Transforming our community spaces especially in our cities require radical thinking and the ability to drive changes among strong opposition from vested interests says Joost Beunderman from Demos. Does any political party have the will to deliver this?
Theorists have long argued that two distinct concepts of value drive the production of the built environment: exchange value and use value. A town centre, for example, can be seen as a generator of retail and office rents or as a place that caters to people’s everyday needs - be it shopping, use of public services, or sharing social experiences. In the case of housing, we can discern its ability to give shelter to its inhabitants (and more than that: a place to inhabit, feel at home in) from its role as an investment: for individuals, or on the housebuilder’s balance sheet. Different ways of prioritising one type of value over the other has implications that go beyond the merely theoretical. In this article I will argue that, if we would wish to favour the use value of places to the public over the financial value that space generates, then we cannot be satisfied at our current ways of planning towns and cities. Inhabiting places implies an active, creative and constantly changing relationship of the user to his or her environment – a more diverse category than shopping or buying a house. There are urgent reasons why we should put this enriched concept of use central, and make tangible steps to empower people’s relation to places
After nearly ten years of Urban Renaissance, it is clear that UK cities have changed dramatically. Many will say, for the better. Rediscovered as engines of economic growth after decades of policy neglect, they have enjoyed reinvestment in public spaces, residential growth and a revived employment base. Needless to say, this is part of a global phenomenon which is as much cultural as financial: people as well as real estate markets have rediscovered what excitement cities can offer. The slogan ‘Live – Work – Play’, which implicitly or explicitly rules policy from Portsmouth to Los Angeles, is having its physical expression in new inner city apartments, performing arts centres, state-of-the-art retail malls, night-time waterfronts and bendy bridges. And clearly it is not just city centres that have seen investment, as regeneration is taking place across cities and towns: small-scale infill, brownfield redevelopment and new urban extensions are speeding up as we speak.
However, there are growing signs that the transformation of the UK built environment isn’t unequivocally successful. We see increasing public discussion about clone-towns, bad-quality ‘town-cramming’, and trouble in the nighttime economy. Commentators lament the increasing dominance of chain bars, overly focused on their alcohol sales without taking social responsibility; they criticise the lowest-common-denominator nature of most new housing development; they condemn the increasing homogenisation of the retail environment, with scale increases said to hollow out diversity.
There are deep structural issues underlying such worries – and they can have profound long-term consequences. One example of this is the recent Foresight report on obesity, featuring a comprehensive systems analysis of the factors that are making Britain fatter. The authors argue that ‘obesogenic environments’ play an important role: the dominance of the car in our everyday movement patterns is co-conditioned by how we currently plan, design and maintain the built environment in ways that make walking and cycling an unattractive option. This is still true in many of the newest housing developments – not, perhaps, in the pedestrianiased squares that we see in urban centres nor in the car-free developments that surround them. But the vast bulk of UK housing continues to be built with streets for cars rather than as social spaces, driving children indoors and decreasing opportunities for everyday contact between neighbours.
CABE, the Government’s champion for architecture and urban design quality, found after an evaluation of recent housing schemes across the country that many of them were so bad that they should have never been given planning permission at all. Despite the best efforts of institutions like CABE to improve planning and design, most housing in the UK still tends towards what architect Peter Barber summarized as ‘the corporate, generic and homogenous.’ Standards are simply too low across the board: dwelling size, quality of design, and environmental performance. Peter Barber points to institutional factors why this is so, and he is right: there are no real incentives for most housebuilders to do any better; the long-term social and environmental cost is for the user and wider society.
No-where in West Europe do volume housebuilders dominate the market as much as in the UK. In many countries, between a third and half of people plan or commission their own house. What is obvious there is that wherever end-users have more input in the process, they approach the process differently: energy use and usable outdoor space matter to tham, and more effective solutions are found. But in the UK, anyone but the meagre 13% that ‘self-builds’ is denied any chance of putting their own creative stamp on what they will inhabit, leading to that weird paradox that the most important investment of most people’s lives comes with the least chance to exercise choice or personalise the product.
