Coffee in the Square

New - Neo - or just unreconstructed?

James Murrays interesting article in the website Businessgreen illustrates the disarray that a global financial shambles has brought to the green movement.
http://touch.businessgreen.com/businessgreen/#!/entry/building-a-new-environmentalism-businessgreen-mobile,5089ce6dd7fc7b567031a03d
He wants to divide the environmental camp, depending on how pro-growth we are.
I don't think I fit into any of these categories because I believe that we must address far more radical change in order to create environmental improvements.
Does that make me unreconstructed?
I certainly don't agree with Murray that we can go on much as before, making just a few tweaks, in order to save the planet. But I feel that the solution to our environmental woes can be found in the current dissatisfaction with economic practice.
We've all become so familiar with the theory that success can be found by nurturing growth, expansion at any price, that we've forgotten the finite nature of our world.
If humans behave like locusts, they are destined to succumb. Nature is cruel to excess. It wipes it out. There are hundreds of examples. Think of the way moulds grow and die, the way plagues and viruses wipe themselves out, how any natural surfeit will tend to crash and burn.
In nature the organisms that survive find a natural balance.
If we subject economic thinking to biological understanding, then we should not go for growth, but steady state. From the position of steady state, genetic improvement proceeds gently and healthily. Steady state does not rule out improvements. In biological terms that improvement is in health, robustness, specialisation. In economy the improvement could be measured in level of national health, educational achievement, even contentedness.
At the moment there is a lot of discussion about how the Chinese need to encourage consumerism amongst their population in order to maintain their impressive (or do I mean frightening?) level of growth.
I wonder what Confucius would have said?

The NPPF - The PPS is dead - Long live the PPS

It's just a few weeks since Government published their National Planning Policy. Local Planning Authorities are still taking stock. Developers are waiting to find out what the upshot is likely to be on the ground.
Are the planning barristers still rubbing their hands with glee? Has the scrapping of hundreds of pages of national policy really freed up our planning system and heralded a new era of localism?
I'm not so sure that it has.
The first thing to realise is that our planning system is a big ship to turn Unlike any other form of statutory legislation, planning has always relied very heavily on local policies. The local plan remains the most important document on the table. These local plans are different in each authority, they take a long time to produce and once published they have a shelf life of 10 to 15 years.
No amount of national posturing is going to change these leviathans in short order.
Before NPPF all these plans based their policies on PPS's, the old and now defunct national planning policies. After NPPF, the local plans still base their policies on the old PPS's. Nothing has changed.
Over time, maybe say the next five years, new and revised local plans will come out which will tweak these old policies. But I'm pessimistic that cash strapped authorities will have the capacity to rethink many of them from first principles.
Some of the old PPS's still provide the meat to the bones of the new national policies.
For example, there used to be a whole national policy document devoted to town centres. It brought in the concept of sequential testing, i.e. that retail development should be located as close to the town centre as possible. The policy went into great detail to describe how this concept should be used to assess applications. The new national policy says the same sort of thing, but collapses the whole, quite complex process, into a few short sentences.
We all know what sequential testing is now. An industry of consultants has grown up who can run this test.
So even though the PPS has been scrapped, the details of its policy and it's effect on the consideration of a retail planning application still stands.
Woe betide any local authority that decided to throw out that old policy document last month when government announced that all the old policies were withdrawn. The methodology PPS established still looks as if it's going to endure for a long time yet.
But, I hear you cry, I thought this was all about local authorities making up their own minds. It's true that a local authority could decide to go it alone and redefine the process for a sequential test. Now here is where I can see the planning barristers rubbing their hands with glee. Most local authorities just don't have the will to change the goalposts.
However I do see some of the big retailers might get very interested in pushing boundaries on these types of issues. They have the money, and the incentive, to try to find gaps between local and national policies. These gaps might just allow that cheap, out of centre site, to be re-born as the perfect location for shopping.
The PPS is dead - long live the PPS!
In my next blog, I shall look at the whole question of the relationship between local plans and neighbourhood plans.

Is town planning a fiscal measure?

Speaking on the BBC’s Andrew Marr show, the chancellor, Mr Osborne insisted that the current planning rules are the thing that are holding Britain back.

"It is deeply frustrating that the planning rules hold back economic development in Britain. I was talking to a major global company who said it takes a third of the time to build a warehouse in Germany than it does in Britain,” he said.

Now this 'major global' would say that wouldn't they?  Planning is a source of frustration for developers all over the western world.  The right approach is obviously balance between rampant development and rampant conservationism.   Groups like the CPRE, supported by newspapers like The Telegraph, are getting into a fighting position to try and block the new National Planning Policy Framework, which is rumoured to come out this week alongside, or even as part of the budget.

I can't remember a time when a chancellor got mixed up with the nitty gritting of planning legislation.  Sadly I think it's because government have so few options to stimulate growth.  Having decided on a fiscally tight economy they can't stimulate from within and with this recession being fairly global, they can't expect exports to help that much either.  So what do they do?  They resort to tinkering with things like planning legislation, or (today's funny) privatising the roads!   None of these will bring forth those lovely green shoots quickly.

There may be good reasons to improve the planning system, something I've been campaigning on for many years.  But I don't think that those reasons are fiscal. I'm sure that the reason for the down turn in our housebuilding programme has got very little to do with the structure of our planning system.

