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1Ā Ā Ā Ā Introduction
What we need now are not trans-historical theories of society but rather theorized histories of social phenomena.
(Cas tells, 1983)
Between January 1974 and June 1982 1,168,957 private sector dwellings were constructed in Britain. This was not a random process nor the simple result of pure market forces. Neither did it occur by official diktat. The amount of housing, its location, density, and design were the function of market forces and the product of negotiation between different interests. The process of negotiation is the subject of this book.
The main agents
There are a whole range of institutions and interests ā let us call them agents ā involved in the production of housing. Some are more important than others. National government, for example, in setting the economic climate and providing the planning ground rules is more important than a small residentsā association. In this study we will concentrate on only a few of the agents. We will select those which allow us to consider the two main themes of state action ā the need to facilitate capital accumulation while also ensuring legitimacy. In a capitalist democracy the state tries to meet the needs of capital while also maintaining the consent of the majority. In particular, the state is lobbied by builder-developers and by various community groups; it seeks to facilitate the operation of the producers of the built environment while being relatively open to the articulated voice of the consumers of the built environment. The conflicts between the different agents and the stateās balancing act in meeting these often competing claims is a major theme of this book. The agents we have identified for analysis are those which encapsulate this accumulation/legitimation dichotomy. In particular, housebuilders who build dwellings, the members and officers of the local councils which give planning permission for housing construction and various community groups who represent local areas. These agents interact in a number of ways but the most important being within the procedures and institutions of land use planning and development control which we will lump together under the term the planning system. The process of negotiation is one of structured interaction, a bargaining within certain sets of changing rules. These interactions can be defined as a game in so far as games are rule-governed behaviours where outcomes are uncertain. By using the terms game, rules and bargaining we do not intend to imply that the negotiations at any one time are fair or even. Inequalities in resources and power exist and the rules aid some agents rather than others.
Moreover, as Gregory (1982, p. 16) points out:
no game is ever a simple working out of deep-seated structural rules: the playersā actions are reflexive ā they are motivated and rationalised ā and it is through the flow of move and counter-move that these rules are affirmed, infringed and challenged.
Each agent has different sets of interests, constraints and opportunities afforded by their position in the planning system and within the wider society. In order to understand this interaction it is necessary to look at the source of these constraints, the nature of the opportunities and the separate and shared ideologies which underpin action and behaviour.
The arena
The study is concerned with the interaction between agents in a particular part of the country ā Central Berkshire, an area with a population of 373,300 in 1980. The choice is not arbitrary. We were based at the University of Reading and this was the planning area closest to home. In any study which uses one case study there is always the problem of the unique which makes it difficult to generalize. Our results are generated from Central Berkshire which in comparison with the rest of the country has seen high levels of economic growth and low levels of unemployment. Thus, it is not a typical area. But because of the strong development pressure it exhibits in heightened form the sorts of tensions less evident elsewhere. The area shows more clearly than most the differing interests involved in the planning system.
Too much human geography has been guilty of accepting spatial subdivisions especially at the sub-national level which relate more to data collection convenience than to theoretically informed classifications. Central Berkshire is not a chaotic concept in this manner. It is a valid object of analysis because in being an area of structure plan preparation, it is an identifiable and real arena for the articulated interests of various agents.
The context
Our work is guided by three debates. The first is the general debate within social theory on the relationship between social structure and human agency. A number of writers, especially Giddens (1981), Bourdieu (1977, 1980) and Bhaskar (1979), have called attention to the failings of much existing social theory. They point in their different ways to:
- (a)Ā Ā the functionalist fallacy which reads off actions and events from a preconceived structure, e.g. the functionalism of structural marxism which sees agents merely as bearers of predetermined positions assigned by a mode of production articulated in a social formation;
- (b)Ā Ā the dangers of voluntarism which sees society as simply the product of human intentions.
There is now a common aim which seeks to provide social theories which can capture the relationship between social structure and human agency without degenerating into voluntarism or structural functionism. Gregory (1981) and Thrift (1983) discuss these issues with respect to human geography. We will not address this debate directly but our work is informed by the general need to consider the recursive relationship involved in the contingency of human agency unfolding within the choices, opportunities and constraints afforded by a transforming social structure. More specifically, we will seek to show:
- (a)Ā Ā the evolving relationships between the main agents within the changing set of rules in the planning system;
- (b)Ā Ā the ways in which the operational rules have themselves been transformed in the process of interaction.
In a very real sense we see the planning system as an institutional point of contact between agency and structure. The evolving recursive relationship between the planning system and the main agents is the central focus of this book.
