We challenge the existing,

Planning for Alfie

Last week was an amazing week for all of us at OpenPlan. We met some almost impossible deadlines but, even more importantly, we gained a  wonderful new addition to our family: our colleague and great friend Laura and her husband, Paul, became the proud – and utterly exhausted – parents of Alfie. 

Now, I am sure this will be the last thing on Laura’s and Paul’s minds just at the moment, but to me their baby’s arrival has given our work renewed purpose, focus and responsibility. All being well, Alfie can expect to see the beginning of the 22nd Century. By the time he is my age, the forward-looking plans we are working on now will be distant history – whether they have worked or not.  Alfie and the other 2.5 million babies born across the World this week will have lived with the outcomes of the work we and thousands of our planner, urbanist, place-maker colleagues have done, and the extent to which that work may – or may not – have affected political, economic and social decisions and actions.  Our success or failure in responding to climate change, rapid and massive urban growth, global inequalities, and all the other economic, social and environmental challenges we know we need to face up to urgently will have had profound impacts on the lives Alfie’s generation will be living in 2100. So, in our small studio here in Lincoln, we have a new incentive: we are now planning for Alfie!

Let’s just think about some of the predictions and expectations for the years in which Alfie will grow from baby to boy to man…  

It seems likely that the world’s population will have grown from 7 billion (now) to around 11 billion and will be continuing to grow. A much larger proportion of those people will be over 80 – like Alfie – in 2100.

Globally, Alfie’s generation will be predominantly urban. The proportion of the world’s people living in towns and cities is expected to have grown from its current 54% to 66% by the time Alfie is 35 (2050) and by 2100 he will probably be one of more than 80% of people worldwide who live in urban places.

According to the most recent climate change forecasts by the United Nations, our net carbon emissions will need, somehow, to have been reduced to zero by the time Alfie reaches his 40th birthday if there is to be any chance of keeping global warming to no greater than what many consider to be the critical ” tipping point” of  2 degrees celsius. Because we are currently such a long way from achieving that reduction ourselves, it looks like Alfie’s generation is going to have to shoulder more than its fair share of the burden of hitting that target – and if it is missed, Alfie’s own children are going to have even bigger problems to live with, as sea levels and climate volatility continue to rise well past 2100. Of course, with so many of the world’s people living in big coastal cities, and with climate change likely to affect agricultural productivity, things may be getting a bit difficult by that time!

That all looks challenging enough, even without considering the political and cultural impacts and tensions resulting from possible resource shortages and mass migration. 

Seeing the bigger picture is helpful in many ways, but it can also make you feel a bit helpless too – unless you have faith in the cumulative effects of millions of small actions. Alfie is one of two-and-a-half million babies born last week. Of course, to us he is the most significant, but all the others are the most significant too – to their own people. Some will not have the advantages Alfie has, some will not make it to adulthood, some, sadly, will not have made it to the end of the week. Most, though will be living through these challenging times with Alfie and it is down to us – collectively – to make sure that the tasks that fall to them are only challenging, not impossible.   

So, how should planning for Alfie affect our work and our priorities? 

As a small studio, we can’t change the world on our own – but we make a contribution. We can continue to apply a global perspective to every piece of ‘local’ work we carry out – whether it’s local to our Lincoln base, our UK base, our Caribbean “second home”, the places where the students we work with from Asia, Africa and the Middle East will be working, or any of the places we’d love to work in ourselves when opportunities arise. 

We can continue to play our part in understanding the workings and cultures of urban places and communities better, and helping to make villages, towns and cities more liveable and more sustainable. 

We can continue to practise – and promote – an integrated and inclusive approach to spatial planning and, placemaking, and to ensure that local people are engaged as fully as possible  in planning the future of their own places. 

We can also continue to value the contributions that children, teenagers and young adults can make to planning and placemaking. 

Surely, we owe at least this to Alfie and all the other citizens of 2100 who were born this week!   

Agile Planning

100 years ago – just as the 1st World War was about to start – the Royal Town Planning Institute was founded. I presume those who set up the RTPI and were involved in its first years may have found themselves rather more preoccupied than they’d expected with the present rather than the future, but optimism and striving for a better future have always been central to the whole concept of planning: no future – no point in making plans!

When the Planning Minister, Nic Boles, addressed last week’s RTPI Centenary Convention, I was surprisingly encouraged by some of the things he said. One comment struck a particularly strong chord: Mr Boles said that “Planning is not about control, but about enabling, creating and planning a future we want to bring about”. I presume thoughts and motivations of that sort must have been pretty much at the forefront of the founders of the RTPI as their country spent the next few years locked in a devastating war on a scale never previously experienced. I guess they must have been even more compelling for the politicians and planners who created the first modern Town & Country Planning Act at then end of the 2nd World War – when creating a very much better future was a top priority.

