Chris Brown Blog

I’m not a great fan of party politics, usually taking the view ‘Don’t vote it only encourages them’. Neither am I a great fan of elections (in which the low turnouts suggest I am not alone) because the Purdah period inevitable creates disruption in the smooth running of regeneration projects.

But politics are important. It’s how priorities are decided and in the worlds of planning and regeneration priorities are everything.

I have always tried to avoid having public private partnerships where the public representatives are politicians because I believe that effective operation of vehicles is best when the directors are governed exclusively by the still relatively new and poorly understood Companies Act directors’ responsibilities. Politicians inevitably are under other pressures and it is both unfair and, in my experience, naïve, to expect them to ignore politics at the boardroom table.

I’m also a fan of strong government. Manchester City Council shows the benefits of having secure politicians who can take long term decisions without the threat of losing their seats or being undermined by internecine party strife. However this situation can generate complacency and, in politics, internal power struggles can break out at any time.

Glasgowhas been difficult politically over recent years and my initial feeling about the local election result (where Labour, somewhat unexpectedly, secured its position) is that the council has had a healthy kick in the rear. However there are still rivalries within the Labour party and it will be interesting to see how the SNP run Scottish Government behaves towards the city in coming months. That relationship has also been tinged with politics over the years.

A city that is often compared to Glasgowis Liverpool. I sit on the board of the Chrysalis Fund with the newly elected mayor of Liverpool, Joe Anderson who, following the loss of most of the mayoral referenda, is likely to be one of a select band for a while. Joe seems to have the ability to work with politicians from different political backgrounds which seems to be a requirement for a successful mayor where central government will periodically have different politics. His early City Deal was an example of this expertise.

The chat in thenorth westis mainly about how the city region is where the mayor is needed (as inLondon) and it will be interesting to see if the city regions, that are now operating much more cohesively, go down this route.

Leicesterjumped the gun last year in the current round of new mayors and elected as mayor Peter Soulsby for whom I have a lot of respect and he has certainly shaken things up in the city. It will be interesting to compare how Peter, Joe and Boris get on over the next few years because, although they are all mayors, they are operating in entirely different contexts (single city, borough in a city region and city region respectively) though in all three they have some huge regeneration issues to tackle.

On the subject of mayors, I take the view that it is all about the qualities of the individual. It is an extraordinarily hard job but one of its big advantages seems to be the ability to put in place a governance structure that can function better than the traditional chief executive/cabinet structure.

When you get a good mayor and good deputy mayors, the late Simon Milton inLondonsprings to mind, you can get extremely good outcomes.

But this is not an automatic outcome of having a mayor and while I respect Michael Heseltine’s advocacy of big city mayors I suspect that it is inevitable that some will not succeed. However the Government will be keen, despite the politics, to support the city mayors and I would expect to see there being rewards for those cities with mayors over the coming years.

Bristolis next on the list as the only city to vote to have a mayor in the current round of referenda and I will be fascinated to see who emerges from that contest in the autumn. As we saw inLondon, in is incredibly difficult to gain traction in these contests without a party machine behind you but I do think the independent mayor has a lot of potential advantages. It could be argued thatLondonhas really only had independent mayors and that both have been successful.

I’m not sure whether George Ferguson is going to stand as an independent or as a party backed mayoral candidate inBristol but from the point of view of planning and regeneration, inevitably one of the main areas of focus for a city mayor, he would be an extraordinarily excellent choice. I do think expertise is an advantage in a job and George would certainly bring that, together with a passion for the city and great empathy with its citizens.

Another politician with these skills is back on the scene today. Sir Albert Bore is back inBirmingham. Albert gets regeneration and it will be fascinating to see how he is able to respond to the huge challenges inBirminghamin the current fiscal and political climate.

So as we go back to work after the bank holiday, while politicians in hung councils are cutting their deals and while political groups are choosing their leaders and cabinet members, let’s remember the people in deprived communities for whom the choices of priorities and the competence of governance have real meaning and impact on their lives.

