producers of space have always acted in accordance with a representation, while the ‘users’ passively experienced whatever was imposed upon them inasmuch as it was more or less thoroughly inserted into, or justified by, their representational space. How such manipulation might occur is a matter for our analysis to determine. If architects (and urban planners) do indeed have a representation of space, whence does it derive? Whose interests are served when it becomes ‘operational’?

From: The Production of Space, pp43-44, Henri Lefebvre (trans Donald Nicholson-Smith), Blackwell (1991)

Doing anything is complicated, doing it well is even worse

I had a meeting yesterday earlier today with a former colleague and some of his associates to talk about a project I was involved in a few years ago (when I was still a wage slave) to improve the Market Place in a small country town. In reviewing with them what had been involved in getting to a scheme on the ground I was amazed at the complexity of the process and at the number of ‘actor’s involved.

For the area in question the County, District and Town Councils all owned land, for different purposes. On top of them are the numerous other agencies with rights over our streets – utilities like phone, gas, water, cable; bus companies, taxis, organisations like English Heritage, the list seems endless. This ignores the many departments within large organisations, some of which can paradoxically now be outside the organisation. My local County Council for example has out-sourced all its highway design and maintenance to a commercial company, who took on former council staff, rent space in County Hall and operate in many ways as if still a Council Department – causing much confusion in the process. Unfortunately many of these departments still have the ‘silo’ mentality that prevailed when they were organised as professional departments. and thus have a very proprietorial attitude to ‘their’ patch. There are also many other non-statutory bodies – conservation and environmental pressure groups, bodies representing the disabled etc.

This makes simple things like redesigning the paving and lighting in public spaces, enormously complex and time consuming. We estimated that this particular job took something like nine years to completion – and that takes no account of earlier abortive attempts. Some of the problems we were trying to deal with had been highlighted in the 1960s and 1970s by John Betjeman and Alec Clifton-Taylor, but were still there in the 1990s.

Some but not all of this difficulty can be ascribed to the need to meet regulatory standards of one sort or another although sometimes these alleged standards are not standards at all, but have acquired de facto status as such. Fear of litigation is one driver but also at work is I suppose a tendency to do what worked before without thinking about it too much so that ‘what worked before’ acquires a standing that it doesn’t really have.

Ownership was another factor, in this case complicated even further by the relationship of the land owned to the statutory function being delivered. In some cases the ‘silo’ manager gave a higher priority to the function in isolation and failed to recognise the wider context in which it was being delivered – in this case a multi-purpose urban space. It took a lot of effort to get these people to see that their proprietory objectives were actually better met by working with others in collaboration.

There are probably around 2–3000 market towns in the UK – at least – and many of these will have centres that are not so attractive as they could be. This has real economic consequences, especially as big box retailers move into towns they wouldn’t have looked at twice 10 years ago. There is an urgent need to look at ways in which these complexities can be reduced to the minimum.

EDIT - this got posted by BlogJet rather than being saved as a draft. I've left it up however and will come back to the conclusions later - looking I hope at ownership of the street as well as at regulation.

Why cities look the way they do

An astute observation from Michael Jennings in a post at Samizdata

Cities and countries develop a certain character based on what is "modern" at the moment a certain bulk of the built environment is built. (London is defined by the Victorian era. New York is defined by the years between the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Empire State Building. One of my favourite European cities, Porto, is defined by the Art Deco era). China's moment has been the last ten years, and it is full of cityscapes like this. At the moment, western movies and television programs filmed or set in China are focused on the modernistically glam parts of the country or of some vision of the bast. The mundane has not yet become the Chinese mundane in non-Chinese popular consciousness, but it will. And this is the mundane. India's built environment has not yet reached that crucial moment. When it does what is modern will have changed, and India will have a quite different look from China. What it will be remains to be seen.