Living with Beauty
What’s good about it?
Title notwithstanding, the report sets out many positive and diverse ideas about how to improve the design of new development in the UK. Interestingly a lot of the recommendations in the report are far more structural than they are aesthetic. So, it does talk about introducing design codes at both national and local level, but it also talks about stewardship, land value capture and a greater role for the public sector in land assembly, masterplanning and delivery following planning permission.
This structural focus is particularly welcome – there’s enough literature knocking around now about what good design is, and to my mind at least there seems to be broad agreement amongst the various actors and institutions on key principles. The report brings together a lot of this thinking, which has already been expressed in previous reports and good practice guidance, but it goes a step further and asks the important question; why aren’t we seeing the results?
We already have design policies at national and local levels, but they aren’t translating into high quality development. Last month’s Planning Magazine highlighted the fact that Councils are rejecting poorly designed housing schemes only to see them being approved at appeal. This is “fatally undermining” the National Planning Policy Framework according to University College London and the Campaign to Protect Rural England. The reports focus on addressing structural issues within the industry therefore makes a lot of sense. At the same time, it advocates “bulking up” existing design policies by strengthening the wording and even considers enshrining them legally.
What’s not so good about it?
What really concerns me about Living with Beauty is a set of internal contradictions which to my mind represent much wider ideological debates within the planning and development industry about government control versus market freedom, efficient delivery versus democratic processes and the age old question of who is going to pick up the bill? (spoiler alert – at the moment it looks like the answer is to run out of the restaurant without paying). I’ve broken down what I see as the three key contradictions below:
Certainty from Uncertainty
The report seeks to create more certainty for applicants and developers, as a way of reducing risk and speeding up the process. However, essentially it suggests that applications should be decided based upon whether a proposal is beautiful or ugly, and at no point in the report are these terms properly defined. It says public bodies should take account of “metrics of quality” without really saying what those metrics are. At one point it asks the question:
“Why can we specify ceiling height, but not that a building is attractive to the eye?”
Well…one can be measured numerically in a way we all agree on (across languages, geography and political persuasion), and the other is a completely subjective matter of opinion. It criticises current design policy for being “too general” but when it comes to defining ugliness, they quote a respondent as saying “everyone knows what’s ugly”. This is a true, if incomplete statement, the full sentence presumably being “everyone knows what’s ugly TO THEM”. How that sort of value judgement can be translated into a robust defence at appeal I’m not quite sure.
More for Less
The bulk of the responsibility for defining what is beautiful or ugly is placed at local level. The report recommends locally specific design guidance, which is a good idea. However, it is one of a number of additional responsibilities placed at the feet of Local Authority Planning departments, which are already massively underfunded and under resourced.
Local Authority responsibilities in the report include, but are not limited to (take a deep breath): creating visioning documents that extend beyond the time period of a Local Plan, undertaking masterplanning work at pre-allocation stage, speeding up the production of Local Plans, educating themselves on urban design (possibly to masters level), monitoring the delivery of applications after they have been approved, incorporating digital technology to increase consultation reach and provide “live plans”, providing a fast track decision making process for “beautiful applications”, using enforcement powers more extensively and involving the public more in the planning process. Phew.
The report frames all this as a “war on ugliness” and we all know wars cost money. So, you would imagine, in a final section, that the report would set out what all this might cost and how much money the Government should be planning to invest in the system.
It doesn’t do that.
Instead the report talks about things like greater efficiency, digital technology, freeing up resources, involving charities and third sector bodies or secondment from private practice. Anything and everything other than properly funding the organisation expected to deliver these improvements. While I appreciate that a report such as this can’t “gift” money, it should surely acknowledge the very real financial cost of what it is proposing.
Greater Speed and Greater Democracy
The report stresses that this drastically improved system must also operate more quickly. It states that “Local Plan documents and area action plans are produced too slowly”, it suggests that beautiful planning applications should be fast tracked and that all guidance should be digital, live and regularly updated.
However, it also wants communities and local people to be much more involved in the process. Planners should be producing guidance “in light of empirical evidence about what local people want” and “in partnership” with the local community. Local Plans should be produced through co-design and not just consultation.
Now, I work for an organisation that prides itself on meaningful engagement. I believe wholeheartedly that everyone has the ability to make decisions about planning and design issues in their area, if given the environment, tools and respect to do so. However, this is not a fast process- it takes time to build trust, it takes time to share knowledge, it takes time to have meaningful debate. If you want to have that depth of community involvement AND you want to keep delivering policy guidance at pace, then you need plenty of well resourced, highly skilled people.