I’m slowly coming the conclusion that the planning system is not fit for purpose any more.

This is not because it has accreted and atrophied over the decades (though it has) or because I disagree with any of the Government’s policy choices.

It is because the problems the system was designed to deal with, like separating homes from noxious industries, are not the problems of today. In some ways the emphasis on sustainability in the NPPF reflects this but is it a new use too far for an aging machine?

Many of the planners who have grown up with the current system and earn their livings from it will defend it vigorously, lauding its successes while perhaps accepting the need for gentle evolution.

But there comes a time when disruptive evolutionary change is need and it can happen surprisingly quickly, whether it be economic evolution like the death of Kodak or ecological evolution like the extinction of the dinosaurs.

As the economy has evolved, the problems we face have changed to include climate change, making creative industry competitive places (likeTechCity), delivering quality housing and places, public transport and digital communication, biodiversity, well-being, quality of life and community inequality and regeneration.

The problems many people want solving are how to get the details of the places they live in and use right – supporting the artisan local or social producer/retailer, creating outdoor places to stroll, lean, sit or lie around and chat, taming the car, making development well designed, making things grow in urban areas, making sure local people have affordable homes close to their families including commissioning them themselves as Custom Build or Community Land Trusts and so on.

The planning system, as practiced today, is pretty rubbish at these kinds of tasks.

Some of the old planning style problems still exist, like where to put noxious incinerators (or waste to energy plants as we now call them) or where to build infrastructure but it feels like the challenges of place governance have evolved a lot faster than the planning legislation designed to facilitate them.

Critics of the planning system have got a pretty bad press recently as the accusations about ‘enemies of enterprise’ have been exposed as spurious. But I wouldn’t expect the suggestion that the system is scrapped and replaced with something else to be welcomed.

If nothing else, people will rightly point to the risks involved in radical change in this highly contested area.

It would be a start to have an open discussion about what is important today to people, the planet and the economy and how we might design a system to best achieve these objectives. As an example, Tom Bloxham’s ideas about a design led system deserve wider debate.

Although it may not seem like it at times, there is a pretty wide consensus that a social (or regulated) market economy, where evidence based policies seek to mitigate negative externalities, can give the least bad outcomes.

The bigger contest then is over the nature of regulation and generally comes down to how best to achieve a balance between private and public benefit.

And a large part of the problem is who gets to define the public benefit. The diversity of people’s needs and desires is so wide that consensus or dictatorial approaches don’t work, while purely market approaches generate collateral damage.

Democracy increasingly, in the UK and US in particular (fans of Borgen may see contrasts elsewhere), seems to lead to divided electorates. As a society we end up having to choose between just two options in the middle ground. Many want to find solutions that work for us as individuals rather than average solutions that don’t work for anyone.

Let’s take an example, local park design. There are a large number of differing preferences. Looking at flowers, skate boarding, barbecues, bird song, dog walking, sun bathing, listening to music, football, picnics…..you get the picture.

Parks tend to evolve slowly and change is often based on binary decision making. Does the majority prefer option A or option B. Public consultation of the ‘here is our plan – what do you think about it’ variety, as we have recently experienced in Bermondsey, doesn’t necessarily create a well used park.

It seems self evident that it would be better to find ways in which as many as possible of the uses people want to put parks to can be accommodated through the day and the year. Optimising the intensity and quality of use of the park seems to be the route to maximising the well-being of the community which is probably the outcome most people would seek.

The best new parks work like this but so many others don’t.

The cultures, governance and decision making processes that result in diverse outcomes, and mutual tolerance for these outcomes, probably have benefits for well being as well as for economic competitiveness.

But we tend towards an adversarial, binary and top down approach.

A different example might be the Green Belt. Too often the undeveloped countryside around urban areas is degraded by a combination of urban users and property speculators.

