The Design Dimension of Planning

Theory, content and best practice for design policies

Matthew Carmona, John Punter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135778590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Aménagement urbain et paysager

This book examines the design policies in current development plans. With design quality of growing importance to the public, consumers, developers and their clients, and high on the Secretary of State's agenda, this book makes an important practical contribution to improving design control. With the increasing importance attached to district-wide development plan policies since 1991, local planning authorities and community groups have an important opportunity to improve their control over the built environment. This research text explains how clear, comprehensive and effective policies can be researched, written and implemented.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Origins, methods and structure

Introduction

In this introductory chapter the design dimension in planning and its complexities are explored as a prelude to an explanation of how this book evolved from two research projects: one a practice-oriented piece of academic research, the other a piece of research consultancy for the Department of the Environment, itself the principal regulator of design policy and guidance. The key research questions for each project are discussed, the various components of the research – content analysis of plans, case studies of best-practice authorities, studies of policy effectiveness and policy sources – are explained, and their methodological strengths and weaknesses are examined. Finally, the structure of the book is explained, both its content chapter by chapter and the structure of each chapter, in order to allow the reader to use the book in a variety of ways.

The design dimension in planning

The design dimension of planning is a highly contentious area, the site of seemingly endless conflicts among architects and planners, developers and designers, professionals and the public, councillors and officers, community groups and business leaders. It is at once a fundamental and a peripheral issue in planning: fundamental in the sense that much if not most of development control is directed at design matters, broadly conceived; peripheral in the sense that overall design quality can be and often is sacrificed to achieve other objectives, particularly the desire for any development or job creation in less economically advantaged areas. There are calls from many quarters for more sophisticated and tighter design controls, but equally there are demands that controls be kept to an absolute minimum in the interests of individual freedom and economic competitiveness.

Part of the problem is that design is often seen as a superficial phenomenon – the visual appearance of development, a matter of facade or elevational design – that matters little in the broader scheme of land use planning. Some see design control as ‘rearranging the deck-chairs on the Titanic’ or ‘putting lipstick on the gorilla’. Proponents, including the authors of this volume, see design as much more all-embracing, and are concerned with how development fits into its social, economic and ecological context, how it deals with the activities and flows of people and traffic that a development generates, the spaces it creates, its impact on the ecology and the natural processes of the city, and finally the aesthetic effect it produces.

Regrettably, the design dimension of British planning has been much neglected as a subject of both academic enquiry and professional development. In academic terms, British urban design has been slow to develop a substantive body of thought that could underpin enlightened practice, and has rarely undertaken evaluations of design control in action. Until recently it had locked itself into a rather narrow tradition of design as a largely visual phenomenon, and only in the last decade has it started to embrace broader social and environmental definitions, and to consider design as a process. Those that practise urban design have rarely written about their craft. In the public sector, urban designers have been heavily involved in the practical concerns of enhancement schemes and the day-to-day pressures of development control, while design consultants have written for their clients, and have rarely disseminated their expertise and experience to a wider audience. Consequently, there has been little constructive and informed debate about design regulation as a component of the planning system.

In local planning authorities, design policies and control practices were also rarely written down and systematized until recently, and were very much something that the development controller learned on the job. They were absorbed by osmosis from office practice, and they allowed a large measure of individual professional discretion in design matters. By the mid-1970s this lack of clear published policy and principles of control had been exposed, but the principal local authority response was to publish a range of design guidance on selected topics rather than to systematize the full range of design policies and considerations. Much of this material grappled with common design problems that occupied much officer time, but it was no substitute for a broader perspective on design priorities district-wide. A number of London boroughs did develop a full range of design policies when they prepared their borough-wide plans in the late 1970s, but elsewhere design policies were largely confined to town centre plans or to conservation concerns.

Most local authorities had always had a shortage of design skills in house, and the demise of the architect-planner and the rise of the generalist or geographer-planner exacerbated the situation. Where both the public and politicians placed a high priority on design quality (usually a direct consequence of a desire to protect an historic heritage or high-quality environment), a few local planning authorities were able to develop dedicated urban design or conservation teams, and their policies and publications set the standards, and to a considerable extent provided the expertise, for the rest. By contrast, in a large number of areas, particularly in the North and in economically depressed areas, the pursuit of design quality was not perceived as a priority, and was more often seen as a barrier to commercial or industrial investment and to the creation of jobs. Here design still has to establish itself as an important planning consideration.

Central governments of both political persuasions have resolutely maintained that design is subjective, and have discouraged design intervention outside environmentally sensitive areas. While Conservatives see it as an impediment to economic growth, Labour often regard it as a rather elitist preoccupation. While there are signs that both might be modifying their views, there is still a deep reluctance in the Department of the Environment to offer more than the most basic and general advice on the matter, or perhaps better still, to devolve such concerns to the local level. At appeal, the Department has continued to reject only those designs that were ‘demonstrably horrific’, and has consistently argued that design is principally a matter for the developer and their designers.

