New Enterprise Zones - Canary Wharf or Merry Hill?

The Government has signalled a return to the Enterprise Zones of the 1980s. The aim is to encourage development by freeing up planning rules and offering tax incentives. This is just one more approach to 'regeneration', i.e. public sector measures to secure development where no one wants to develop (private sector development that claims to be 'regeneration' is now ubiquitous, but is in fact just 'development' - no shame in that).

Last time around, we had Enterprise Zones, which were cheap, passive measures, but also Urban Development Corporations (UDC's), which were costlier, but active in facilitating development, for instance by assembling sites and providing infrastructure; and they, rather than local authorities, had development control powers in their areas. Both (the measures were not mutually exclusive) had mixed results, with more failures than successes. In some places, a great deal of public money was spent, and nothing of consequence was built; in others, nothing that was any good. The successes tended to be where one might have expected, such as London Docklands, as well as some less obvious outliers such as the Quayside in Newcastle.

The recent announcement was accompanied by the usual muddle of mixed messages. The Government says that the Labour administration focussed growth too much in the south-east, but they also say that the new zones will be focussed on areas of high growth potential - that sounds like the south-east to me (although perhaps they mean that we are going to start making things again, rather than relying on the thin air of the financial services sector).

See this recent article in Prospect magazine for a more honest take on all this. We should be encouraging development Cambridge, where there are plenty of people who would like to build things, not Sunderland, where there aren't. A Government that claims to be pro-growth but shows no appetite for (and has no cash for) Heseltine-style interventionism may need to think a bit harder about where and how significant development is to happen.

All this points to the need for some tough choices and unpopular decisions. By far the most successful of the UDC's last time around, the London Docklands Development Corporation - invented by the Tories - is a model they might find it useful to study. Not everything they did was terrific, but most of it wasn't too bad, and a great deal got built where nothing had happened for decades. The most notable triumph of the non-UDC Enterprise Zones appears to be Merry Hill shopping centre, which offers rather less to be proud of. The evidence suggests that active intervention (UDC's) produces better quality (and therefore more enduring and therefore more sustainable) results than pure Enterprise Zones. If there's no public money this time, what about offering the opportunity for the private sector to invest in UDC's, with the prospect of benefitting from the uplift in land value that will accrue when they grant themselves planning permission?

One of the most interesting aspects of the LDDC, from the point of view of architecture, was that in a deregulated planning environment, those who ran it were, at least for part of the LDDC's life, able to insist on higher design standards than prevailed outside the zone. This was achieved by a combination of carrots and sticks, including some design-led selection processes for disposal sites, and with the help of some dedicated architects on the staff, supported by an authoritative design panel. Between them they were prepared to demand high standards and had the respect of those coming to the LDDC with projects. I was one of the latter, and remember thinking that the standard of design discussion at the LDDC was in a different league from that which pertained in the average local authority planning department (which hasn't got much better since, and is about to get worse as the design-qualified staff are made redundant).

An important aspect of achieving good quality schemes in Docklands was where the LDDC was the landowner. As history shows, landowners as patrons of design are better than planning authorities as proxy patrons.

Free up planning by all means, but in any new system, the Government should insist on high standards of design even when all the other rules have lapsed. Folk memory in public administration tends to be non-existent, but there are people who know how this was done last time.

People fear new development because so much of it is so bad. Allowing developers to throw up any old rubbish will exacerbate nimbyism and add to the list of things for voters to hold against the Government. Beautiful cities are not the answer to all our problems, but they can't do any harm.

Let's make planning more complicated!

Neighbourhood planning is likely to make the planning system more complicated, but luckily, it probably won't apply everywhere, and it is likely to be most prevalent in places where there isn't much development anyway. All a bit Alice in Wonderland.

My latest quarterly column for the RIBA Journal, here, has more considered views on this.

What hope for CABE redux?

In a few weeks, old CABE disappears and its successor begins work as part of the Design Council. What are the prospects for the new arrangement, and how will the politics work?

When CABE was started in 1999, its support came from the Government's Culture department, DCMS, which had sponsored CABE's predecessor the Royal Fine Art Commission. DCMS has remained CABE's primary sponsor, but as the years have gone by, it has received progressively more funding from what is now the Communities department, DCLG, responsible for planning, housing etc. - the two funding sources reflecting architecture's uneasy siting, as far as tidy minded administrators are concerned, somewhere between fine art and the provision of useful shelter.

The Design Council's links are with yet another department, the Business department, headed by Vince Cable. This could make a significant difference in the way new CABE will relate to its political (pay)masters.

The DCMS is way down the Whitehall pecking order, which has always made it difficult for CABE to get its voice heard in government. DCLG is a bit more important in the scheme of things, but while there are some rising stars amongst its ministers with at least some interest in architecture (Grant Shapps and Greg Clark), it is unlikely to be much of an architectural champion while Eric Pickles remains in charge - though the bookies think he won't be there much longer.

The Business department, in spite of having the most naff of recent departmental acronyms, BIS, is closer to where the power lies in government than either of the other departments, so on the face of it, this will be helpful to the new organisation in establishing itself.

BIS is responsible for the construction industry, and the Design Council in its present guise concerns itself with industrial design and so on. All of this suggests the possibility of new CABE involving itself in the building and production side of architecture, an aspect it has had little to do with in the past. At a time when there is a need to reinvent much of building construction to deal with climate change, this is an interesting opportunity.