We should be able to achieve a much greater intensity and quality of use of these areas. Combining recreation, horticulture and agriculture and biodiversity is possible with good governance. But our current planning system just doesn’t provide the tools or the mechanisms. Or if it does, they aren’t being used.

I’ve heard examples this week of city administrations outside the UK creating four different visions for the city to encourage debate about what people want. Many of our cities don’t even have one vision.

If we did have visions for the neighbourhoods, towns and cities that we want to live in, and if we then tried to work out how to get from where we are today to where we want to be, I can guarantee that we wouldn’t invent our current planning system to get us there.

I’ve also been looking at some of the Dutch and Scandinavian new town and new urban district examples this week. New towns provide great learning opportunities. Generally they tell us that whatever era of masterplanning was fashionable at the time has proven to be arrogantly inappropriate, often within a decade or two.

There is a fascinating exhibition just opened in Almere, Europe’s fastest growing new town, that illustrates the failure of wave after wave of arrogant masterplanners from Corbusier to Koolhaas. In the UK we have learnt our lessons the hard way on this (Cumbernauld or Skelmersdale anyone) and as we begin to contemplate the idea of local village communities welcoming in new towns under the Government’s latest garden city planning consultation we would do well to consider these lessons.

As we move towards these garden city new towns, which have the potential to split the Conservative Party again on a planning issue, it may be time to think radically about what a workable system, to deliver the places people want, might look like.

The latest Almere experiment, Homeruskwartier, is a form of neighbourhood co-creation where the professional urban designers lay down the infrastructure and set some simple rules and individuals or groups of custom builders get on and design their own homes within this context.

These are ideas that appeal to libertarians, the largest political party by number of seats in Almere is the far right Freedom Party that recently brought down the Dutch government, but do they create the kinds of places that are best for people, the planet and the economy? More on that in few weeks time.

What would a system for delivering the places people want look like? Who would make the choices and what would they be? What tools and processes would those people need?

The NPPF feels like a good holding pattern for now but it also feels like a resting place that gives us time to work on the radical transformative change we need.

As the NewBuy debacle continues to embarrass Government (and the HBF), Grant Shapps staged a publicity offensive at No. 10 to try and win back the Daily Mail readers after the Conservatory Tax debacle.

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Government’s apparent inability to make its big political ideas workable on the ground is a source of huge frustration for politicians and citizens alike. So why is it so difficult? Or why do omnishambles occur?

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It’s quite possible that everyone is now bored with the infinite number of opinions and interpretative battles that multitudinous skim readers have been firing across the virtual ether.

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It’s been a Green Week this week and I feel that I have glimpsed the future, and for most existing property industry organisations the future looks pretty scary.
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The launch of The Chrysalis Fund in Liverpool City Region this week brings to seven (if my arithmetic is working) Joint European Support for Sustainable Investment in City Areas (JESSICA) funds operational in the UK with around £500m of funds (out of about £2.5 Bn worth of funds across the EU – don’t quote me on the exact numbers, I’m in blog mode). There are a couple more in the UK trying to get in under the wire (the money needs to be spent by the end of 2015) so the final total may be around 10.

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The P word (Procurement) has entered regeneration parlance over the last three decades and created a new industry, similar to the health and safety industry, with a risk averse culture, a huge ability to say NO and virtually no capacity to innovate.

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The planning systems in the UK don’t make development happen. Plans do not deliver infrastructure, or serviced sites or affordable housing subsidy (to name just a few fundamental flaws in the system). Basically plans do little more than curb the worst negative impacts of the market on the planet and society (still a really valuable contribution).

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The importance of urban design compared to the value we put on it has been brought home to me again this week. In working in Tottenham, to try to maximise the impact on regeneration of the efforts to reduce carbon by 40% by 2020, urban design keeps appearing as a critical element. Haringey are wrestling, using the advice of the Haringey Carbon Commission, with questions that all local authorities to some extent are now having to think about. How, in practical terms, can places reduce the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they produce?
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