New government, new towns, new focus on sustainability

The new Labour government has unveiled planning reforms including proposed new #towns aimed at ending shortage of affordable housing for rent or purchase that is undermining the social and economic #sustainability of Britain’s towns and cities. But can they be built in a way that avoids #environmental mistakes of the past?

New towns are at the heart of Labour’s manifesto commitment to build 1.5 million new homes over the course of its first parliament. The taskforce to identify potential locations on green field land, headed by local government guru Sir Michael Lyons, will not start its 12-month programme until September but deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has set out some concepts.

Each of the new settlements will contain at least 10,000 homes — around the size of Tring in Hertfordshire or Sandy in Bedfordshire — although it expects a number to be “far larger in size” and that they will provide hundreds of thousands more homes over the coming decades. It will “target” rates of 40% affordable housing with a focus on genuinely affordable social rented homes.

Some will be standalone new towns on green land, while others will be urban extensions and regeneration schemes that will work with the “grain of development” in any given area, but which encroach on green belts. Crucially in terms of environmental sustainability, they will be well-connected, well-designed, sustainable and attractive places where people want to live and have all the “infrastructure, amenities and services necessary to sustain thriving communities”.

Central to that ambition are the five “golden rules” of housebuilding that prime minister Keir Starmer set out before the election of which three apply to new towns (the first two favour  development on brownfield and “dirty” grey-belt land)). The others mandate improved genuine green spaces, boosting public services and infrastructure, and a high share of affordable housing.

A big ask, overall. Clearly the model from history is the New Towns Act set out by Clement Attlee’s 1945 Labour government that led to the creation of 32 new settlements from Milton Keynes to Warrington in Cheshire. Many were successful but some, as well as other urban expansion projects, were blamed for failing to supply the community infrastructure to match.

Growth and jobs

Before thinking about what they might look like and where they would be, it is worth noting that new towns are likely to provide only a small share of the 1.5 million homes target. Analysis by the Centre for Cities thinktank provided to The Guardian shows that new town development corporations in England oversaw the construction of 307,000 homes over the 46 years of the various programmes up to 1993. This is the same number as would need to be built in one year to meet the 1.5 million target and compares with fewer than 190,000 built in 2023.

But as new towns saw residential construction progress more rapidly compared to other areas nationwide, according to Centre for Cities, they have the potential to allow the new government to show it is delivering on its manifesto.

The taskforce is likely to favour areas where there is greatest need for new homes, either because of the level of unaffordability or because of the expected growth in employment, as that will make the successful creation of a community more likely to succeed while also relieving the main pressure points. That points towards London, southern England and the growing city regions in the North and Midlands.

One analysis by Urbanist Architecture, an architecture practice, appears to support the argument. It identified 20 potential sites that stood out for economic prospects, current development and potential for robust population growth. Its top five were the area around Cambridge that has long been seen as a prime site; the M1 corridor near Milton Keynes; the Thames estuary near Ebbsfleet; south Hampshire; and the Midlands, particularly around Birmingham, Leicester and Nottingham.

Wherever they are located precisely, the government will hope to reduce “Nimby” objections with its five golden rules and commitment to make the towns sustainable and attractive places where exemplary development is the norm not the exception and that avoid the mistakes of building masses of housing without infrastructure such as schools, shops and parks.

In fact, by building them on greenfield land, objections from local residents will be smaller (the big fight will be over extensions to existing towns). The next five years could be interesting if, as housing minister Matthew Pennycook told the BBC, there will be “spades in the ground” by the final year of this parliament. It may not be until the start of the next decade before we can see if the new towns are genuinely sustainable.

It’s time to bring back the town planning Olympics

As the Paris #Olympics draws to a close, there has been much discussion over “new sports” such as skateboarding and breaking. But could the contest’s format be applied to the designing of the host #cities themselves? In fact it was, but sadly the practice ended 80 years ago.

In the four summer Olympic games held between 1928 and 1948 gold, silver and bronze medals were awarded in the very un-athletic category of town planning. They were part of a programme of art competitions that the International Olympic Committee put in place in 1912, to reflect the wider agenda of the ancient games. Medals for literature, drama, the arts and music were also up for grabs.

Source: Wikipedia

Although most of projects may initially look architectural in nature, the latter had its own categories, which indicated that town planning (or “master planning” as it might be known today) was seen as a distinct discipline. The medals were awarded for schemes drawn up in the run-up to each games, which may explain why stadia picked up three medals and sports centres six — even if in some cases they were located thousands of miles from the games.

It would be interesting to know which projects might have entered and which would have won the 2024 town planning Olympics. The King’s Cross Development in London, which has been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize, might have been in the running for its master plan, albeit one with little sports content. There is a whole host of US stadiums in the pipeline and India’s 132,000-capacity Narendra Modi stadium might also have made the final.

Sustainable podium

If the town planning Olympics were to be revived, what categories should feature more than a century on from the first wave? First up would be sustainability. Given the huge amount of concrete and associated carbon emissions involved in building facilities, as discussed here recently, construction consortia increasingly focus on showing how they are offsetting those impacts and offering benefits such as net biodiversity gains. Perhaps one set of medals could go toward “the most sustainable sporting event or building”.

