THE FATE OF THE COUNTRYSIDE: DEATH BY PLANNING?

A review of SOCIABLE CITIES: the legacy of Ebenezer Howard by Peter Hall and Colin Ward (Wiley, Chichester, 1998):

In October 1998, with much fanfare, Sir Peter Hall, Chairman of the Town and Country Planning Association, launched a book called "Sociable Cities" which he had co-authored with Colin Ward. Although overtly a history of the "Garden City" movement, the book was in fact a detailed presentation of the case for three new "city clusters" each incoporating up to 20 new garden cities. The locations of the proposed cities of "Mercia," "Anglia" and "Kent" are Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire and East Kent.

The City of Mercia would be a horseshoe-shaped development with eleven new towns from Rugby to Northampton, Wellingborough and Kettering. The City of Anglia would incorporate 18 new settlements in a triangle which would include Cambridge, Sandy, Huntingdon, Peterborough and Ely.

The City of Kent would cover virtually all of East Kent linking existing towns from Ashford and Faversham eastwards with 18 new towns built along the major roads. This would have the practical effect of making Canterbury its city centre. described by Sir Peter Hall as a way of avoiding urban sprawl, the new settlements would be built along existing major road and rail routes encouraging linear development on farmland and protected sites. The proposals take as a basis forecast demands for housing which bear no relation to identifiable population increase.

The "predict and provide" figures of up to 5 million homes are the dark dream of the construction industry and allied planners, justified against smaller household size and pressure for population movement into the South East. Such plans are the antithesis of urban regeneration, which could readily include more flats and apartments for single people in urban areas. How seriously should such nightmare scenarios be taken? Sir Peter Hall has already assisted the current Government in helping to set the fantasy housing demand estimates which have risen from 4.4 million new households in a 20 year period under the Conservatives to the current favoured figure of 5 million.(see pp112-115 of "Sociable Cities")

The Labour Government has not undertaken any significant legislative initiatives with respect to the environment. Worse still, it is permitting airport expansion and even the Birmingham Northern Relief Road. Ministers and tacticians may see an opportunity in these proposals to extend Labour dominance of urban England by urbanising the countryside which remains the heartland of the Conservative vote. Construction of new towns could turn Labour-held marginal seats in the areas specified for these new "city clusters" into safe Labour seats in the future. Labour leaders will recall the precedent set by Lansbury, amongst others, whose boast that the Conservatives would be "..built out of London" as a result of council house building in the early era of municipal socialism proved to be true for most London councils for most of this century. So a Labour Government with an apparent lack of commitment to introduce and implement better environmental policy may well be tempted to take up these proposals. Also, with adherents in every local council, the unelected "planning party" may get its way as a result of Government failure to restrain development. "Sociable Cities" examined in more detail:book begins with an idealised account of the contributors to the Garden City movement.

There is an attempt to describe the early Garden Cities as "sustainable" (p.23) but the ideas of people like Ebenezer Howard were developed long before the full impact of the car upon western Europe. Also, the conceptions of Howard writing in 1898 were those applicable to the population density of his period - not 1998. Major problems between Howard and commercial interests and a lack of enthusiasm from the increasingly influential Fabian Society are indicative of a general distance between the Garden City idea and the contemporaneous political and economic realities. (p.30 onwards)

The very limited initial successes of the Garden City Movement should perhaps be considered against the one general success it did have: the notion of low-density housing rather than the flats of continental European communities is still firmly planted in the planning profession. This is a disastrous situation which explains why an area the size of Bristol disappears beneath development each year in Britain. Promotion of Garden Cities continued between the two World Wars with little result. The Garden City Town Planning Association became the Town and Country Planning Association in 1941, campaigning vigorously at this time against high-rise, high-density approaches to meeting housing need. (p.47)

It is noteworthy that the era of greater building security seems to have contributed to a more positive image for high-rise blocks according to those who live in them, to be seen in some recent articles. The TCPA tactics seems to have contributed to the thinking of the Labour Government of 1945-50. The New Towns Act of 1946 was the Labour response to urban squalor when the re-development of existing towns and cities would have been cheaper and would have retained community identity. From 1946, for a period of 50 years, 28 new towns were built - many outgrowing the modest size advocated by Ebenezer Howard, amongst them Stevenage and Milton Keynes. (pp53-55)

The new towns vary in character from ones like Milton Keynes which has proved to be a successful community in many respects to utterly ghastly developments like Cumbernauld, Runcorn and Harlow which reflect the worse characteristics of modern architecture. Howard's principle of people being able to walk to their workplace was an early casualty of the increasingly random growth of many of the new towns. new towns are claimed to have helped to decentralise employment away from London (p.67) but the decentralisation of the civil service and the creation of nationalised industries throughout the country arguably had this effect anyway.some examination of the plotlands idea and continental planning practice, the book begins to turn towards pro-development propaganda.

