To the
Gallery at Cowcross Street for an evening of thought-provoking
talks, organised by Farrar Huxley Associates, on ‘The future of cities’.
They
brought home just how useless we are at ‘planning’ (in the sense found in the
dictionary, rather than the rather different sense we all use when we are down
at the council planning department).
Ken
Webster of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation, Kayla Friedman, and ‘rational optimist’
Kelvin Campbell of the Smart Urbanism Alliance presented a series of challenges
at difference scales of time and space that all posed questions of ‘top down vs.
bottom up’ in planning for the future of the city.
Two contrasting
big topics that stuck in the memory after the event were:
·
Global
energy supplies will run out and no one is getting to grips with it (the scary
scenarios are presented in David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air). The Ellen MacArthur Foundation promotes
the Circular Economy as one way out.
·
Big
urban design /masterplanning is dead and incremental, bottom up intervention is
the answer for the age of austerity.
While I
might just buy buy Kelvin Campbell’s examples of self-organising squatter
settlements as good bottom-up models (though Prince Charles’ support for
them makes me suspicious), I don’t buy the extension of this line of thought
closer to home to suggest that the unplanned, unregulated ‘beds in sheds’ bottom-of-garden
homes that have sprung up in tens of thousands in outer London locations far
from the chattering classes such as Barking and Southall, might be just as
admirable a model.
Planning
in its origins was meant to address basic needs and problems – public health,
sanitation, decent homes, not living next to a glue factory or a car breakers
etc. Once those basic problems were more
or less sorted, we got mission creep, and ended up with a system that opines on
what your windows will look like. Similarly, since no one knocks down nice old
buildings any more, conservationists move on to stopping people building new
things near nice old buildings.
The effort
put in to ‘planning’ (starting with the Government, who are the really
important planning authority) is inversely proportional to how much things
actually matter. Very little effort into securing future energy supplies so
that our grandchildren do not end up like extras in ‘The Road’; middling effort
into checking whether people are being housed in homes fit to live in; and lots
of effort into stopping developers building (at a time of housing shortage) new homes that are a few metres
higher than the neighbours would like to see.
I did,
however, very much buy Kelvin Campbell’s maxim ‘incentivise the fine grain’ –
that really would be a useful task for the planners.
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