Homes, Cities and Neighbourhoods

Planning and the Residential Landscapes of Modern Britain

Barry Goodchild

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351930499
• Subtopic: Local & Regional Planning Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Given current projections of population and household numbers, housing has become arguably the most important issue in planning. Likewise, planning raises arguably the most important long term issues in housing, given the environmental consequences of urban development and the use of the home. Homes, Cities and Neighbourhoods documents the evolution of typical urban landscapes from 1900 to the present with an emphasis on contemporary issues and practice. In doing this, the book examines in detail: -

PART A
Introduction

Chapter 1
The Aims and Scope

Let us imagine a typical urban area in Britain. This urban area is an imaginary place, but one that includes a cross-section of the conditions and types of neighbourhood found in all British cities. It has neighbourhoods of high housing demand and a vibrant city centre. Equally, it has zones of industrial dereliction, depressed house prices and social deprivation. Likewise, this urban area possesses a full range of house types. It possesses nineteenth-century terraces and tenements, low density residential suburbs of varied dates, inner city flats that were built by the local council and privately developed city centre flats.

What are the processes that have created the residential landscapes of this urban area? How can one classify the main periods in their formation? What are the distinctive processes at work at present compared to say 40 or 50 years ago? What has been the role of planning? What is its likely, continuing role? What are the main contemporary planning issues? What are the lessons for practitioners and those interested in practice?

Such are the questions that concern this study. Though the account includes many examples, the aim is not to provide a detailed account of a specific place or city. Instead the aim is to draw out general tendencies and issues in the history of planning and urban development. Likewise, the aim is not to provide specific recommendations or examples of good practice, but to draw out the broad lessons. Put slightly differently, the aim is to provide a contemporary history of urban planning through a focus on housing. A contemporary history is one that goes beyond narratives and chronology to look at contemporary issues and the dynamics of change.

A contemporary history of residential landscapes focuses on housing as ‘urbanism’. This does not mean ‘new urbanism’, which is a prescriptive method of urban design and is only a small part of the subject matter. Instead, the focus is on urbanism understood as a hybrid field of study between urban design, urban geography and urban planning. Housing as urbanism is concerned with living conditions, with the physical form of housing, with the management of urban growth and sometimes with the management of urban decline.

The Aims

A brief review of the existing literature allows the aims to be stated in more detail as follows.

Homes, Cities and Neighbourhoods In Relation to Planning

Providing a new account and a new history of urban planning is the first aim. Planning and housing are mutually interdependent. Planning in the sense of a future-oriented style of intervention, helps determine the form of housing and the future of residential areas. Conversely, public concerns about affordable good quality housing help determine planning policy. Planning involves an assessment of future demands and needs in relation to urban development. In relation to land take and overall costs, housing and its related infrastructure provide the main components of such assessments.

The close links between housing and planning do not mean an untroubled relationship. From the first planning legislation, the Housing, Town Planning, Etc. Act, 1909 to the present, the relationship has been characterised by conflicts about policy aims and priorities. Housing and planning have evolved together in response to external political and economic changes, but not in a coherent, co-ordinated way. Each decade has had its orthodoxy, each has had its voices of dissent and each has typically been characterised by a multitude of reports and policy recommendations that impinge on both housing and planning in different ways.

A series of reports illustrate the range of sometimes conflicting policy issues that have affected planning and housing.

• The report of the Urban Task Force Towards an Urban Renaissance has promoted urban design in planning, that is to say planning as place making rather than an exercise in land use allocation and has, in this context, placed more emphasis on high density new build, on urban intensification and the renewal of run down neighbourhoods (UTC 1999).
• The Sustainable Communities policy plan has argued for integrated planning and housing policies that might facilitate a combination of house building in growth areas and neighbourhood renewal in regions in decline. Again the implication is that planning should conceive of housing in terms of places rather than the simple allocation of land use (ODPM 2003b).
• Finally the Barker Review (2004) of house prices and affordability, a recent policy statement Homes for the Future (DCLG 2007c) and a further review of house building delivery by Calcutt (2007) have reasserted the significance of earlier twentieth-century concerns with house completion numbers and the quality of new housing.

The reports mostly deal with England. Since the devolution of powers in 1999, policy and policy debates in Scotland and Wales have largely run in parallel, but with increasing differences in detail. The issues raised in the various reports are, in any case, not unique to Britain. They are likely to arise in any relatively wealthy country characterised by a popular commitment to housing as a focus for consumption; by increasing, but uneven pressure pressures on land resources and property markets; and by an increased concern with environmental protection in all its forms.

Put slightly differently, planning for housing in Britain offers a case study of the issues that arise in planning for sustainable development. Current understandings of sustainable development date from Our Common Future by the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) and the subsequent international policy commitments made at the United Nations Earth Summit of 1992. Sustainable development is an international concept, one that has received numerous and repeated references at virtually all levels of planning from the local to the global.

Yet concepts of sustainable development are also contested. Cautious, pragmatic definitions are mostly about balancing different aspects of policy. The British government’s definition of ‘sustainable communities’ refers, for example, to the need to ‘balance and integrate the social, economic and environmental components’ of community life.¹ In contrast, other definitions adopt a market-critical, green perspective. Sustainable development means, in this context, a process of developing land, cities and communities in a way that protects biodiversity, promotes human health and minimises the use of finite resources. A recent report, The Urban Environment by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2007), implicitly adopts such a green perspective.

Moreover, the green movement possesses another related division. On one hand, eco-centric or deep green positions treat lifestyle changes as essential to sustainable development. For example, they would argue that affluent individuals and families should minimise the level of winter heating in the home and reduce the level of personal travelling by car and aeroplane. On the other, techno-centric or light green positions assume a continuation of existing lifestyles and attempt to work out technological solutions, including solutions based on redesigning and re-equipping the built environment.