The main reason for people not buying houses is fear of the future.  We've just been through a global recession, jobless numbers are skyrocketing and there are very few areas of our economy where people feel secure in their jobs.  So very few people are buying or selling. 

People hunker down in recessions, they stop buying unnecessary goods and a new house is, for most people, nothing more than a very expensive luxury.  If you take out a thirty year mortgage, it's a punt on your earnings capacity over the long term. At a time when inflation is low and access to finance, is tight it's not surprising that people don't want to take that risk.

When I last attended a National House Builder's Conference the developers told the communities minister the facts in no uncertain terms.  They knew that people weren't buying because they could not or did not wish to extend their mortgages.  It's a shame that the minister didn't listen and pass it on to his mate George (Osborne)

There are hundreds of sites all over the country with planning permission, but with no builders present.  I don't think people will be drawn back into the market until the following has happened.

1. People feel secure in their jobs.

2. Mortgages become easier to get hold of.

Even then developers will have to entice people back into the market with new brands that are seen to offer better value for money.  This did the trick in the early 90's when loft conversions spearheaded by new entrants Urban Splash and Manhattan Lofts kick started the housing market again.  People were prepared to buy half finished spaces and fit them out themselves.

It's a wonderful opportunity for new firms willing to sell a more sustainable product.  But until we see those green shoots it's not the time to dangle a toe in the market.

Stimulate the construction industry and you get people off the dole queue fast. It's a very important aspect of our economy.  But planning is a long term strategy.  We need to stimulate the businesses and new developers now, stimulate the money markets and make access to finance easier and more reliable now.  Encouraging developers, housing associations, co-ownership co-ops and self builders to invest in construction on sites which already have planning permission could be an fast ticket to fiscal success.

So I would urge the chancellor on Wednesday to forget about fiddling with planning legislation, while the economy is still burning.  A fiscal mistake may take ten years and a couple of changes of parliament to get right.  Make rash decisions about the environment today, and we'll still be paying for our mistakes in hundreds of years time.

 

How are we going to do that?

"As we have come to realise in recent years, we are running out.  Materials are scarce, fuel is in short supply, and prices are escalating.  To survive one is either going to have to be rich, or resourceful."

Guess who said that - and when...

It was Lloyd Kahn and the yearwas 1973.  It's part of the opening salvo in a book entitled "Shelter" which was the must-have alternative publication for us at architecture school.  The irony is that when I leaf through the book today it's all in there.  Articles about conserving water; high levels of insulation; using solar power; growing your own.  It's as if the truth was out there all along, but politicians just didn't see it.  Most of my architect colleagues went on to design air conditioned offices, gas guzzling airports and houses with high levels of central heating and low levels of insulation!  (I did too - I wasn't immune from the spirit of the times.  It's what the clients wanted.)

The management consultants will tell you that there are two types of important and that all managers must pay attention to both types.  We all get round somehow to dealing with the Import and Urgent - but we all have equal difficulty with the Important and Non-urgent.  That never gets done.  Though the consultants say that those who do pay attention to the long view will succeed.

Climate change is important and non-urgent and that's the problem.  Back in the Seventies we had an oil crisis and the issue of dwindling stocks of hydrocarbons became urgent.  So for a few short years scarce resources were Important and Urgent.

Now the scarcest resource on the planet seems to be money - strange because money - unlike fuel or other resources - can be printed at will! 

Oh No! I Hear you cry.  She's lost the plot! Money has a value which is linked to resources.  And that is true, but there is one resource that we are not running out of - in fact we are pretty flush with it.  That resource is human capital.  As populations rise we need to find ways of utilising human resourcefulness to the full.  There are a lot of social and politician implications for this one, but in terms of resources, humans are brilliant at taking a few resources and transforming them into objects of value.  Seeds into food; clay into pots; wood into houses.

I think we are underestimating the value of hand made objects, which waste less resources, which generate more jobs and which can turn the means of production into a creative act.  The 70's book Shelter is all about making your own home, about using recycled resources, being off grid and on message.  I find the technical pages really interesting, they are full of early designs for solar power and windmills.  There's an interview with Harold Hay, one of the first solar engineers which is worth reading.  He talks about the superiority of micro generation.  I think a lot of his argument still holds true today.

The message never got through in the 70's they were followed by the roaring 80's when we all wore shoulder pads and acted like Carrington in Dallas.   But those people kept on working, and I'm sure their knowledge should be valued today. (Catch this rather poignant article about Harold Hay today http://articles.latimes.com/2007/nov/10/business/fi-haroldhay10)

I leave you with the poem that comes at the beginning of the book, and accompanies the illustration at the head of this article.

Fox was the only living man.  There was no earth.
The water was everywhere. "What shall I do," Fox
asked himself. He began to sing in order to find out.
"I would like to meet somebody," he sang to the
sky.
The he met Coyote.
"I thought I was going to meet someone," FOx
said.
"Where are you going?" Coyote asked.
"I've been wandering all over trying to find some-
one. I was worried there for a while."
"Well, it's better for two people to go together...
that's what they always say."
"O.K. But what will we do?"
"I don't know."
"I got it! Let's try to make the world."

"And how are we going to do that?" Coyote asked.
"Sing!" said Fox.

Jamie de Angelo

Shelter Ed Lloyd Kahn 1973 ISBN 0-394-70991-8 (paper back)