Paris has shown how existing buildings and sites can be used to host sporting events to avoid building white elephants. To encourage this, there could be an award for “adapting a historic landmark for athletic purposes while preserving its cultural significance and aesthetic charm”.

Allied to that are the efforts made to ensure that purpose-built facilities do not become redundant once the athletes and spectators have left the arena. Perhaps gold, silver and bronze medals for “city renewal initiatives aimed at creating an area suitable for athletics, but with long-term plans for community access and environmentally responsible development”.

But should the medals be made of metal? A light-hearted piece of analysis by Oxford Economics shows that while gold medals are not made entirely of the precious metal, each has value of more than a $1,000. And mining of gold and other metals raises concerns over environmental sustainability.

So, what should the town planning medals be made of? Medals made of recycled material such as aluminium or acrylic would be suitable for the sustainability title, painted the appropriate colour. Conservation of heritage charm could be reflected by including a wooden relief sculpture of a significant building in the host country. The community-access medals might be a perpetual awards (of wood or recycled material) passed from one winner to the next, with engravings to show the names and dates of all winners added over time.

According to journalism professor Richard Stanton’s book, The Forgotten Olympic Art Competitions, the arts programme was scrapped at the 1952 Helsinki games because of the burden it placed on the local organising committee. Hopefully a new committee, whether Los Angeles 2028 or Brisbane 2032, will decide to revive some non-athletic “sports” for their event to show that the Olympics is more than just running, throwing, swimming … and breaking.

Small may be beautiful, but compact is a more achievable goal for cities

As the human race continues to hurtle towards #climate catastrophe, the calls to shrink our consumption get louder. But while smaller #cities would help, making them more #compact seems more achievable.

Just over 50 years ago the economist and statistician EF Schumacher warned in his book Small is Beautiful that gigantic man-made organisms such as cities would lead to the ongoing and harmful depletion of natural resources. Fearing future cities of 60 million or more, he said the “finest cities in history” had been very small by twentieth-century standards.

Since then, the growth of cities and the migration towards these urban centres has increased and perhaps accelerated. Over the last half century, the number of people living in cities has almost quadrupled from 1.19 billion in 1970 to 4.53 billion in 2022, according to the United Nations. Seven out of 10 people will live in cities by 2050.

This pace of growth has led to renewed calls to follow Schumacher’s thesis, but updated to make small be seen as cool, as Mark Cliffe, a visiting fellow at the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute, put it.

That is a strong argument but, while tackling over-sizing of homes, transport and food  may be achievable in the short and medium term, returning city sizes to a mediaeval European dimensions is unlikely any time soon.

The idea of halting the growth of cities — let alone them reversing them — seems highly unlikely as rising populations and the impacts of climate change that are already baked in, will lead to greater demand for expanded urban settlements as people migrate from vulnerable rural areas. According to the UN, there are already 33 10 million-plus cities (and five over 20 million). One forecast has 10 cities of more than 50 million people by 2070.

So, if cities are unlikely to get smaller, then they have to become better at ensuring they are liveable places. Or as Schumacher put it, to be more compact.

Popular engagement

There seems to be a growing acceptance that city dwellers need to consume less and pollute less. Writing 25 years ago, the German British urban ecologist Herbert Girardet built on Schumacher’s thinking to plot a route towards creating sustainable cities.

Technological advances, the rise in computing power, and the pandemic-inspired growth in working-from-home culture have changed how city dwellers behave over the last quarter-century. But some of his key concepts for building the three pillars of urban sustainability — socially just, economically viable and environmentally sustainable — remain valid.

For example, the increased efforts towards recycling and the emergence of electric cars are positive signs, although critics would say they only touch the edges of climate change mitigation. One of the key ingredients for Schumacher and which still carries weight is popular engagement in how cities are developed and operate.

Policymakers must work to deliver eco-friendly urban development by ensuring public participation in efforts to reduce consumption, increase waste recycling, push for eco-friendly building design, and both improve transport systems and reduce the need for travel. One idea was to create more “convivial cities” based around smaller urban villages, a concept that has become codified as the highly contested 15 minute city.

Cities are home to immense prosperity that can fund the innovation and ingenuity needed to make them more resilient and able to combat climate change.

Meanwhile wireless networks, 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial

intelligence (AI), and digital twins may offer the digital infrastructure to deliver advances in transport, energy efficiency, decarbonising buildings and connected lighting.

Sensors and devices that can collect data that can used to deliver real-time insights into the status of city infrastructure, operations, and services offer the potential to deliver better services that residents want.

However, this raises concerns over privacy and the primacy over some, well-educated groups over others. Again, citizens and communities must be able to interact with decision makers knowledge developers to ensure that they are not excluded – in other words to make a human smart city.

A successful and human-focused combination of environmentally focused policies, technological innovation and the thinking behind 15 minute cities present the opportunity to make cities more compact so that the same number of people can carry out their personal, family and business activities while using fewer resources.

The goal has to be to reduce the space cities take up, curb the volume of journeys travelled and minimise the impact of the transport methods to do them. Girardet summed up the idea of the compact city 25 years ago as offering a model of great significance for sustainable urban living. Creating vibrant, diverse, and secure urban spaces, rather than exacerbating sprawl and traffic, will demand greater cooperation among urban planners, architects, investors, and residents in shaping new city developments. They will be bottom-up, rather than to-down urban development.