{"id":40800,"date":"2024-08-30T16:05:56","date_gmt":"2024-08-30T15:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=40800"},"modified":"2024-08-30T17:54:00","modified_gmt":"2024-08-30T16:54:00","slug":"ihbc-features-heritage-from-the-global-doorstep-a-view-on-planning-in-labour-from-the-world-architecture-festival-6-8-24-singapore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/?p=40800","title":{"rendered":"IHBC features \u2018Heritage from the Global doorstep\u2019: A view on planning in Labour, from the World Architecture Festival 6-8\/24, Singapore"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n
image for illustration: Open Government Licence v3.0<\/em><\/h6>\n

Jeremy Melvin has posted a his view on the history of planning in Labour as part of the World Architecture Festival.<\/em><\/h3>\n

<\/p>\n

…government see a \u2018streamlined\u2019 planning system as integral to creating growth…<\/span><\/em><\/h2>\n

World Architecture Festival writes:<\/p>\n

\u2018We will immediately update the Planning Policy Guidance Framework\u2019, trumpeted the Labour Party\u2019s manifesto, setting out the programme for which it won a massive parliamentary majority (but only 20 per cent of the popular vote) in the UK\u2019s recent general election, writes Jeremy Melvin. This is in a section labeled \u2018Kickstart Economic Growth\u2019, and it goes on to reference the usual platitudes about making home ownership affordable \u2013 a genuine problem across most of the UK \u2013 prioritizing brownfield land for development, and only releasing the green belt \u2018in the right places\u2019, presumably that sliver of constituencies which were unenlightened enough to elect Conservative MPs.<\/p>\n

This wondrous new policy will also respect biodiversity, nature and sustainability. Coupled with the idea of making the UK a \u2018green energy superpower\u2019 through establishing an entity called Great British Energy, it will doubtlessly lead towards the New Jerusalem which Labour has promised us for most of its 130-year existence. Apart, though, from that old tried, tired and tested Soviet stratagem of \u2018setting targets\u2019, it is unclear how this will be delivered, let alone how it will \u2018kickstart economic growth\u2019.<\/p>\n

All this is part of a long-term trend in Western democracies, where the electorate expects governments to solve all their problems \u2013 economic, financial, aspirational, health, intellectual development and housing. Leave aside for a moment Hayek\u2019s persuasive argument in The Road to Serfdom (1943), that allowing the state to plan our existence runs the risk of the title. The trend dates back to the late 19th century when politicians began to adopt what Robert Skidelsky (in his biography of J M Keynes) terms the \u2018Benthamite calculus\u2019 of trying to ensure \u2018the greatest good for the greatest number\u2019. This makes a certain amount of sense in a mass democracy, but it created an open invitation for those of a bossy disposition \u2013 already overrepresented among politicians \u2013 to impose their will on the rest of us.<\/p>\n

A recent partial analysis of this trend can be found in a recent book by FT columnist Ruchir Sharma, What Went Wrong with Capitalism (2024). He argues that policies followed by politicians and central bankers seek to remove all risk from capitalism, using fiscal policy and interest rates to try to abolish the possibility of recession. Sharma argues that this undermines the very essence and virtue of capitalism for \u2018creative destruction\u2019, and hence wealth creation and redistribution. This may seem some way removed from policies affecting spatial planning, but to the incoming Labour government \u2013 as to the Conservatives before them \u2013 the British planning system has been regarded as a break on economic growth. That growth is the Holy Grail of followers of the Benthamite calculus, as it generates greater revenue for governments to spend on public services, avoiding or reducing the need to increase taxes. Its success hinges around increasing productivity, a longstanding problem in the UK, recently exaggerated by Covid-related policies which enforced state-subsidized idleness. Incidentally, the Labour leader at the time, now prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, demanded those policies should last longer, be more restrictive and imposed more frequently. Does he still think that?…<\/p>\n

\u2026 In order to understand how Labour\u2019s ambitions might work, we need to separate a certain amount of wheat from a great deal of chaff. Chief among this amalgam is a long- running confusion between spatial and economic planning. In the late 19th century, town planning \u2013 at least in the UK \u2013 became an object of public policy. Its main concern was public health, in response to the unhealthy conditions of slum housing. This spawned a series of local bye laws and settlements known pejoratively as \u2018bye law housing\u2019. One popular solution to this in the first decade of the 20th century was garden cities, to which Raymond Unwin would give an unmistakable image, apparently based on traditional Cotswold-style villages, but with underlying radical elements which found their apotheosis in the modernist houses schemes of the 1920s. Unwin\u2019s influence continued through the housing for munitions workers built during World War I, the \u2018homes for heroes\u2019 campaign in its aftermath and into the generation of public housing built through the 1920s\u2026<\/p>\n

Housing and health became indelibly associated, grouped in the same ministry which after the Labour victory in 1945 was headed by Aneurin (Nye) Bevan\u2026<\/p>\n

As Keynes had been the intellectual force behind the Macmillan Commission, so Patrick Abercrombie was on the Barlow Commission. He largely authored the commission\u2019s minority report, which was eventually \u2013 and unusually \u2013 adopted over that of the majority. This advocated the creation of a Ministry of Town and Country Planning, which became the apex of the implementation of spatial planning as an economic policy\u2026. They included Harlow, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Peterlee and Milton Keynes. Conceptually, if not aesthetically, they were very close to the garden cities, with the thread of continuity being Frederick Osborn, leading light in the Town and Country Planning Association, who wrote in 1977, shortly before the end of his very long life, that coupled with the 1946 New Towns Act, the TCPA of 1947 created a \u2018machinery for positive town construction\u2019.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, each of the towns mentioned above had a noted architect as its chief planner, respectively Sir Frederick Gibberd, the urbane old Harrovian Anthony Monoprio, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, Berthold Lubetkin and Walter Bor (of Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker and Bor). All were qualified successes, the qualification perhaps most forcibly proven in a BBC documentary made in the 1960s and fronted by Reyner Banham \u2013 a new town sceptic and colleague of Llewelyn-Davies at the Bartlett \u2013 who argued that their inevitable fate was, not as Osborn (and before him the instigator of garden cities Ebenezer Howard) hoped, to be self-sufficient settlements, but to be gobbled up by and become satellites of the nearest big city, in most cases, London. Even the fiercest and most enlightened legislation could not prevent this from happening\u2026<\/p>\n

\u2026 Both the defeated Conservative government and today\u2019s incoming Labour government see a \u2018streamlined\u2019 planning system as integral to creating growth. While the Conservatives performed so many U-turns and somersaults over planning policy that it is hard to identify an intellectual programme, the Labour Party has been more explicit. All the present ills, it claims, stem from \u2018Tory mistakes\u2019 and all can be solved by enlightened planning, largely of a spatial variety. Apparently, at least so far, without any apparent means of delivery, planning can solve our housing crisis, our lack of transport, our productivity deficit, and bring us energy security. New Jerusalem, here we come! And like New Jerusalem, or the wait for Godot in Samuel Beckett\u2019s eponymous play, there is no clarity, at least yet, about means and method of delivery.<\/p>\n

Read more….<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

image for illustration: Open Government Licence v3.0 Jeremy Melvin has posted a his view on the history of planning in Labour as part of the World Architecture Festival.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[6,30,9,52,16],"class_list":["post-40800","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ihbc-newsblog","tag-building","tag-environment","tag-government","tag-philosophy","tag-planning"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40800","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40800"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40800\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40837,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40800\/revisions\/40837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40800"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40800"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsblogs.ihbc.org.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40800"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}