Here and There

I’ve seen a number of briefs coming out recently seeking an exploration of the impact of COVID -19 on town centers/high streets, along with guidance about what to do in the future. As my colleague David Rudlin opined it’s nigh on impossible to get good data or develop robust plans for the future when we are still very much in “the eye of the storm”. There’s a phrase that’s quoted in various forms and most commonly attributed to something that Plato may have heard Socrates possibly say at one point or another. The clearest articulation is something like: “Wisest is the person who knows they do not know” It’s difficult at the moment to take anyone who claims to know what will happen or that has the perfect solution very seriously. In respect of town centres, but more generally in relation to anything at this moment in time.  So, if you find yourself in a world of known unknowns, and you don’t want to just sit back and do nothing, what are you supposed to do?  There are a few dif...

In the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd and the resulting resurgence of interest in the Black Lives Matter movement, many of us have reflected on what more we could be doing to fight for an equal and fair society. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to this. Everyone has different levels of influence, different spaces in which they can affect change and different resources (money, energy, time) to contribute. As individuals I think everyone at URBED is personally reflecting on what role they can play, but we are also examining what more we can do as a business. It shouldn’t be necessary to explain why representation in the built environment profession is important. We all live in this world, and the groups of people designing places should reflect the people living in them. As Jane Jacobs said: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody” It also makes sense for us commercially. Statistically sp...

Living with Beauty is the final report of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission; an independent body set up to “advise government on how to promote and increase the use of high-quality design for new build homes and neighbourhoods”. Personally, I thought “Living with Beauty” sounded like a semi-fictional memoir about sharing an apartment with a drag queen (named Beauty) in 1980’s New York. I don’t think this a view shared by many and is likely due to the speed with which I consumed the Netflix show “POSE” rather than any flaw in the Commission’s report titling. 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 gre...

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 ...