For architecture to flourish in the public sector, it is necessary for there to be patrons, preferably ministers at a senior level. That is the only way that it will be taken seriously. The New Labour administration was in general terms about as philistine as they come for most of its time in office, but CABE was lucky to have the support of a few ministers who cared - Alan Howarth and Lord Falconer, for example. The person in the new government who appeared most likely to care about architecture was Ed Vaizey, assiduously courted by all before the election because it appeared he was likely to end up as architecture minister - which he did, for a day or two, before being replaced, as a result of a conflict of interest problem, by the source of that problem, a man called John Penrose, who has not been heard of since.

With Cameron and Osborne worthy heirs to Blair and Brown in their apparent lack of interest in the arts in general - and Education Secretary Michael Gove suggesting that school design can manage without architects - things don't look that promising. In that context, CABE's survival comes across as a grudging concession, rather than evidence of any enthusiasm or commitment on the part of the Government.

CABE is going to have to work hard to fight its corner. If architecture in the planning system has problems of its own, and architecture as fine art is of no interest, perhaps the promotion of architecture - including retrofit - as a source of climate change solutions will be the way to get noticed.

Welcome to Royston Vasey

People would be more interested in getting involved in a 'Big Community' than in the 'Big Society', according to research published this week.

There's not much sign of enthusiasm for 'Localism' either, so perhaps that term also needs another look.

The default unit of localism in the Localism Bill is the parish - we still have parish councils in some places, generally in the countryside, but not in others. The adjective associated with a parish is parochial. So perhaps Parochialism would be a better word for what is intended? Certainly as far as 'neighbourhood planning' is concerned, it would convey the likely flavour more accurately.

But there is also something called 'community planning' - which starts to sound a bit more like something useful.

The planning system suffers from too many words and not enough pictures, but the choice of words is still important.

Separated at birth?

The Rogers Stirk Harbour-designed One Hyde Park, with its super luxury flats, had a high profile launch party yesterday which got plenty of attention in the press. The jaw-dropping prices and billionaire interiors received more attention than RSH's architecture, and no one seems to have noticed the building's inspiration across town at the 1970's St Giles Hotel in the former YMCA building off the south end of Tottenham Court Road - revealed in the pictures above. The buildings share a remarkably similar 'parti' - architect speak for basic arrangement of plan and form - even to the extent of both relying on views out on the diagonal to avoid overlooking from one wing to the next, as in both cases they are quite tightly planned. But while you will be asked for quite a few tens of millions if you want one of the remaining flats in the new building, at the former YMCA there is, as the Village People observed, a 'place you can go...when you're short on your dough' and enjoy a poor man's version of the same experience for less than £100 a night.

Piloti has a funny turn

Private Eye's Nooks and Corners column, which deals with planning and architecture, can usually be relied upon for tweedy, miserabilist huffing and puffing, sweeping up (with that same lack of discrimination for which its targets are so often criticised) the worthwhile along with the worthless in its scattergun loathing of anything that has happened in architecture after, roughly, Le Corbusier abandoned twiddly mouldings.

Very surprising, therefore, to find that the column in the latest issue begins with two paragraphs of (grudging, caveated) praise for the new masterplan for Chelsea Barracks. What's going on? No good can come of this.

Happily, the natural order of things is restored within a sentence or two, and the point of the item revealed - a characteristic moan about the project developer Qatari Diar's application for a certificate of immunity from listing for the Victorian chapel on the site.

Piloti's judgement in matters of listing can be gauged from a subsequent item which appears to suggest that a former workhouse in Cleveland Street W1, the subject of a current campaign, should be listed because Dickens lived nearby. Hmmm.

Gehl at NLA

To a packed event at the New London Architecture galleries, where Professor Jan Gehl gives a talk to promote his most recent book Cities for People.

He's a terrifically engaging speaker, his command of English striking just the right balance between communicating well while remaining very Nordic and therefore inherently more plausible than a Brit on the subject of humane, people-centred urban environments. We've heard most of it it all before, but it can't be said often enough, and Gehl is the man who was saying it earlier than most and more clearly and consistently than most.

It became apparent that in spite of successes such as Trafalgar Square and Kensington High Street, London is pretty off the pace when it comes to tarmac-culling, pedestrian and cyclist friendly streetscape improvements such as are now happening even all over Manhattan, as well as in Scandinavia, Australia and elsewhere.

Gehl has reached the level of authority and seniority where he can take the mickey, in a charming manner, out of named as well as generic purveyors of form-obsessed urban soullessness. Those architects' drawings showing new urban environments implausibly overpopulated by people enjoying themselves - activity he describes as 'unspecified public life' - were ruthlessly contrasted with photos of the deserted reality.

He is clear that architects should spend less time obsessing about forms on the skyline and more time worrying about life lived with feet on the ground, but perhaps most striking was the thought that perhaps these two worlds have far less to do with each other than one might assume. The neglect of the public realm in design is not a necessary consequence of attention to other things (except insofar as there are only so many hours in the designer's day) - we ought to be able to have both.

The evening ended with reflections on whether economies such as China and India can learn the lessons sooner than we did, relative to their state of development. The signs are not hopeful. I was reminded of a story of an occasion when London's then Mayor Ken Livingstone visited Beijing with Richard Rogers. On a tour of the streets of the city, they exclaimed 'all these bicycles!' - but the admiring tones were lost in translation, and they were told 'Don't worry, we're meeting our targets for getting them all cars.'