Planning and Urban Change

Stephen Ward

• Editorial: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781446240113
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Biowissenschaften
• Categoría: Umweltwissenschaft

Fully revised and thoroughly updated, the Second Edition of Planning and Urban Change provides an accessible yet richly detailed account of British urban planning.

Stephen Ward demonstrates how urban planning can be understood through three categories: ideas - urban planning history as the development of theoretical approaches: from radical and utopian beginnings, to the `new right? thinking of the 1980s, and recent interest in green thought and sustainability; policies - urban planning history as an intensely political process, the text explains the complicated relation between planning theory and political practice; and impacts - urban planning history as the divergence of expectation and outcome, each chapter shows how intended impacts have been modified by economic and social forces.

This Second Edition features an entirely new chapter on the key policy changes that have occurred under the Major and Blair governments, together with a critical review of current policy trends.

1	Planning and Urban Change

Town planning, by its nature, is essentially concerned with shaping the future. This does not mean, however, that town planners are able to ignore the past. In an older urbanized country such as Britain they have, fairly obviously, to work with physical structures and urban arrangements inherited from the past. What is less obvious though is that the concerns and ideologies of the town planners themselves are also products of the past. Planners carry with them professional assumptions about the need to regulate and order urban space and about the ways in which they should do this. They also work within a planning system that embodies past political assumptions about the institutional location, purpose and instruments of planning policy. And, not least, they have to live with the consequences of past planning decisions, expressed within the fabric of towns and cities.

All this is by way of arguing that to understand town planning properly, it is essential to understand how it has developed. This is not to say that planners or indeed society should drive into the future with eyes fixed exclusively on the rear-view mirror. Quite obviously this would be a recipe for disaster, although the analogy aptly reminds us that failing to look behind can also produce disaster, however exhilarating it may be in the short term. Nor is it to say what many planners certainly thought in more pessimistic moments during Thatcherite assaults on their activities, that the past was the only thing they had to look forward to. Clearly, it is always important to appreciate that town planning as a tradition of thought, policy and action has a breadth, depth and diversity that may not be immediately apparent in the way it is practised today. But however much we might yearn for the Utopian socialism of the early days or the political backing for the strong and socially concerned planning system created in the 1940s, we must also understand the reasons why they were superseded.

The case for the explicitly historical approach of this book is, then, to enable a rounded understanding of town planning as a continuing tradition of thought, policy and action. Other books share this broad historical approach, among them Ashworth (1954), Cherry (1972, 1974b, 1988, 1996), Hague (1984), Hall (2002a, 2002b), Lawless and Brown (1986), Meller (1997), Ravetz (1980, 1986) and Taylor (1998). All inevitably interpret the story in their own way, stressing different aspects and offering different explanations. The reader should certainly refer to these and the other works referenced in the succeeding chapters of this book to gain a fuller understanding. But the present work itself provides a solid grounding for those training to be town planners or otherwise interested in planning in the early twenty-first century to understand the development of town planning ideas and policies since the late nineteenth century and assess their impacts on urban change. We examine where town planning ideas actually came from, who originated them and why. We also consider how and why governments saw fit to incorporate at least some of the ideas of the town planning movement into state policies, and assess something of their impacts on the processes of actual urban change. Ideas, policies and impacts are in fact the three continuing themes that run through this book. It is therefore important to establish from the outset what we understand these terms to mean, and briefly rehearse some of the main arguments that we will develop in detail in the following chapters.

THE CENTRAL THEMES OF THE BOOK

Ideas

The genesis of town planning ideas

Before it was anything else, town planning was a series of radical reformist ideas about changing and improving the city which began to take shape from about 1890. The basis of these ideas lay in land reform and, increasingly, housing reform, although with other important dimensions in the enhancement of community and the protection of amenity. The actual term ‘town planning’ was coined, almost certainly, in 1905, to give these ideas a distinct identity and coherence. They were advanced further mainly by the relatively small number of reformers and professionals who rallied behind the new flag of the town planning movement. A few key organizations, most notably the Garden City and Town Planning Association, the National Housing and Town Planning Council and the Town Planning Institute, played central roles in this.