A survey of the satisfaction of people with their immediate environment is presented as evidence that about 2/3 of the population want gardens and that the satisfaction of people is greater when they live in smaller communities. Smaller communities can be created within the largest of cities and rooftop, window-box, reclaimed paved yard and allotments can accommodate those city dwellers who do want gardens - and help to clean up city air too. This is highly inadequate material since people's preferences not tested against their sense of community identity and the suggestion that people are less happy in larger settlements suggests the need for urban regeneration not greenfield site development.

Many single young people do not make use of gardens when they have them and many elderly people have gardens they cannot maintain themselves. It would have been very valuable to hear what the inhabitants of the various new towns think about their communities but this is something the book does not provide. In fact, people are treated as the subject of planning rather than the source of decisions about planning.phenomenon of set-aside land is used (pp107-108) to justify further development in the countryside. This inefficiency in agriculture and under-development of forestry industries can hardly be used to justify urban sprawl. The authors support the contention that protection of rural areas is "excessive", which exposes their basic anti-environment bias.(p.109)

To further justify their views, the authors confront the suggested balance between greenfield and brownfield development and suggest only 30-40% of future development could be on brownfield sites - not the 60% the current Government says is its target. This is nonsensical, given their avoidance of the question of urban regeneration which could involve: building above surface car parks, retaining some parking at the base of new structures; utilising space above shops; converting unused office space to flats; building low-rise blocks in parts of urban industrial estates which have long-term vacant space; transferring Ministry of Defence brownfield land to local authorities with a view to creating housing and other forms of development. Hall and Ward assert that you could not achieve greater urban density without a reduction in "urban quality" (p.115). In practice, the opposite is true: more people living in urban areas within a framework of environmental policies to decrease traffic and support plant and tree growth would enormously enhance under-populated city centres and run-down estates enclosed in urban areas.

Amongst many very questionable assertions, the authors suggest no more money will be made available to the cities. Since even the current Government envisages removing capping of local government spending at some point, this statement lacks a basis in fact. Also, the possibility of new sources of Government revenue like air fuel taxation or a general carbon tax plus higher taxes on high income and on wealth gives Government a range of choices of revenue to support local government in the future. Also, Government can tackle waste by local government like road building, most co-called road improvements and car park construction. Similarly, they suggest that the majority of householders prefer surburban or rural locations - a straightforward, unjustified construction industry argument. (p.119) Even more doubtful, they predict "severe fiscal restraints on the use of the car will not be introduced".

The commitment of both the last Government and this Government to increase tax on fuel at rates above the level of inflation is to be ignored? As global warming makes more impact upon climatic conditions and arguments against it diminish in significance as data accumulates, it is going to become ever easier to tax people through the private car. They also argue that people will resist intensification of urban settlement,(p.120) although local residents' associations and environmentalists in many communities are arguing for such intensification - to keep cars out and protect the countryside.

Hall and Ward are very anti-flats (see p.132) but what is at fault is building standards not the idea of flats or apartments themselves. European cities like Vienna house most of their people in flats, but the space per person is generally far greater than what we see in flats in Britain. High building standards ensure low noise levels and low repair and maintenance costs.

Introducing the section of the book on the proposed three city clusters, the authors commend the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and suggest metro development within the proposed City of Kent. Setting aside for the moment the immense cost of light rail and metro development, a factor also in the long delay in building the Tunnel Rail Link, there is another salient factor the authors ignore. In a short time, the European Commission will complete work on a Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive which may well obstruct development upon protected landscapes. This Directive will require prior research paid for by the developer concerning any large-scale project. The new "city clusters" will be phenomenally expensive and require Government funds especially for the least profitable parts of the development - like roads and railways. Developers will only be interested in short-term profit aspects of the "city clusters".

