Here and There

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government have been preoccupied of late with the philosophy of art. It is something of a departure from the broadly mathematical rhetoric that has dominated the media for the last few years; “we need to build 200,000 homes a year! No, 300,000 homes a year! Has anyone seen my calculator?!”. Recently, it has broadened its view beyond such prosaic matters to explore aesthetics; the study of beauty. The Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission is an independent body set up to advise Government on how to promote high quality design for new homes and neighbourhoods. Headed by on-again, off-again Chair Roger Scruton, the initial thinking was that objections to development would be greatly diminished if the buildings encroaching on the public sightline were aesthetically pleasing. This begs the question; how do we decide what is beautiful and what isn’t? When it comes to human beauty we have a pretty clear idea about what we like. C...

Last month I attended the Global Development Institute  conference “Scaling up participatory development in towns and cities of the global south” at the People’s History Museum. The purpose of the conference was to understand the opportunities and constraints on scaling up participation by sharing experiences and analysing outcomes. For my part, I was particularly interested in the “scaling up” element. I have spent the last few years working on a number of huge strategic spatial planning projects and I’ve become increasingly curious as to how we can embed meaningful engagement into these large-scale, long term processes. It’s tricky, there’s no getting around it. The last strategic spatial project I worked on covered an area that was home to 2.8 million people - the great consultation techniques we know and love become difficult to implement at that scale. You can’t exactly invite them all a workshop, hand them a cup of tea and ask them what they think. No wonder then, that th...

This week I was in the slightly disconcerting position of agreeing with a Strategic Land Promoter (who will be here-forth known as SLP) about the deregulation of the UK planning system. Me, a card-carrying urbanist and fully paid up member of the RTPI. We met at the recording of an exciting new planning podcast (yes you heard that right) the first episode of which will hopefully be released in the coming weeks. We kept our aspirations lofty and set out, in our 57-minute record, to answer the fundamental question –is the planning system fit for purpose? We covered the findings of the National Audit Office Report , the Raynsford Review and dissected the aims of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission . Then we moved on to the changes to Permitted Development Rights and this is where things really got interesting. For those planners who have been living under a rock, it is now possible, through Permitted Development Rights, to turn an office building into housing without ...

On Valentine’s day the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) held the “Better Design for Better Places” conference, seeking to raise the bar for design in the built environment. It drew together some of the thinking floating around since the announcement of the “Building Better, Building Beautiful” Commission and addressed the “Better” element of #MoreBetterFaster - the hashtag increasingly being used by government types when tweeting about housing delivery. Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth opened the conference which a speech, in which he stated: “We must aspire to beauty” This gave me pause, and I pondered the statement for the rest of the day as I attended various panels and breakout sessions. Is aspiring to beauty the best way for us to ensure that we create good, successful places? Is beauty necessary to create good design? And what do we even mean when we talk about beauty? We are told that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, meaning that our ideas ...