Political think tank DEMOS has published ‘A room with a view: remaking the relationship between citizens and the built environment’, a blog by Lucy Bush, Director of Research and Participation.
Lucy Bush writes:
Look out of your nearest window and what do you see? Wherever you are in the country, whether there are buildings in sight or not, your view is almost certainly of a human habitat. It might sound unlikely given that only 10.5% of land in the UK is officially classed as being built up, but it is also true that there are very few views today that would count as truly wild. Instead, whatever you can see is the result of human ideas and human actions, shaped to meet human needs. The result of millions of minutely laid out plans, grand ambitions, the most mundane of everyday habits and behaviours, high fashions and ultimately, decisions, layered through time and rendered in solid form.
The most tangible decisions that you see before you, are the decisions to build something at all; that is, the decision to build in this place instead of that place; the decision to build this thing instead of that thing. But equally, your view will be the outcome of decisions not to build, perhaps decisions to demolish and start again, or decisions to repair, refit, redecorate or repurpose. Who gets to make those decisions? Whose ideas, what values, do you see embedded into your view? Who won or lost the argument to shape that space? Who was even involved in the discussion?
The view from my window, as I type this, looks out over the 1970s-built, council estate in which I live. From my fourth floor flat I can see one of the other blocks as it curves (rather clunkily) around a generous communal garden. There are several fine mature trees in view with a tangle of overgrown shrubbery, squealing children and rusting play equipment around their feet.
What decisions can I see embodied in this view?
The reason this view exists at all is because of a collective decision made in the postwar era to provide council-funded housing for working class Londoners at rent levels in line with their income. The policy was in many ways more than a decision; it was a declaration that decent, affordable housing was a right, not a privilege. The estate looks the way it does – ‘brick-clad [with] glass-tiled entrances… eye-catchingly modernist’ (according to John Boughton, author of Municipal Dreams) and now, a bit rough around the edges (according to me) because of decisions made about what was considered a fitting style for council properties at the time and the corners cut to save costs in upkeep since. The blocks were part of the ‘Five Estates’ area between Burgess Park and Peckham Road that was remodelled in the 1990s as part of a sweeping regeneration project. Most of the other estates were razed to the ground; others were spruced up a bit; a decision was made to leave this one standing relatively untouched.
The fact that I happen to be sitting here, looking out at this view, is a result of Thatcher’s decision in 1980 to introduce Right to Buy. It enabled the previous owner of our flat to purchase it from the council at a 70% discount and sell it to us on the open market.
This is what makes the built environment so fascinating.
Buildings, streets, roads and parks – they are primarily objects you share space with, places you inhabit. They are experienced in the way they look, the way you use and move through them. But of course there is another way to read buildings and streets – as expressions of power and of capital. What then, as a citizen, can I learn, by looking at the stories that our buildings are telling us? If I look at the place I live in, take the time to interrogate the view out of my window, or look up from my phone as I sit on the bus, what is the built environment saying to me? What is it communicating about my value to society? My place in the world? What can I learn about who has power and agency? And who doesn’t?
We need to renew and remake the relationship between citizens and our built environment. For example:
- Trialling radical new ways to prompt deeper engagement with place and with one another. (See the amazing work done by Intelligent Health in their Beat the Streets programme for one such idea).
- Rebalancing the planning system away from discretionary decision-making, towards a set of clear rules embodied in the Local Plan, that representative public panels in each local area are deeply involved in setting, reviewing and auditing.
- Changing the rules and incentives that developers are currently working within so that it is not possible to row back on promises on affordable housing.
- Instituting early and representative public participation in the making of Spatial Development Strategies as recommended in our report The MIMBY Majority.
- Instituting a participatory process that operates at different points in the system to help politicians mediate trade-offs between planning decisions at the national, regional and local levels.
- We need a radical new way for the public, local planning authorities and developers to work together that is more constructive, authentic and grounded in the public interest. And then, maybe in several decades’ time, we will have a view to look out on that tells us a positive story about who we are.