Early conceptual innovation in planning

As the reformist ideas of this new movement were given physical expression in pioneering ventures such as garden cities and suburbs, it acquired a more specifically physical and professional focus. A new professional, design-based repertoire of ideas was assembled, incorporating wider strategic concepts of city extension or comprehensively decentralized ‘social cities’ and detailed ideas of zoning, site layout, etc. Within a few decades many important new ideas were developed and incorporated within this intellectual tradition of town planning. A strategic model for planned metropolitan decentralization and containment was moulded out of the more radical notions of the social city. Ideas for urban redevelopment were reinvigorated as the functionalist theories of the modern movement in architecture were extended to entire cities. Before the late 1930s, however, there was usually little immediate prospect of most of these ideas being implemented on a sizeable scale. In fact what was most striking about the process of intellectual innovation over this period was the extent to which it was independent of the rather limited operations of planning policies in practice.

Later conceptual innovation in planning

All this began to change significantly as town planning ideas were comprehensively incorporated into official town planning policies from the 1940s. The essential focus of planning activity now became, as never before, the officially ordered planning system rather than the independent planning movement. Increasingly, and especially after 1960, innovations in planning thought arose more from within the policy process, rather than from the wider town planning movement. The tradition of autonomous intellectual thought and conceptual innovation that had characterized the earlier years now began to atrophy. The wider town planning movement became more concerned with refining and celebrating the contemporary successes of town planning policies (such as the New Towns), rather than with developing new radical models that looked beyond present concerns.

Thus as events and government actions moved very sharply against the established policy conventions of planning in the 1970s and especially the 1980s, the town planning movement found itself without the autonomous intellectual tradition that would have allowed it to develop alternatives in the manner of earlier generations. Certainly new environmentalist ideas emerged during these years, but not from the town planning movement. Despite welcome attempts to incorporate such ideas within town planning thought, there is no doubt that this new environmental radicalism has to some extent outflanked the older established town planning tradition. As we will show, one of the main reasons for this lies within our other central concerns with planning policies and impacts.

Policies

What are planning policies?

Put very simply, town planning ideas become policies at the point at which they are incorporated by government into officially endorsed courses of action. The manner of this incorporation varies, depending on the importance of the original idea. Some policies were so fundamental to town planning that they were written directly into the planning system by central government. For example, elements of land market reform were integral to the whole practice of town planning and became intrinsic policies, embodied in the various compensation and betterment provisions of the Acts. Others, however, represent conscious applications of the planning system to pursue particular ends, for example by encouraging town extension rather than containment, or rehabilitation rather than redevelopment, etc. Such conscious policies may also reflect the various scales of planning ideas, with strategic policies such as metropolitan decentralization or containment, and more detailed policies, for example zoning or pedestrianization. The adoption of these conscious policies is inevitably a rather more discretionary process, involving more local decisions.

Town planning policies and party politics

Ideas may have political implications but, while they remain just ideas, this dimension remains fairly passive. Policies, by contrast, are actively political and the course of policy-making in planning cannot therefore be understood without reference to a wider political frame. In this connection it is immediately important to recognize that town planning ideas have generally found a more sympathetic political home within the Liberal and Labour parties. By its nature, town planning as a political project has involved greater state control over private activity, particularly in the use and exploitation of land. Its general political trajectory has been based historically on the assertion of public interest concerns and reduction of the role of private interests in the urban development process. It is therefore readily understandable that first Liberal and later Labour administrations should have set the pace in town planning policy-making over this century.

Conservative governments have generally pursued a more cautious line, usually diminishing earlier Liberal or Labour planning policy initiatives in favour of private development interests. This has been particularly evident in the intrinsic policies on land values that are embodied in planning legislation, on which there was a long history of party political disagreement. Generally, Conservatives have wanted to see a bigger proportion of land value increases arising from development remaining with private landowners and developers, while the Liberals and Labour have favoured stronger taxation or public landownership. Recently though, the approaches of the two main parties have converged, seeking betterment through locally negotiated planning agreements or obligations.

Moreover, in other aspects of planning, party political disagreements have always been less significant. Conservative sympathy for private developers has been tempered by their sensitivity to other important political interests, notably the protection of residential owner-occupiers and other established interests, such as farming. In practice this has encouraged a high degree of political consensus over many planning matters, especially in the 1940–74 period. Elements of this approach have even survived as the traditional post-war consensus on many aspects of state policy broke down in the late 1970s and 1980s. In practice the traditional Conservative desire for planning policies that restricted development ‘in their backyards’ has probably outweighed the 1979–90 Thatcherite Conservative portrayal of it as a drag on the ‘enterprise culture’, especially in urban fringe areas. Since 1990 there has been even greater continuity. The planning policies of both Conservative and ‘New’ Labour have given developers a much more central role than they ever had from the 1940s to the 1970s.

