hsa conference 2015 political ideology and housing supply: rethinking new towns and the building of...

HSA conference 2015

Political ideology and housing supply: rethinking New Towns and the building of new

communities in England

Presented by : Dr. Helena Rivera

University College London (UCL)

Pioneer Perspectives: learning from local voices to rethink New Towns and the building of new communities in England

Dr. Helena Rivera The Bartlett School of Planning (UCL)

Professor Sir Peter Hall 1932-2014

HSA conference 2015: Early Career Stream


Britain has a nightmare, and its name is housing. At the heart of the nightmare is the sheer expense. The average house costs five times the average person’s annual income, not far off record highs. And they’re going up too.

(The Independent, 2014).


England has relied on the profession for over a century, one now matured into spatial planning to solve the chronic problems of supply through the stewardship of land licenses and orientation of policy to build new communities:



Industrial Villages (1850-1888)



Garden Cities (1898)



Homes Fit for Heroes (1919)



New Towns (1946-1976)



Millennium Communities (1997)



Locally-led Garden Cities (2014)



Figure 1 a: ‑ Communities: Proposed extension of existing built-up areas and sites for new satellite © Source: Original map presented to the Minister of Town and Country Planning (Abercrombie, 1944)

The New Towns programme 1946-1976:

• a formidable example of how a single planning policy can be interpreted, delivered and managed

• New Towns provided a template for both physical and social reconstruction of England. The planning ideology for New Towns was one of creating balanced communities (Reith Committee, 1946c)

• Through a national policy aimed to abate the

housing crisis, there would be a redistribution of the population to a series of satellite towns strategically placed at a 20-mile radius from London.

• Prepared as a Greater London Plan of 1944 by Patrick Abercrombie

• Purpose was to redistribution London’s population and industry into new satellite towns

• Objective was to create new communities that would be self-sustaining and self-sufficient, both economically and physically, in what was coined balance (Clapp, 1971: 53-55).



1900 1904 1908 1912 1916 1923 1927 1931 1935 1939 1943 1947 1951 1955 1959 1963 1967 1971 1975 1979 1983 1987 1991 1995 1999 2003 2007 20110

50,000

100,000

150,000

200,000

250,000

300,000

350,000

400,000

New Towns Programme

mark 1

Source: Graph produced by researcher. Data from 1900-1946 from the Office for National Statistics (Hicks and Allen, 1999); and data from 1946-2014 from Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG, 2014a)

Table 1: Overall house building in England 1900-2014



What happens if we try to learn from the past not through planning history, or discursive policy analysis, but by revealing the stories and experiences of the non-experts, the non-planners?

The English New Towns are unique in this sense because their original pioneers are still alive. The production of space in New Towns began with its first wave of settlers, coined ‘pioneers’. This idea derives from Dolores Hayden (1995):

The production of space begins as soon as indigenous residents locate themselves in a particular landscape and begin the search for subsistence. The place may grow into a town, inhabited by a new wave of settlers. (ibid.: 20).

New Towns nonetheless migrated between 60,000-90,000 new settlers to its mark 1 towns. These pioneers that witnessed the ‘place grow into a town’ provide an invaluable opportunity for reviewing the past.



You see the government doesn’t want to use the [New Town] term because it is a toxic term in their minds so instead they use other phrases, like eco towns, but in effect they are still New Towns. People have a negative image of New Towns so they avoid the terms. (120117-05H).



Research Questions:

(1) Given the ongoing crisis in housing provision, how can a renewed study of the New Towns Programme help rethink planning’s challenges in building new communities today? This leads to two subsidiary questions:

What is the contemporary legacy of the English New Town beyond the already established criticisms?In what ways does a study of a programme that was active between 1946 and 1976 explain a continuum and/or departure in the government’s efforts to build new communities throughout the twentieth century?

(2) To what extent can we reconceptualise the New Towns discourse by incorporating local perspectives into the legacy of this 1946 policy? And as a result,

If we accept that New Towns have been mainly documented through an expert-driven discourse (academic and practice) that has created a specific and limited understanding, what happens when we nuance its discourse using everyday voices to draw on its historical and contemporary experience?



What are the specific stereotypes that have been created (and perpetuated) by experts regarding New Towns that have led to their popular characterisation as unbalanced communities?



Research Questions:

(1) Given the ongoing crisis in housing provision, how can a renewed study of the New Towns Programme help rethink planning’s challenges in building new communities today? This leads to two subsidiary questions:

What is the contemporary legacy of the English New Town beyond the already established criticisms?In what ways does a study of a programme that was active between 1946 and 1976 explain a continuum and/or departure in the government’s efforts to build new communities throughout the twentieth century?

(2) To what extent can we reconceptualise the New Towns discourse by incorporating local perspectives into the legacy of this 1946 policy? And as a result,

If we accept that New Towns have been mainly documented through an expert-driven discourse (academic and practice) that has created a specific and limited understanding, what happens when we nuance its discourse using everyday voices to draw on its historical and contemporary experience?



How to reveal the stories and experiences of the non-experts, the non-planners?