The second debate is the continuation of the work of the senior author on the relationship between state, space, capital and community. These themes have been combined in different ways at various scales in two previous books. In An Introduction to Political Geography (Short, 1982a) the relationship between the changing world order and the nation state was considered while The Urban Arena (Short, 1984) took the analysis along a more specific route by examining the unfolding tensions in post-war Britain between capital and community in and through the state. This book carries on the debates by examining some of these tensions in a specific place at a specific time. By analysing agents and their interaction on this more detailed scale it is intended to flesh out debates in the previous books. This specific case study draws upon the ideas of the previous books but by looking at actual agents in real time it focuses attention on contingency, change, creativity and the relationship between beliefs and action.
Finally, we have been working within a well-established academic field. There is a small mountain of books and a vast array of papers on analysing different aspects of the British planning system. We have drawn on some of this literature but as outsiders coming into this field we were both overawed and disappointed; overawed by our lack of knowledge especially in the face of the amount of material ā there are senior researchers in this field who have internalized more than, we can articulate ā but disappointed by the nature of much of the literature. As outsiders we looked in vain for many studies which allowed hypotheses about the effects of the British land use planning system to be sustained. Much of the planning literature ignores the need to demonstrate rather than assert the real consequences of the system. Breheny (1983, p. 114) blames
the theorists who have been excessively abstract in their work, have ignored yet managed to misrepresent practice, and who have consciously failed to offer any presumptive advice to practitioners. The latter for their part have continued to lack any sustained critical assessment of their own activities and have lapsed into insular pragmatism.ā¦ The result has been theory which, albeit sophisticated, has become increasingly useless, and practice which has become increasingly devoid of intellectual credibility.
In this study we have adopted a naive realism which makes few assumptions and seeks to demonstrate rather than assert. While old hands may find our naivety at best innocent and at worst over-simplistic, newcomers will hopefully be enlightened and it is for them that the book is intended. The work is provisional. We present a case study at one point in time and basic empirical data on the main agents and the changing nature and forms of their interaction. We hope that other researchers will come along the same path but will go far beyond the efforts presented here.
The contents
The structure of the book is relatively straightforward. Since we are concerned with providing an outline of the system of interaction between the different agents, it is important to look at the agents in some detail. Chapter 3 thus considers the housebuilders, while Chapter 4 examines the functioning of local planning authorities (LPAs) in Central Berkshire paying particular attention to the position of elected members. Chapter 5 looks in detail at the role of parish councils in local planning affairs, organizations positioned between the formal institutionalism of LPAs and the informality of social movements. Chapter 6 considers the importance of residentsā groups in planning matters. These four chapters thus consider the main agents concerned with the production, management and consumption of the one element of the built environment. Chapter 7 attempts to pull together these separate threads of the story in two ways. On the one hand three separate case studies will be discussed in depth showing how the interaction between the agents is full of āaccidents and conjunctures and curious juxtaposition of eventsā (Butterfield, 1950, p. 6). On the other hand the interaction will also be considered in a more analytical fashion by showing the emerging tensions implicit and explicit in their relationship.
In the exposition we will seek to provide particular examples while also drawing out generalities. We wish to generate theorized histories and and also theorized geographies. To those who require the steady pace of a general text or the rich diversity of only case studies then the exposition presented here may seem of uneven pace. We ask the readerās indulgence. The text should.be seen as two elements of a whole, like beads on a string. The generalities run like a thread through the more discrete case studies. One gains stability from the one and substance from the other.
People, to paraphrase Marx, make their own histories and their own geographies. But not, he went on to add, in circumstances of their own making. In the next chapter we will consider some of the circumstances in the making of the recent history and the transformation of the human geography of Central Berkshire.
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2 The circumstances
ā I am the very slave of circumstance. And impulse.ā (Lord Byron)
The three main circumstances which provide the context for the unfolding relationships between the three main agents of developers, planning authorities and community groups in Central Berkshire are:
- (1) the role and scope of local government;
- (2) the land use planning system;
- (3) the nature of development pressure in Central Berkshire.
Let us examine each in turn.
Local government
After April 1974 the elected representatives of the people of Berkshire had to operate a new local government system. In the rest of this book we will be concerned with the workings of this system. In this section we will examine the general background to this change, some of its causes and consequences and the more important subsequent events.
Local government under pressure
The 1972 Local Government Act, which signalled the reorganization of local governments in England, was the outcome of a whole series of pressures and attempts to change the system which had been operated relatively unchanged since 1888. In the old system the town-country split had a legislative form in the county borough/county council division which also marked a rough political divide between Conservative rural areas and Labour cities. A major source of conflict came from an attempt by ...