Conclusion
Living with Beauty brings together a great set of ideas and suggestions for ambitious change. It’s really now down to Government to stump up the cash needed to deliver this vision of a speedy, beautiful system. Anyone taking this forward would do well to revisit the much cited “Unattainable Triangle” which states that you can either have it fast, cheap or good, but you can’t have all three. Without that pragmatism, our dreams of living with beauty are unlikely to ever be realised.
I think BBBBC's emphasis on beauty, undefined, is legitimate. Its main purpose is to make it possible for councillors in development committees to take beauty into account as a reason for rejecting an application. At the moment they can't do so. It is simply not a valid planning objection. If a Development Committee thinks something is ugly, it has to scramble to find other legitimate grounds for refusal. If it turns an application down on the grounds of ugliness, the refusal will get expensively knocked back on appeal.
ReplyDeleteAllowing beauty (or lack therof) into the conversation is powerful:
[1] It emphasises that beauty is important, something that I don't think you will find if you spend much time listening to the deliberations of Development Committees, for the reason stated above,
[2] It allows the Development Committee greater latitude do decide what in the particular location, is appropriate.
The idea that beauty is "a completely subjective matter of opinion" doesn't add up. There is an enormous degree of consensus about what, in the built environment, is attractive and what isn't, as Create Streets have been telling us for yonks. I don't really understand why this subjectivity chestnut is being pulled out when there is so much empirical research on the matter.
BBBBC was poorly structured. It is very long (190 pages) and arguably not helped by the fact that a largely unfamiliar emphasis on beauty occupies large chunks of its first 52 pages. But the core thrust, somewhat concealed, is to graft a continental-style plan-based system onto the UK's entirely different system of so-called 'development control' which is based on permissioning individual buildings. I think to miss this is a bit odd.
You also seem to have missed Theme 8 (the last of the 8 themes) which talks about resourcing planning. In this context, feel you have to give some credit to the fact that Boys Smith was tasked to take over BBBBC at the last minute, had little time to complete it, and that his time was given entirely free. This is not Richard Rogers, he doesn't have a fortune behind him nor an army of research assistants. It is true that the section on financing isn't detailed, but until the politicians have indicated what they're going to accept or reject, what would be the purpose of spending many, many months totting up the finances, given the circumstances in which he was working?
Apologies I didn't see this until now.
DeleteDo you have some links/resources to a consensus on beauty in the built environment?
I'm familiar with the work of Create Streets, but I don't know if their perspective is universally shared. I can't imagine there's a huge amount of crossover between them and The Modernist Society for example.
I'm inclined to think that consensus might be reached on what constitutes quality but not necessarily beauty.
Two people for example might agree that a particular artist is highly skilled, but have divergent opinions about whether the work is sufficiently beautiful to hang on their walls.
I believe a lot of planners dismiss Create Streets as amateurs and as having a rather narrow focus - arguably true, e.g. transport is not a major focus of their work on planning! - I do think they were quite path-breaking in saying, we can't go on with this madness of just having one urban dream after another (Peter Hall: Cities of the Future), and on the other hand we cannot just swim around directionlessly, leaving things to the hunches of planning committees. We have got to ground ourselves in the empirical: what sorts of places make people happy, and what sorts of places people find beautiful. Let's collect the empirical work. And at the same time, we need to make the process of deciding what goes into our towns more democratic, more open - a big focus of BBBBC.
DeleteThe work on beauty is done by them simply, naively, but it IS done, and why not?
I'll try to find the beauty consensus stuff. That there may be a consensus coheres with research work on physical beauty. What is a beautiful person? Well, it has been fairly well researched that it is a completely average person, i.e., put 100 images of faces together and you get a face which is seen by most people it is shown to as beautiful. The very unusual face - the face without a nose, etc... is seen as ugly. Secondly, these tests of what people find beautiful are possible because people largely agree on what is an obviously attractive face and what is an obviously ugly face. Not everyone is attracted to the same faces, but there's some sort of general consensus on what is attractive. You put a photograph of one face in front of 100 people. One face will get 90 ticks out of 100, another will get 2 ticks out of 100. I think we all know this is tragically true and that life is unfair in this way - which is why adolescents, suddenly discovering this, are so obsessed by physical appearance.
Art may be different, because the consensus may indeed be much lower. I have no insight into why this is. Music is probably similar, not much consensus, but probably more than art.
So we come back to you question, is this true of architecture? I believe it is true that there is a lot of consensus, eg. most people will agree that Amsterdam is more beautiful than Stoke-on-Trent (though having revisited my family's Burslem origins recently, the "mother town" has quite a cute centre). But Create Streets have done the work and I'll try to find it.