The Minister went on to explain that recent relaxations of planning controls have been intended to free Planners from the burdens of having to consider planning applications for lots of minor changes that really do not have much impact on neighbours or the environment, so that they can invest their time in helping communities to create effective visions for their future. Now, I suspect there may have been a bit of post-rationalisation going on here – even a bit of spin to soften the audience, perhaps. I know that some of my professional colleagues are treating this all with some scepticism and concern – and they may well be right to do so. However, whatever the reality and the motivation behind the words themselves, I actually believe the principle is right.

The role of Planning – the only legitimate reason for its continuation as an interventionary activity – must be to help envision, work towards and bring about a future that is better than the present. The Planning profession’s activities must focus strongly on managing change – not for the sake of interfering, but to guide change in one direction rather than another; to equip us to adapt to the big changes we shall be experiencing; to be resilient to changes that can devastate; and to make changes that create more benefits and more good than harm, and that increase social, economic and environmental well-being and equity in the way that we use our most basic resource – the space we occupy.

We can contribute to this at any scale: individual, local community, national, global – every plan and every planning intervention should be underpinned by the same ethos. And if we are going to make the contributions that are – or should be – expected of us, in a world in which change is occurring and impacting at an ever-accelerating rate, we need to be planning with care, speed and agility.

One of the concerns voiced repeatedly from some at the RTPI Convention was that Planning is too slow. I agree entirely. A plan prepared without urgency over 5 years or more may be no better than a plan prepared with focused urgency and care in just a year – but the one prepared in the shorter time is likely to be more relevant at the time it emerges. The objective should be to prepare vision-based plans thoroughly but quickly, with the communities they are designed to benefit fully engaged in the process (and definitely not bored or alienated by it), and then to monitor, review and adjust them as a continuous process. A good plan is one that identifies a very clear destination, maps a route towards it, and then allows that route to be varied as unforeseen obstacles and changes crop up. Taking too long to prepare the plan just means that we move forward whilst looking down at the ground: when we encounter obstacles we get knocked off course and then don’t know where to go next.

Perhaps we need to heed Winston Churchill’s view that “plans are of little importance, but planning is essential”. We need good, visionary plans, but focusing on producing a perfect plan can detract from the continuously adaptive processes of good planning that we really need. The outcomes should always be more important than the outputs.

Steve Kemp, Executive Director

A good plan identifies a clear destination, maps a route towards it, and then allows that route to be varied as unforeseen obstacles and changes crop up.

A Brown and Pleasant Land?

“CHANCELLOR George Osborne last night revealed “radical” new rules on housing that he said would push local authorities to let developers build on almost all brownfield land – or central government might bypass council controls altogether.

The chancellor said that he expected 90 per cent of appropriate brownfield land to be covered by pre-approved planning permission in six years, freeing up as many as 200,000 new homes across the country.”

[City A.M., 13^th June 2014 – www.cityam.com – covering Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Mansion House speech]

The Chancellor’s recently announced drive to solve the “housing crisis” by compelling local authorities to short-circuit normal planning procedures so as to bring forward brownfield land for building “up to 200,000 new homes” raises many complex issues, so first thoughts areprobably dangerous – but I’m going to have a go anyway. Here are the first five that have come to mind, in response to the words Mr. Osborne actually spoke at Mansion House.

1.    “We need to see a lot more homes being built in Britain. The growing demand for housing has to be met by growing supply.”

Can’t argue with that one. We all know that, but finding agreement about what’s hindering the supply side and how best to boost it is a bit more challenging. But, of course, that’s why the Chancellor was all dressed up and ready to illuminate everyone…

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2. “We’ve already taken big steps to deliver those new homes. We’ve reformed our antiquated planning system.”

Some interesting use of language.

“Big” steps? Perhaps, but the steps taken in the 1950s and 1960s were definitely bigger (incentivised massively by the need to stride ahead after a devastating war, of course). The building peak was reached as long ago as 1968. Home-building rates plummeted pretty dramatically after that and have really remained comparatively unimpressive ever since. What made the difference? Direct public investment in housing provision. The BIG lesson so far seems to be that, whatever we do, the private sector alone simply can’t build all the houses we need fast enough. Politically and economically tricky but, nevertheless, that seems to be what the statistics show. So giving advance planning permission for housing on lots of brownfield sites might be part of a good idea, but its not a panacea by any means.

The other interesting phrase is “our antiquated planning system” As systems go, this one actually seems to have been in a state of constant reform – a sort of perpetual revolution – for a long time now. “Confused”, “confusing”, “contradictory”, “contorted”, “challenging”, yes, I can see varying degrees of justification for each of those adjectives; but “antiquated”? That suggests a degree of stability and constancy that we really have not experienced – and probably rightly so, in many ways. Planning is all about managing change, so change is really the only constant in planning!

