City planning: bring beauty back to Britain
Recently, I looked over the
Georgian weaving town of Malmesbury, said Clive Aslet in The Daily Telegraph, and wondered: Why don’t we build such lovely places today?
Why, instead, has Britain been lumbered with large swathes of “ugliness”, from soulless, identikit housing estates, cut off from local amenities, to “low-rise sheds surrounded by acres of tarmac”. The answer is complex, but according to the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission – formerly co-chaired by the late Roger Scruton – the central problem is that beauty is a “dirty word” in the planning system. “It’s regarded as too subjective for planners to get hold of, so it just doesn’t feature.” Yet this is a cop-out. Most people are in broad agreement as to what kind of buildings are appealing. It’s not about style: it’s about texture, proportion and space. As the commission’s report notes, to address the housing crisis, we need to encourage attractive developments that promote human interaction, and that have the potential to be vibrant communities. “Only if neighbours feel that a new development has something to offer will they stop campaigning against it.”
Something has to be done, said Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. As the report says, the current system is so bad, the public has “lost confidence in developers and their regulators”. What’s more, it is deeply un-green. It favours low-density housing estates where cars are essential; and encourages developers to tear down old buildings, instead of refurbishing them. People hate tower blocks; and we know that anonymous sprawl is no recipe for human happiness. So the report recommends a host of new rules to promote the “gentle densification” of Britain’s underoccupied cities, with pocket parks and a fruit tree for every home.
It’s inspiring to think of a planning system that favours beauty, community and sustainability, said Jenni Russell in The Times. But in making this a reality, there is a major obstacle: the power of the “big volume housebuilders, the eight companies that own the vast majority of building land, that build cheaply and profitably because they can and because their shareholders demand it”. Their dominance is catastrophic: last month, the University of London reported that three-quarters of recent housing developments were so badly designed, they should not have gone ahead. But these firms have the resources to fight long legal battles, making their will hard to resist. Unless the Government makes higher standards legally enforceable, and gives local authorities the funds to veto poor developments, “little will improve”.