1. Review the established view

literature review, Post-war Films & movies, House of Commons debates and political discourses

Conduct interviews with experts: academic, professional & political

2. Reveal the local voices

Define the key stereotypes around New Towns

Participatory Action Research (PAR) workshops

Individual and group Interviews with Pioneers, LA employees & New Town professionals

Tell the story of the NT: arrival, development, current challenges, future growth

OVERLAP

AESOP Young Academics Conference


1. A case of New Town Blues or suburban dystopia?

New Towns Blues? What's that? (120130-06G).

Within [the New Town], the better you did, the more you wanted to move out but also –importantly - people started to get cars and they could live a more dissociated life from the ideal of self-containment because society became more mobile. So if you have a nice job, people don’t contain themselves and live in the New Town. “I’ve done better in life, I want to get away from the New Town’. If you think about what self-containment means… [chuckle] …it tends to mean that you weren’t necessarily ever going to have a high wage. Because if you contain yourself to living and working in one place and you are only searching for work over a wide area… you know once you start to make routes and motorways to all these towns that take you to the M25 and beyond and people get cars, their aspirations change and they recognise that if you search for work over a larger area you are potentially going to get a higher wage. (120221-10G) .




2. Design driven stereotypes of New Towns as mostly Modernist projects

Something happened in the 20th and 21st century in housing and communities. It seems as if good design has been forgotten [because of the radburn layout & neighbourhood unit]. The important thing is really place making… designing to create real spaces to live in. Outdoor streets and squares where, if it rains it rains and if it shines it shines. (120116-01G).





3. New Towns are nothing more than large council estates

One of the problems about the New Towns, and they were good in their time, and we need to remember we are talking of an idea that came nearly 100 years ago… one of the bad things about new towns, especially post-war New Towns, are they are all single-class. It was taking a poor estate in the slums and throwing them into New Towns. (120531-09G).






4. Working-class Labour in the Conservative belt? Tipping the electoral balance

I think it [the negative image of new towns] comes from the kind of ‘all built at one time’ syndrome that is so not English picturesque. We are in a country where there is a huge love for little villages growing incrementally, market towns that have developed slowly over centuries. And this is very foreign to us all. To have suddenly, all in one era, a town built at once is very un-English. (120208-08G).






4. Working-class Labour in the Conservative belt? Tipping the electoral balance

5. Land-banking over Compulsory Purchase Orders (CPO)

Housing is the most difficult type of building in Britain. That’s because it’s in the hands of volume builders which are property developers… they are the biggest firms in Britain and build millions of houses. But they really have very little interest in the housing- it is only a short term interest. They buy pieces of land. They wait for planning permission. They bank land and at certain points they dribble it out! They dribble it out because they want to push their prices up. And then they have to move real quickly: there is such a demand you can sell anything, and then they sell quickly and they have no interests in follow-ups. (120531-09G).



Structural issues: the bane of self-containment



Design and access: newness and sameness



Political ideology: re-scaling governance



I came to Harlow when I was five. My father moved to Harlow when they [Development Corporation] offered him a good deal to move out and set up his business there. My father was looking for a small factory unit and the Harlow Development Corporation had built these units specifically for start-ups. Until then it was in a shared garden. My father had the unit there in Harlow for 40 years and the Corp always looked after him. (120117-05H).



At one time, if you had a nuisance neighbour, you went and reported him. Now you don’t know who to go to or be in contact with, because everyone is a private landlord. (260312-10H).



The sale of housing below cost to existing tenants got rid of all the best of stuff… Oh [the Right-to-Buy] is a very serious issue. It residualised the whole of council housing so most of the people who are left in council housing are low income that can’t afford to buy… [council housing] becomes for people who are unemployed, who have quite complex issues and problems, so then the housing gets associated with something we don’t want to be involved in… with a stigma basically. (140212-13H).



Conclusion

Working specifically with mark 1 pioneers and local voices generated important insights not available in the existing New Town literature. The New Town pioneers provided a nuanced understanding of their town, free from the weight of judgement; of retrospective analysis; and of the desire to create a linear narrative.



Conclusion

For Sandercock, existing histories have led to what she calls the ‘noir’ side of planning that omits both diversity and critical perspective. This noir side has occurred because ‘the mainstream planning historian has typically seen their subject as the profession and the object as describing and (and celebrating) its emergence’ (Sandercock 2003: 40).

I rely on this critique as a guide for connecting the mixed methods to a narrative enquiry.



Conclusion

Sir Peter Hall (1980) identified that planning served three sets of actors;1. politicians; 2. bureaucracy and;3. community

I suggest that ‘pioneers’ should be included as a fourth actor.



Conclusion

Pioneers are the local residents who are directly affected by planning initiatives and can provide specificity of both their impact and legacy. Whilst ‘community’ as an actor is important, there is a differentiation that needs to be qualified.



Conclusion

A critical reading of planning was introduced by Aaron Wildavsky in 1973 with a paper called:

‘If Planning is Everything, Maybe it’s Nothing’

He presented a radical departure in planning thought by arguing that planning had taken on so many manifest functions that ‘the planner can no longer encompass its dimensions’ (Wildavsky, 1973: 127).



Conclusion

We could invest Wildavsky’s 1973 title with contemporary meaning so that it reads:

‘If planning does not learn from the past maybe it does not have

a future.’


hsa conference 2015 political ideology and housing supply: rethinking new towns and the building of...

Documents

early career streamdr

planning ideology

spatial planning

building of new communities

new towns programme

managed new towns

single planning policy

country planning abercrombie