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3. “If we want to limit development on important green spaces, we have to remove all the obstacles that remain to development on brown field sites.”

The operative word here is “important”. If we have important green spaces we, presumably, also have less important – even unimportant – green spaces too. To quote economist Dr. Kristian Niemietz, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs:  “an ex-industrial site that is used as a car park is not really “derelict”, and greenbelt land that is used for high-intensity agriculture is hardly pristine countryside. We should judge land by its actual environmental and amenity value, not by a box-ticking template from the 1940s”

The challenge for planners, politicians, communities and developers is to work together in differentiating between important and less important green spaces, as well as in identifying suitable brownfield sites, and to plan and deliver the development that is really needed in the most beneficial, least damaging ways. Applying a simplistic “green field bad – brown field good” approach when deciding where to build isn’t really likely to lead to the best outcomes (as we’ve seen before). I’m sure that’s not what Mr. Osborne was saying: it’s just that that’s how it sounds. The challenge for government is to prioritise investment and to avoid getting distracted by blame-game solutions.

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4. “Councils will be required to put local development orders on over 90% of brownfield sites that are suitable for housing.”

Another important word that might get lost if we’re not careful – the qualification “suitable”. So, we’re not talking about 90% of all brownfield sites, but 90% of whatever proportion of those sites may be considered suitable to have homes built on them.

That’s fine, but differentiating will involve consideration of a number of quite complex factors, including, for example:

–  location  – is this a good place for people to live?

–  infrastructure – is this place already well-connected and well served? If not can it be, and what are the costs involved?

–  viability – how much will it costs to make this a fit and healthy place for people to live? Will it be possible to meet the costs of restoration and cleaning, build affordable homes and still make an acceptable profit?

This will not be a simple task – which is why trying to get the right answers has tended to take time. Shifting the onus away from developers having to carry out the investigations to support planning applications to local authority planners having to do the same work to inform Local Development Orders might not be such an easy answer. It certainly doesn’t go very far towards answering the question “what if the largest concentrations of suitable brownfield land happen to be in the places where demand for housing is low?” NLP’s recent analysis suggests strongly that this is a very real problem.

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5. “This urban planning revolution will mean that in effect development on these sites will be pre-approved – local authorities will be able to specify the type of housing, not whether there is housing.”

 More interesting use of language. I’ve already suggested that the “revolution” is continual. Mr. Osborne might wish to be cast in the dashing role of revolutionary student leader, Marius, in the Mansion House production of Les Miserables, but to play that one out he has to “hear the people sing” and that’s where there seems to be a bit of a problem with all this. The Chancellor says that “local authorities will be able to specify the type of housing, not whether there is housing”.  Really? Won’t it be the local authorities who make that in-principle decision when formulating the LDOs? If not them, who? Who will be deciding whether each brownfield site is “suitable”? Who will be considering the wider implications of building homes on that site? Who will be working out demand and viability issues – looking at whether people will actually come if you build it? Who will be consulting the local people and hearing them sing? Is it really being suggested that central government will have the knowledge and understanding of each place and each community to take those decisions itself?

I really do hope I’ve misunderstood this one!

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There are big steps to be taken between putting a Local Development Order in place for developing a brownfield site and putting houses (or anything else) on a brownfield site to develop a place. Generally, planners do not seem to have been notably averse to the principle of redeveloping these sites – or of prioritising their redevelopment – but the remediation processes often involved can be very costly and making such developments commercially viable (without public financial intervention) has not proved an easy task for developers. Ways of overcoming that deterrent to development need very careful consideration. Just simplifying the procedure for  obtaining planning permission is unlikely to be the answer to the housing crisis, but it might well take us all a further step away from the careful planning of development  and change that is necessary to produce the well-designed and well-integrated places that we need for a healthy future.

Putting the “Play” in Placecheck

Working to produce a “Community Plan” for a large area in the south of Barbados, we recently spent a thought-provoking week leading Placechecks. Essentially, a Placecheck is a conversation – an hour or so’s discussion whilst walking around a place with the people who live and breathe it. By listening to our local hosts’ answers to the three basic Placecheck questions (What do you like about this place? What do you dislike about it? What changes would you like to see?) we learned, in just a few hours, much more about the real lives, concerns and hopes of ‘normal’ people in this part of Barbados than any literature reviews or data searches could have told us on their own.

For two of these Placechecks, the people who showed us round and chatted with us were young: children from a junior school, and teenagers and young adults from a youth group.  Seeing their place through their eyes was an assumption-challenging privilege.