In Britain, the relationship between housing and planning has largely been examined through different specialised accounts. Various examples can be cited – the role of the statutory town planning system (Gallent and Tewdr-Jones 2007); the design of the external environment in housing (Carmona 2001; Edwards 1981); and finally the process of land development (Adam and Watkins 2002; Golland and Blake, eds., 2004). All these different accounts need to be brought together, updated and related to concepts of neighbourhood and community, as is explicit in the Sustainable Communities policy plan. In addition, the various specialist accounts need to be discussed in the context of general studies of planning theory and the history of planning. Planning and Urban Change by Ward (2004) is the best-known, recently published history of planning in Britain. Its housing content consists of a series of fragments – the early, pre-1919 garden city movement, the post1945 neighbourhood and the redevelopment projects of the 1950s and 1960s.

Conceptualising the history of planning means in turn seeking a balance between optimism and pessimism, modernism and postmodernism. One obvious trap is to fall into the overoptimistic, grand narratives of progress that were commonplace in the 1950s and 1960s and have been criticised b. Sandercock (1998) amongst others. These were histories that saw planning and allied forms of urban design as means of promoting modernity in the built environment and progress in urban management. Examples include Ashworth’s The Genesis of Modern British Town Planning (1954), for many years, considered the definitive history of the subject; Public Authority Housing by Cleeve Barr (1958); and Homes, Towns and Traffic by Tetlow and Goss (1965). An extract from the latter summarises the assumptions of this type of optimistic account. ‘No one’, declared Tetlow and Goss (ibid., 19), ‘should doubt the need for a more scientific basis and greater technical competence in reshaping our habitat.’ The other, opposing trap is to adopt an exclusive concern with postmodern styles of planning, understood as a pluralist reaction against the modern. Postmodernism, though important, is one, but not the only interpretation of the contemporary world. Instead, a contemporary history must attempt to understand contemporary processes of change whilst simultaneously revealing aspects of continuity with the past.

In Relation to Housing Studies

The second, but no less important aim is to update and extend the history of housing, including relevant aspects of social history. Burnett’s A Social History of Housing, first published in 1978 and then in a second edition in 1986, continues to provide the most widely cited example of a history of house building and design. Much of its content concerns the nineteenth century, however and the narrative stops in the early 1980s. In any case, updating the history of housing involves more than merely inserting the events of the past few years. Updating also requires a shift in emphasis towards the neighbourhood and, in addition, towards urban design, as is recognised in recent policy shifts represented by the Urban Renaissance policy agenda and the Sustainable Communities policy plan.

Otherwise, housing history and more generally housing studies are either about housing policy, tenure and management or about specific types of housing or episodes in the history of design. The latter, more specific accounts are numerous and diverse. Sim (1993) has covered the history of design in social housing, including contemporary issues but stops towards the end of the 1980s. Rodger (1989) has summarised the origins of nineteenth-century house types, without following subsequent twentieth-century attitudes and policies towards these house types. Swenarton (1981) has examined in detail the rationale for the Homes for Heroes building programme that started in 1919 and the design of the estates and houses built as part of the programme. Others have examined the history of particular house types notably the high rise flat (Sutcliffe, ed., 1974; Glendinning and Muthesius 1994), the bungalow (King 1984) and the English terrace (Muthesius 1982). The history of housing design and house types is, of course, not the same as the history of the urban landscape or of urban development. These are histories of elements and have to be synthesised and brought together.

Housing and the Environment: A New Agenda by Bhatti et al. (1994) is an exception in housing studies. It deals with sustainable development and advocates a new approach to housing policy concerned with ‘futurity’ (the principle of sustainable development), ‘environment’ (environmental impact), equity (countering environmental poverty) and ‘participation’ (involving people in decision-making). Housing and the Environment is not a systematic analysis of sustainable development, however in relation to housing and it does not provide analysis of the role of planning as a distinctive form of decision-making. A similar omission applies to the present author’s similarly named Housing and the Urban Environment (Goodchild 1997). This latter provides an analysis of different aspects of housing quality, the regulation of housing and planning. It does not analyse the characteristics of the planning process and, in addition, does not attempt to chart processes of change, as is the aim of the present study.

A later article by Brown and Bhatti (2003) reflects on the subsequent experience of ‘housing and the environment’. The authors note that interest in the environment amongst housing practitioners grew in the 1990s, but that this was not reflected in the growth of relevant theory. As an academic field, housing studies has mostly arisen from the practical concerns of teaching professional housing management or from undertaking contract research. The focus has been on a succession of substantive social problems (homelessness, poor condition, affordability, low demand) or implementation issues (finance, costs and administrative coordination). The assumption has been that somehow sustainability could be incorporated into these conventional housing issues.

Recent research into the use of the home has filled in some of the gaps. It is possible to show, for example, that domestic energy consumption depends on a mutually supportive, three-way interaction between daily routines, a largely taken-for-granted technological infrastructure such as washing machines and showers and dominant cultural conceptions of comfort, cleanliness and convenience (Shove 2003; Owens and Driffill 2006). From at least the middle of the nineteenth century, modernity in housing design and in domestic equipment has been about a search for more space, more privacy, more convenience and more control over room temperatures and this has led to a constant ratcheting up of domestic energy consumption in a way that is difficult to reverse.

Even so, theorising about ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Plates
• Preface
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 Planning, Markets and the Industrial City
• PART 3 New Forms of Modernity, 1980 Onwards
• PART 4 Conclusions
• PART 5 Supplementary Information
• References
• Index