Here and There

It’s an uncharacteristically warm February evening in lockdown. The Manchester sky, which for most of the day has been a shocking shade of (whisper it!) blue, is cooling down to a mellow lilac, and more familiar banks of cloud are gathering on the horizon. I am happily laboring under the misapprehension that spring has arrived and wandering around a housing estate in Moss Side. This is one of many meanderings from the centre point of my flat, tracking an uneven radius that increases in relation to my restlessness. These walks have been a rare joy of lockdown. They make me feel grateful for my interest in urban design. What do others do when all else fails to entertain? At least we can always go outside and look at buildings. There are downsides of course – this time I got a blister; once some children on bikes jeered at me and I occasionally get odd looks, but in the main it’s a diverting and educational pastime. This particular evening, I was matching up components of the residential ...

Like many within the industry I watched the 21st June Parliamentary debate on planning with a mixture of excitement (“Ooo look at planning right there at the top of the political agenda!”) and horror (“but, but, the bill hasn’t been written yet!”, “what even is a Developer’s Charter!?”)  Although the debate expanded to cover failures of the current system, the housing crisis, land banking, infrastructure, green space and the environment, the starting point was an issue of local democracy. Namely, the fear that a Planning Bill could remove the rights of residents to comment on (let’s be honest, object to) individual applications.  The white paper proposes a simplification of Local Plans to focus on identifying land under three categories: growth, renewal and protected. In “growth” areas outline approval would automatically be secured. In such a system, respondents could comment on the details of development, but any objections to principle would be shifted forward in the proces...

  “In the Netherlands, planning is seen as part of the solution, in the UK, planning is seen as part of the problem” So said Clive Betts MP on the most recent edition of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast . Clive is Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee – a cross party scrutiny group that recently published an intelligent and even-handed analysis of the Planning White Paper . This comparison with the Netherlands comes up often, especially in the urban design circles that I move in. It exists in our minds as a planning utopia; a common destination for best practice field trips, much cited in case studies and frequently admired in industry press coverage. In practical terms though, how is it actually different? What does being seen as “part of the solution” actually look like in practice? I think it’s time to play a little game of Top Trumps.   Resourcing An easy comparison. The 2019 RTPI Report “ Resourcing Public Planning ” highlighted that there are...

“A blog post once a month” she said. “That’s achievable” she said. Yet here we are, it’s April Fool’s Day, and there hasn’t been a blog post since February. This is not for a lack of ideas, more a lack of time. In fact it’s probably a deadly combination of too many ideas and too little time, resulting in a handful of hastily composed Twitter threads and….zero blog posts. Anyway, points should be awarded for not skipping March completely and waiting until mid-April to write anything else. This is a postponed March post, and I will write another for April. I will. I will. I’m also trying to be less fussy about planning the content/structure – it’s a blog post after all, not a book chapter.  For most of March Sarah Everard was at the forefront of my mind. What she symbolised I guess, rather than the woman herself, who I know so little about. I talked with my partner about our experience of being out in the streets, moving through spaces. For me this means always being on alert, always...

I’ve always had a soft spot for the work of Adam Curtis. His latest series, Can’t Get You Out of My Head , has caused me to think more deeply about a recent project; producing a National Model Design Code for the UK with MHCLG . In typical Curtis style the series seeks to tackle an ambitious grab-bag of themes, but what struck me was a section on the simplification of data required for humans to understand the complexity of the world.   Simplification of complexity for the purpose of understanding is the essence of what the National Model Design Code is seeking to do. Questions have been asked both about the validity of such an aim, and the ability of a codified process to create intangible outcomes like “beauty”.    Embracing Complexity   In around 300 BC Aristotle tried to define what it means to be virtuous. “Virtue” stands on the podium with “Beauty” in the Indefinable Concept Olympics and Aristotle understandably struggled. He said virtue means behaving in the “...

Ah 2020, we said, some time on new years eve, What a nice round number, how fun that ought to be. Imagining all the projects the next 12 months might hold,  The planning legislation, we hoped might soon unfold. The GMSF will be, no doubt, a strategic planning win, And the white paper, shaking things up, a new era could begin. A few more days of festive rest, then back to work said we, Tipsy, and optimistic about how the year might be. Things started out the way you’d think, dry January, new me, But then they slightly came unstuck, and suddenly you’d see - Talk of case numbers in the news, and graph lines surely rising… And… bumping elbows in the pub, I guess it was surprising, But we realised, slowly at first, then all at once, that everything would change - 2020, it transpired, was frightening and strange.  Like a Local Plan examination, the year rolled on and on, Some were furloughed, some lost work, our certainty was gone. We couldn’t see our families, we could see our frie...