“We like tree-lined streets – the shade makes it cooler to walk around”

We are still considering the Placecheck “results”, so it’s too early to talk about the way they are affecting our thinking about the emerging plan. However, some of the comments we’d heard in our conversations with young Barbadians connected with something mentioned in an interesting article I read just after the last of the Placechecks. The article, by David Maddox, looks at the potential for using “simulation modeling” in community engagement and has been published on the Sustainable Cities Collective website: http://tinyurl.com/lvazlym

What caught my mind initially was the author’s expressed excitement about “engagement exercises that use simulation models as tools to get people talking not just about their opinions, but about the consequences of their opinions”. This is a crucial part of the planning process that is often given insufficient time and attention. Using simple, but well-considered techniques, it is already possible to involve people in identifying the consequences of plans and changes – up to a point – but it seems that the technology that has so excited David Maddox could make the process more accessible, deeper, quicker and probably more fun. By helping – encouraging – ordinary people to participate more directly and actively in the process of making difficult decisions, it should be possible to produce plans that have greater acceptance and are better understood.  With the technology that David Maddox describes “Individuals can try out their designs and social ideas using the model as context, and have the model give some feedback about the how their ideas would work on the ground. Their ideas are taken out of the realm of unverified opinion and placed in a context in which their function, output, and outcomes can be compared. You might still prefer one type of design to another, but its performance could now be part of the decision mix“.

This is a really exciting development in engagement practice and the sort of thing that I can see could soon become real in a technologically advanced place like New York, where one of the models is evolving. But in Barbados or other small developing states? – way too ambitious, surely? But then I thought about a couple of things that we had learned whilst Placechecking…

On the Monday, we had been beckoned over to a small village “rum shop” with the unforgettable name “Bump Fart”s Variety” by a group of youths who were whiling away the morning chatting and drinking a beer or two (it turned out that Bump Fart has been the owner’s nickname since he was a small boy – he didn’t explain why, but we imagined a scenario!)  They were friendly and offered some genuinely helpful insights in to the life of their community.  We’d wondered, though about the circumstances that led them to be sitting in the rum shop at that time of a weekday – and we’d thought it interesting that, despite apparently being jobless, they were “playing” (our guess) on nice, up-to-date tablets and smartphones.

Hanging out at Bump Fart’s

The second thing that came back to me was our chats with the junior school children (who were, of course, all much more technologically competent than me) and then with the older youth group, all of whom had easy access to the internet via laptops, tablets and other good mobile devices. Asked whether the neighbourhood shops, bars and rum shops were important meeting places for the community, they said they were – but mostly for older people rather than them. “So, what’s the equivalent for young people like you?” we asked. The immediate answer from one of the older members of the group: “PlayStation!”. Now, obviously, he was only partly correct – this was a youth group that meets regularly, so there’s at least one face-to-face community activity they share! – but it was an interesting response and it was not said entirely facetiously. What else is there to do as a young person in a remote village with poor transport links and little money?  Are we unthinkingly forcing our young people behind their screens – and then blaming them?

Interestingly, all of the youth group members said they would like more opportunities and facilities for meeting together and they all placed high value on community cohesion. They also placed great value on allowing for expression of individual identity and providing space for everyone to grow fruit and vegetables – kitchen gardens are a strong feature of Bajan homes and one that the young people were both proud and protective of. It is far too easy (and lazy) to dismiss young people as only being interested in communicating through screens: mostly, their social and community interests do not stop there, but the actions and inactions of adult society sometimes force them to disconnect more than they might choose! Too often, adults feel they need to speak for teenagers rather than simply allowing them to engage actively in making choices and plans – when this is the case, how can we expect them to take responsibility for – and play an active role in – a community that doesn’t reflect their needs? Wouldn’t it be great if we used modern technology to engage young people in shaping their communities and their environments, rather than using it as an excuse for shutting them out?

If computer gaming technology can really be adapted into interactive planning “tools”, our young Placecheckers  – and other young people living in this part of Barbados (and across the Caribbean) – will probably have the technology, the aptitude and the willingness to get much more deeply involved in planning the future of their places.  They had plenty to say about the things they like, don’t like and would like to see change in their places – and their attitudes were, in fact, overwhelmingly positive. If we could get them more directly involved in generating and testing options – their contribution could be even more valuable. The challenge is actually not really to them, it’s to the senior members of the current generation of planning professionals – people like me – who need to see the potential of this and empower our younger colleagues – and young planners who don’t even know that they’re planners – to use their PlayStation skills to the full. And that takes me to a final connection. The Placecheck contributions made by the young man who told us that PlayStation is the new rum shop, made us all feel that he’d make a great planner. It turned out, however, that he is currently studying IT at university: but maybe that’s the perfect combination for developing the “PlaceStation” we clearly need!

“We think development should allow for individuality”