When the worst decisions are often made it is not because nothing should be done, but because speed starts to be confused with seriousness, reports Placemaking Europe, a non-profit organisation that supports practitioners working with communities to shape better cities.
Placemaking Europe writes:
We are seeing this in the housing debate. Faced with rising prices, a shortage of supply and accumulated social pressure, more and more leaders are defending, with conviction, that what matters now is only to build more, faster and cheaper. We will deal later with quality, with urban integration, with public transport, with squares, with everyday life. The emergency, they tell us, does not allow us to maintain standards.
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… The question is not whether we need to build, but where, how and for whom we are willing to lower the bar… this rhetoric almost never appears when the best-located plots are at stake, the central neighbourhoods, the well-connected environments, the places with the highest real estate value. Those spaces have usually already been planned or developed…
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… The housing crisis is inseparable from the price of land, from financial markets, from income inequality, from everyday mobility, from the provision of services, from local taxation, from the type of city we have incentivised for decades and even from our idea of what matters in life. It is not solved only by building more..
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… the challenge is not to choose between urgency and quality… The challenge is to reject that false dilemma…