With daily news stories pointing to a need for speeding up housing production, the question is whether we haven’t reached a dead end: on the one hand, we are learning more and more about the importance of the built environment for physical and mental well-being; also, we are hoping to massively increase housebuilding, (perhaps even on greenbelts) and increase environmental standards and (somehow, despite the enormous speed of building and population’s inherent mobility) ‘create community’ – and, we are told, we face a planning gridlock, fuelled by NIMBYism. In this context, will we still rely on the same institutions and builders to deliver a better outcome? And if, based on past experiences, we don’t trust housing developers to do better, can we rely on chaining them with ever-stricter design codes and codes for sustainable homes? It seems we should be looking for different ways to open up this housing deadlock – and one way is to empower the users, rather than the mass producers.
We seem to reaching a similar dead-end in our thinking about town centres. When the chair of the Commons Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh MP, spoke out that ‘drunken yobs were turning town-centres into a no-go zone’, ‘behaving like an invading army’, his was just one of many voices expressing concern at how town centres fail to provide accommodate the needs and aspirations of the public at large, rather than catering to small segments of the population. Again, public experiences and structural factors coincide: the increasing dominance of the profit motive in the evening economy – note how policymakers inevitably refer to it as evening economy – is well-documented, as is the debate about the increasing blandness of town centre spaces. Again, ‘improving design’ clearly isn’t the issue here: what matters is our underlying concept of values. One forthcoming Demos publication, Seen and Heard, highlights how town centres are failing to provide any amenities for children, effectively shutting them out of what town centres offer altogether: ‘Live Work and Play’ has become narrowed down to privilege the 20 to 55 year olds who drive retail and ‘evening economy’ sales. Equally, there is little in our revitalised town centres for those on low incomes or for elderly – especially ‘after hours’ when most shops close and libraries shut their doors. A recent research by the Civic Trust Night vision, called this a ‘vanishing of the public sector after’, adding that even many of those aged 20 to 35 would favour and use a more diversified range of things to do in the evening. However, the dominant way of planning town centres does not succeed in articulating and encouraging more diverse use patterns.
In public services, the past period has seen a slow but steady trend towards ‘user-led design.’ It aims to spread new ‘operating systems’ for services such as social care, allowing people to become participants in shaping, commissioning and delivering the services they use, rather than passive and dependent recipients of what the system routinely provides. There is much that that we can learn from such concepts. The Demos study People Make Places showed how public spaces, in order to be successful, need to encourage people’s participation, rather than merely providing set-piece designs. Organisations such as CABE have gathered promising examples showing the benefits of community gardens to create a sense of ownership and belonging in hitherto neglected and unsafe spaces.
There is an appetite for more. In housing, self-building and self-commissioning is mostly constrained by the lack of land and supportive planning regulations, and hence increasingly an option only to the super-rich. If this barrier were overcome, no doubt more people would choose to opt out of the house-builders’ products. Already, with a grant from the Urban Buzz sustainable communities initiative, two London-based architectural practices are creating a model for Enabled Self-Procurement, in which housing developers, rather than providing a finished turn-key product, work with future buyers to enable the self-planning of homes, assisting people with expertise and highly adaptable template models. Similarly, events such as the Bristol Urban Beach, London’s tour of the Sultan’s Elephant and the temporary grassing over of Trafalgar Square show the massive public response whenever the use of town centres and street space gets subverted temporarily. In our research on the Bristol Beach, two women were asked what they though they day would have been like without the beach. They responded: “Bristol’s all bars, shops, churches and offices. Where can you go?” “We would have gone shopping again, spending money I don’t have...” The big planning challenge is to provide new channels for people’s producer power: for more self-commissioned housing, for more bottom-up created temporary public spaces, more street parties and a more diverse night-life.
To extend and propogate existing such models across the whole of the UK requires a transformation of every aspect of how we plan for spaces: assessment of needs and opportunities, models of participation and regulation, the distribution of funding and investment and professional roles. The scale of that transformation raises risks and obstacles that will be used by opponents to water down proposals and slow down change. Proposals for more participative ways of producing spaces run the risk of sounding utopian unless they are clearly grounded in practical experience. As I have argued, there are examples of reimagining the process by putting use value central: acknowledging the diversity of users’ needs, and encouraging them to be an active participant in creating spaces.We should recognise this potential to re-imagine what city space can be used for more broadly and to re-think what we ultimately want to encourage in urban develpment.