Central government agnosticism on design has been strengthened by the failure of the architectural and planning professions to reach a common view on design intervention. Despite several joint policy statements by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), leaders of the architectural profession (some self-appointed) have continually attacked any planning intervention on design matters outside designated areas. On occasion they have been joined publicly by development and construction interests, notably the House-Builders Federation, but usually the latter prefer to do their lobbying in private. None the less, in recent years various of these development bodies have contributed position statements on design and commissioned research that have helped to advance the design debate. Furthermore, a number of developers have made quality design a hallmark of their development activity, occasionally adopting private regulations to replace very limited public controls, and their commercial success (notwithstanding recession-induced receiverships) has been potentially instructive. But in the mainstream, issues such as the rise of design-and-build contracting, the declining use of architects, the lack of enlightened architectural patronage, and the predominance of applications prepared by non-design-trained ‘plansmiths’ are all issues that bedevil design quality and which design regulation has to address, albeit indirectly.

The role of the public in design matters has often been neglected, not least by government advice, but since the advent of the local amenity/conservation movement it has become a critical factor in the design and development process and in the debate about design regulation. One of the great ironies was that in the 1980s the public found a spokesman in the Prince of Wales, who well represented their incomprehension of the foibles of planning control, and strongly expressed their disaffection with much redevelopment after the Second World War. Like that of the public, the Prince’s understanding of the limits of control and the realities of the development process was very partial, but he clearly exposed the frequently wide gap between professional and lay tastes that has to be addressed in design regulation.

Public controversy has been easy to excite, and has often reinforced the convenient view that design is subjective and that therefore the client or his/her architect’s views are as good as, if not better than, anyone else’s. To reinforce this perspective, the search for consensus on design has been vilified, particularly by architects, as producing lowest common denominator solutions and tame compromises. But over the last two decades amenity interests have built up a level of understanding and a means of working with local authorities that have injected lay values into decisions, and have frequently brought the planning authority and the public closer together on the same side. Such consultations have in turn made officers more aware of the need to take the public with them on these matters. Planners should always remember Lewis Keeble’s perceptive observation that ‘planning is judged principally by the quality of development that receives planning permission’ (Keeble, 1971, p. 169), making effective design control doubly important as a component of planning practice. But the very conservative nature of public perspectives on development and contemporary architecture is a double-edged sword for planning authorities in their intermediary role between the architectural profession and the public, and is often the source of tension between officers and councillors in the decision-making process. Again, there is much anecdotal information about these issues but little substantive research.

A decade ago, design control was in the doldrums, an early victim of a rapidly deregulating planning system and a rising tide of successful appeals, the frequent fall guy of an unsympathetic Secretary of State, and easily slurred as a source of planning inefficiencies or an example of a lack of planning achievement. But in the last decade a more enlightened perspective has gradually percolated through to the highest echelons, spurred on by the combined efforts of the Prince of Wales, professional leaders, academic researchers, practitioner-writers, enlightened developers and, latterly, sympathetic Secretaries of State. Chris Patten gave the green light to more encouraging design advice in 1990, while Parliament itself gave increased emphasis to development plans and therefore policies. The current Secretary of State, John Gummer, launched his ‘Quality in Town and Country Initiative’ in 1994, to take a broad look at how the planning system delivers environmental quality, and giving quality architecture, urban and environmental design a new prominence in central government circles. There is unlikely to be a more propitious moment to further the role of planning in promoting design quality than the present, particularly given the cyclical nature of politics and property, and the history of design control and planning regulation in England. It is an important moment to review the nature of design policies, to draw together the different perspectives on the design debate, and to make suggestions for improvement. This is the task of this book.

The origins of the research

It was events in the early 1990s that precipitated this study of design policies in English development plans. In 1990 Section 54a of the Town and Country Planning Act passed into law, giving new emphasis to development plan policies as material considerations in deciding planning applications, and in the same legislation the Government required each local authority in England and Wales to produce a district-wide development plan. In 1992 the Government issued new advice on design control practice, a seven-paragraph annex to a revised Planning Policy Guidance Note 1 (PPG 1), stressing the importance of local authorities setting out policies for design in their development plans. These events seemed likely to change the course of design control in England and Wales, if not fundamentally then at least in many of its operational details. Relatively few local authorities outside the London boroughs had any experience of how to write design policies, and many were likely to encounter considerable problems in doing so. There was a clear need to examine current practice and to provide local authorities with constructive suggestions as to how best to research, formulate, write and implement policies.

The Royal Town Planning Institute began lobbying the Department of the Environment to rewrite its design guidance in the wake of Francis Tibbalds’ presidency of the Institute in 1989. A Design Working Party took advantage of the then Secretary of State for the Environment Chris Patten’s interest in design matters, to attempt to write better guidance and to lobby for some fundamental research into all aspects of design policy. However, it soon became clear that events were going to move extremely slowly, and that any substantive research agenda would have to be separately defined. Accordingly, in the early spring of 1992 the principal author submitted a proposal to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to fund a two-year study of the design content of district-wide development plans and their supplementary guidance.

Key research questions

The research proposal identified seven key research questions as follows:

• the scope of design control, its operation at different scales, the issues it embraces and their relationships to urban conservation, to architectural and urban design practice, but also to landscape, ecology, access and security/public safety;

• the analytical basis of policy, the relationship to design theory and principles, the method of study of locality and context, and the derivation of principles;

• the relationship between policy and public preferences, how public views are sought and accommodated, and how professional and public concerns are reconciled both within and without the plan-making process;

• the context of policy formulation – in particular, the way in which landscape/townscape qualities, development pressures, political priorities or indeed staff skill and resources determine policy responses;

• the hierarchy of guidance – what should be put in the plan, and how this relates to design at different scales, to supplementary design guidance, guides and briefs and other kinds of informal guidance;

• t...