Officialdom and policies

Another important element in the continuity of planning policies has been the largely hidden politics of civil servants, defending their established departmental interests. In an activity like planning, which has only rarely been a national party political issue of the first order and which raises issues of great technical complexity, civil servants and professional experts have had key roles in forming policies. Ultimately they can be overridden by determined ministers, but we will find only a few clear-cut instances where this has definitely happened. By contrast, officials have certainly limited the impact of potentially far-reaching planning reforms on some occasions, most notably in 1964–65. Their local equivalents, the municipal town planners, also helped shape the course of policies in their own areas.

Ideas and policies

All of this serves to remind us that the policy dimension introduces many considerations that may have precious little to do with town planning ideas in the purest sense. One of the most important points to understand about the relationship between ideas and policies is that the state generally adopted town planning for rather different reasons from those which motivated the town planning movement to invent it. The recognition of this point can sometimes be difficult because the advocates of town planning were generally clever enough to present their case in a way that did more than merely preach to the converted. In the pre-1914 period, for example, they addressed their arguments to the concerns of the political elite to defend British imperial and economic dominance and domestic social stability, not themes which were central to the garden city or co-partnership housing ideas.

But there can be little doubt that it was these (and other) wider concerns which propelled the Liberal government towards the first town planning legislation in 1909 rather than the radical reformism and Utopian socialism of many of the inventors of town planning’s central ideas. Similarly, external events like the 1930s’ Depression and both world wars, especially the Second World War, had a dramatic effect on the sympathy of governments for planning ideas that were of rather older origin. Whereas ideas can and frequently do have a purity of purpose, policy-making has been inherently opportunistic.

The lack of congruence between conceptual innovation and policy-making was also reflected in the partial way in which town planning ideas were incorporated in policies. The wider social reformism that animated early planning ideas was quickly narrowed down to environmental policies. The co-operative and voluntarist tradition was soon subordinated to a more government-oriented approach as, for example, co-operatively developed garden suburbs gave way to municipal satellite towns and garden cities to New Towns. Yet such policy-driven changes could also add a creative dynamic as older ideas were adapted to meet new circumstances. This was particularly noticeable in the post-war period as the distinction between ideas and policies became increasingly blurred. By the 1960s, for example, the metropolitan, decentralist garden city/New Town idea was being merged with French growth-pole theory to become a model for regional growth. But these various kinds of slippage between ideas and policies were minor compared to that which occurred when policies were actually implemented.

Impacts

Assessing impacts

Whether town planners like it or not, society essentially evaluates the success or failure of planning by its impacts rather than the intentions embodied in policies, still less in the underlying ideas. Social and political reactions to the perceived impacts of planning policies have helped trigger important changes of direction, for example against town extension policies in the late 1930s and 1940s or against comprehensive inner-city housing redevelopment in the 1970s. It is, however, arguable that much of what was being criticized did not actually result from planning policies, but represented particular modes of implementing planning policies over which planners had little control.

There is, in fact, a major problem in assessing what the impacts of planning have actually been. Planning policies supplement and attempt to order existing processes of urban change, but do not normally replace them. This means that we can never be exactly certain as to what would have happened without planning. Inevitably, therefore, planning impact studies, however well researched, ultimately rest on a degree of intelligent ‘counterfactual’ guesswork and can never be proven in a completely satisfactory way. As we have suggested though, the need to evaluate planning outcomes is too important to be ignored on grounds of methodological purity.

Impacts, policies and ideas

What we are arguing here is that what are termed the impacts of planning have actually been produced by a much wider and more diverse set of forces than those which have shaped our other two concerns. Both ideas and policies were certainly directed at wider issues, but their characteristics were actively shaped within rather narrower social and political milieux. Thus ideas essentially arose out of the particular social and intellectual setting of a few creative individuals and organizations. Policies were broadly the result of an interaction of these planning ideas with political and institutional processes, but in ways that still reflected the particular concerns and approaches of the policy-makers. Planning impacts, in contrast, arise from the interaction of these ideas and policies with an altogether wider range of economic and social forces, many of them entirely outside the planner’s control. Despite commonly held assumptions about their power to shape cities, town planners have actually had rather limited powers over most of the twentieth century.

Planning and twentieth-century urban change

Developing this point further, we must immediately note a considerable variation over time in the conscious ability of planners to shape the pattern of urban change. Planning was a significant though somewhat marginal influence before 1939. Then, as wartime brought a state-dominated economy, marginalizing private landed and development interests, town planning briefly became a major force in the 1940s. But when this interventionism gave way, during the 1950s, to the mixed economy, where an active state was retained but within what was now an unequi...