Don’t destroy the suburbs. Build new ones
Why would I want to get to Leeds city centre faster when I don’t work there?” This was my first reaction to a report by the Centre for Cities think tank comparing Leeds unfavourably with densely populated Marseille. I live 40 minutes from the centre of Leeds and my neighbours work in Keighley, Skipton, Halifax, or parts of Bradford. None of them work in either Bradford or Leeds city centre. They drive to work.
This is English suburbia. Many people still commute into the centre of a big city, mostly by public transport, but even in cities like London a third of people work outside the centre. For city boosters such as the Centre for Cities, their solution to every problem we face is to make cities more important, more dense, and more dependent on public transport. This includes Britain’s biggest challenge – the housing crisis. Their answer is to build thousands of flats in city centres and turn existing suburbs into dense urban places by extending homes into blocks of flats.
Is this what people want? Do millennials want to spend their whole life in a cramped apartment where the only outdoor space is a balcony? Is this the best sort of environment in which to raise children? It may be that densification is great for productivity, although not all dense urban places are noted for their dynamism, but do we want a society where work is everything?
When pollsters ask the public what they are looking for in a new home, the answer looks like a suburb. In 2020, Rightmove surveyed 4,000 homemovers, finding that people wanted bigger gardens, more space, off-street parking, good local amenities, and access to open space. City living doesn’t meet any of these expectations. Suburbia, done right, meets all of them.
We often hear suburbs characterised as unattractive places filled with dull people living dull lives. Simon Schama once told journalist Rod Liddle to “turn your suburban face away”, his words reflecting the contempt educated, sophisticated city dwellers often have for the suburbs.
Today, this snobbery tends to be rationalised on the basis of environmental concerns: claims that the land suburbia takes up and the cars driven by those who live there are bad for the planet. But once you remove the carbon impact of cars (which electric vehicles will achieve) suburbia may be less of an environmental problem than high-rise city living. In 2017, Antony Wood and Peng Du presented a study funded by Chicago’s Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat that found high-rise development used more energy and had a bigger carbon footprint than low-rise suburban development.
Building suburbs, however, requires land and much of that land is green belt. Even beyond the green belt, as Prince Charles discovered with the Duchy of Cornwall’s urban extension at Faversham in Kent, new housing development is unpopular. This is why we need real planning reform.
It is easy for ministers to opt to make existing cities denser rather than develop new suburbs that enhance the local environment and help make struggling towns more sustainable. New development can also incorporate Dutch-style cycling and walking infrastructure, support biodiversity and increase tree cover. All within the sort of place we know people want to settle and raise a family. Places where we welcome the car alongside the bike and the bus. But to achieve that, policymakers will have to change their understanding of what the public wants. Britain does not need denser cities, it does not need new towns – it needs a new suburbia.