What people want and what they get
A planning system works best when it provides people with the homes they want.
Although this may sound obvious, experience shows it is far from being so. Up to and including the present day, decision makers (and those lobbying them) have certain ideas about how people should live and what a planning system should achieve. Instead of following people's preferences, the views of politicians, government officials and planners are far too often imposed on the population at large. This has meant telling people what is best for them, treating them like children unable to make informed choices for themselves.
So people are told they ought to consume less land to protect the countryside, and that they should live in higher density environments to save fuel. They have been led to believe that all this is necessary to achieve the overall goal of 'sustainable communities', but no one ever bothers to ask residents what they think a truly sustainable community actually is. Our planning system is a classic symptom of "the man in Whitehall knows best" tendency in government.
There are ways of finding out what people generally want. The most straightforward way is to observe which houses people rent and buy. One only has to look at the property market and compare prices. You do not need to be a real estate expert to find a clear pattern. The bigger a house, the nicer and greener its environment (location, location, location!), the more access to transport and amenities, the more detached it is from neighbouring properties and the bigger its garden, the more it will be worth.
These prices reflect more than just the cost of building these houses. They are so high because many people want to live that way: given the necessary means a large group would opt for this kind of housing. In economic terms the 'greenness' of the surrounding area is capitalised into the price of the houses. And research indicates that the higher the proportion of the surrounding area which is parkland or otherwise green, the higher will be the value of the houses.
This openness can be measured more directly by asking people to say how much keeping land undeveloped is worth to them. The figure of £10.8 million per hectare quoted in the Kate Barker's Interim Report as the value of 'urban core public space' (i.e. a city park) was obtained in this way.
People want to live in places that provide them with the pleasures of a rather rural lifestyle while at the same time they value the advantages that cities offer. Of course, this is not a new discovery. In fact, it was Ebenezer Howard, in his visionary book To-morrow - A peaceful path to real reform, who drew the famous three magnets diagram. It showed that both town and country had features to offer that people valued highly, while others were regarded as less favourable. Positive characteristics about the town are employment and places of amusements, whereas the country could offer the beauty of nature and fresh air. His solution was to come up with an urban design that incorporated the best of both worlds, the idea of the garden city. It turns out that this is precisely what many people want, even one hundred years after the publication of To-morrow.
The current planning system has actually grown out of the garden city movement, but over time its goals seem to have been reversed. The aims of the founders of town planning were not that people should live at high densities in apartment blocks. Visionaries like Ebenezer Howard or Raymond Unwin understood that people wanted to live in houses with space around them, both private and public, and set out to help them achieve their goals. Selling off playing fields would never have been part of their plans. Nor is it now what any but a tiny minority of the population want. Yet this is what is happening. For example, between 1992 and 2005 out of the 77,949 playing fields nearly 34,000 disappeared5 as planning policies focus on developing within existing towns instead of letting cities grow outwards. In fact, the Government has set a target for using at least 60 per cent of so-called brown field land for new development. This policy is meant to 'recycle' areas that were previously developed, and sounds like a reasonable idea. However, many of these brown fields look remarkably green. These are inner-city areas that nature has reclaimed. Many are now valuable havens for plants and animals in the cities, and they also provide recreational spaces for children and adults. From the statistical evidence we know that people prefer to live in green environments. Most would like to enjoy the clean air and greenery of the countryside or at second best would like to live in green cities. Yet, with disappearing playing fields, the re-use of 'green' brown field sites and densification policies it becomes less and less likely that people will ever live in such an environment. A report by the London Assembly Environment Committee found that front gardens in London 22 times the size of Hyde Park have been paved over and lost.6 The use of global satellite imagery at a high level of detail tells us that the built up, as opposed to green, area of London expanded at an average rate of one and a half per cent per year in the nineties.Our cities less and less resemble the places where people want to live: they are becoming grey deserts. It should hardly be surprising that this is bad news for nature too. The Independent newspaper has reported the mystery of disappearing butterflies.8 With gardens disappearing, cities getting denser and highly intensive agriculture surrounding the cities, butterflies have nowhere to go.
Jul 06
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