If the Government has to pay for a Strategic Environmental Assessment to be done and for infrastructure then the costs over the period to 2016 - in which Britain is supposed to gain 5 million homes - would without doubt be comparable in scale to the budgets of whole Government departments. The dispersed nature of the "city clusters" and need for many new roads, coupled with the failure to use brownfield sites properly guarantee billions of pounds of public funds would be needed.

It is quite remarkable that the authors commend the "Thames Gateway" initiative which is contributing to the almost continuous urbanisation of north-east Kent.(p.149) Nothing further away from a garden city concept could be imagined. Rochester in the Medway towns vies with Canterbury as the worst place in Kent for air pollution.

Of the three proposed cities, I am taking the City of Kent proposal as an example to demonstrate the many problems with this re-styled version of urban sprawl. First, let us consider that Canterbury is the potential hub of the new City which has major transport implications for a city of just c34,000. Canterbury has two railway stations, a major bus station and is the central point of East Kent's road links. Canterbury is designated as a sub-regional shopping centre under the Kent Structure Plan, is one of Europe's major tourist destinations and has more students in proportion to its resident population than any city or town in Europe. Canterbury's shopping area and retail parks at the urban periphery give it the largest retail zone in Kent - until the completion of the Bluewater development in the former Blue Circle quarries at Dartford which with 285+ shops will be the largest out of town shopping development in Europe.

The concentration of retail development that impoverishes neighbouring towns is combined with three institutions of higher education, three public schools, many language schools and an unusual concentration of state-sector schools also. The effect of this planning incompetence is traffic nearing gridlock, an incredibly busy shopping centre congested with people, air pollution and noise at very high levels in many parts of the city. The traffic implications of further greenfield site housing in East Kent can be imagined.

Development around Canterbury has been severely restrained to date by the presence of grade 1 and grade 2 agricultural land and protected forest. Linear development as contemplated throughout East Kent to build this City would inevitably involve destroying the most ecologically valuable elements of the East Kent landscape.

East Kent's coastal towns certainly need development which the gross over-development of Canterbury has denied to them. Transfer of a Government department to Thanet could be readily achieved and would mean the 1800 empty properties and many derelict industrial and retail sites in this poor district would come into use. This would be rather more rational (p.169) than building on the Dungeness shingle promontory which has an estimated maximum one hundred years of life, has a significant geological fault line which is also beneath the Channel Tunnel, and two rapidly ageing nuclear power stations which are a major disincentive for people to move into the area. Dungeness is flat and low-lying and open to prevailing winds. A more inhospitable place for housing could hardly be found. Much of the existing coastal housing is in the form of holiday homes.

While a regional metro for the region would be desirable, linking towns which have long suffered from poor rail services and appalling rolling stock, the cost would be astronomical. In fact, it might only be contemplated when high levels of fuel taxation were actually pushing down car use. The book's general comments place a lot of faith in the Private Finance Initiative but this is in reality a "cherry-pickers charter": another Severn Crossing with a good guarantee of a return through tolls; new hospitals with the Government footing many aspects of the long-term costs; the Birmingham Northern Relief Road with hefty tolls. The idea of "city clusters" is comparable only to the Channel Tunnel and its associated Rail Link: meaning financial problems are paramount. The Channel Tunnel was only built because private finance was available from Japan in the 1980s, a source dried up by currency problems in the late 1990s. It has taken the donation of £35.2 billion in public assets by Government to the developer plus additional funds and guarantees to get work started on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. In general, the economic aspects of the book are weak and unrealistic.

General comments:

The book is obsessed with "houses" rather than "homes". It simply is not possible to turn back the clock and build Garden cities in South East England. The economic and ecologically sustainable solution to meeting actual housing need is urban regeneration, run by local authorities. The dispersed development of the proposed "city clusters" is a proposed enhancement of car use in the South East, reason enough by itself to oppose these proposals and any version of them appearing in the minds of local planning officers. The book does illustrate a serious social need: re-education of the planning profession in urban re-development. We need more environmental protection, not less as this book suggests, and more restraints upon local planning authorities. We need to protect the future from the planners or face continuation of their ruinous activities in our countryside.

Author: Steve Dawe steve.dawe@btclick.com

34 Bramshaw Road, CANTERBURY, Kent. CT2 7HR Tel. 01227 767809

Steve Dawe is Chair of PACE (People Against Canterbury Expansion) a coalition of local residents' and environmental groups in the Canterbury City Council area. He teaches European Studies and Internastional Relations at the University of Kent at Canterbury.