The 2nd Edge Debate: 12th February 1997

A Planner's View:

Professor Peter Hall

University College London

As Britain's media pored over the Budget last November, one item slipped across the news pages only half-reported. But it looks like obsessing not only this government, but its successors, for decades to come; and it is of course the subject of tonight's debate. It was John Gummer's response to the household projections produced by his own department over a year ago. Household Growth: Where Shall We Live? (Cm 3471, H.M.S.O. £10) deals with a politically explosive topic.

For it shows that we need to house 4.4 million additional households in the 25-year period from 1991 to 2016. Not, notice, 4.4 million additional people: the odd fact is that household numbers are exploding while the underlying population numbers are projected to increase only modestly. The fact is that we are becoming fissiparous and fragmented, living increasingly on our own: of the extra 4.4 million, nearly 80 per cent will be one-person households. There are three main causes: more young people leaving parental homes for university and first job, more divorces and separations, and more old people surviving years of widowhood.

When the projections first appeared, some doubted them: as with traffic growth, so it was argued, if you did not provide for the increase, then maybe it would never happen. The experts, led by ex-DOE statistician Alan Holmans, told them that the comparison was false: if you fail to provide for traffic you get jams on the M25; if you fail to provide for households, the result could be people in cardboard boxes.

The great historical irony is that the new figures again mean that housing comes to the top of the political agenda. Further, as in those earlier periods, they imply that planning will regain its legitimacy, lost in those hectic 1980s years, as a way of reconciling local differences and making critical policy decisions. The issue now is summed up in the White Paper's title, or more dramatically by the TCPA's own report in the summer, borrowed from their founder Ebenezer Howard, who coined it in 1898: The People: Where Will They Go? On the one side are the Council for the Protection of Rural England, who are leading a campaign to get the bulk of the growth inside the cities. Gummmer, who lives in a Suffolk vicarage and represents a rural constituency, clearly sympathises. On the other side are the TCPA and the House Builders' Federation, who doubt it will be possible to maintain the recent achievement of nearly 50 per cent of development on urban land.

The White Paper judiciously settles for an "aspirational target" - a wonderful Sir Humphreyesque phrase, which might mean nothing at all - of 60 per cent. Maybe it does mean nothing; with a response date of March 17, the consultation paper has neatly kicked the issue into touch until after the election. But it will not go away; it will loom large on the desk of the new Secretary of State for the Environment, and the key issue will remain the geography of growth.

John Gummer has eloquently argued that this is a chance to achieve quality higher-density redevelopment in the cities, so bringing life back to them. He, and others, argue that many of the new one-person households will prefer an urban lifestyle based on access to restaurants and bars and entertainments; country living will not appeal to them. But research by MORI underlines the fact that the great majority of all households - including those living alone - want owner-occupiership, that four in five prefer houses to flats (though a majority of one-person households say they would be willing to live in a flat), and that they want more than one bedroom. And most will exercise their preferences in the market.

Yet, deeper even than these issues of preference, is the question of whether 60 per cent is even feasible. Our own TCPA report of last summer, based on what we were told by local professionals and politicians at seven regional conferences, casts severe doubt on that proposition: cities reported that they would be out of land sometime between 2006 and 2011, as the windfall gains of the 1980s - product of industrial and dockland closures - became exhausted. And in the regions with the biggest projected numbers - the South East outside London, the South West, the East Midlands - the Green Paper shows that the proportion of so-called brownfield development has been falling recently, in contrast to the overall national trend.

In the South East, above all, it does not seem remotely practicable: the projections suggest that more than one third, to be precise 36 per cent, of the new households, 629,000 out of the 1.7 million, should be crammed into London. But the space is simply not there. In Thames Gateway, for instance, Llewelyn Davies Planning looked at land availability: on that basis, the Planning Framework found that it possible to provide only 98,400 homes in the entire corridor, stretching beyond the London border down to Sheppey, of which a mere 30,600 would be in London. Yet Thames Gateway contains by far the biggest potential for brownfield development anywhere within London. So, against a target of housing 629,000 households within London, one has to wonder where exactly the remaining 599,400 homes are actually going to be built. The current London Regional Guidance, published after the new projections came out, has a figure for all of London which projects to only 418,000 over 25 years, almost exactly two thirds of the projection figure.

This is not to deny any possibility of densifying bits of London. In places it may well be possible: especially where we could use former factory and warehouse areas to develop higher-density apartment living, where there are potentials for higher-density redevelopment in outworn areas around train stations, and in places where large areas of open space give the potential for walls of higher-density development looking over parkland. In the Lea Valley, for instance, with luck we might house 10,000 people in that way. And there will be penny packets all over the place, save that many of the best sites are actually built on.

But notice: even this may mean biting into green space, or quite massive densification, whether by converting bigger houses into flats, or by tearing down those houses and replacing them by blocks of flats. And that may not be realistic. Hertfordshire, next door to London, employed consultants to look at densification possibilities: they concluded that with really determined policies across the county, a total of 11,000 dwellings could be provided: a net addition of 2.5 per cent. But it implies emptying out whole blocks and partially rebuilding them, which will demand agreement among all the owners. The consultants also stressed problems like traffic congestion, pollution and parking. And it would prove very difficult to densify existing urban areas, because local residents would quite rightly object to ill-conceived infillings and plasterings-over of back gardens for car ports: NIMBYism is not just a rural phenomenon.

To this basic problem, the Green Paper offers what can only be called wheezes: cut empty houses from 4 to 3 per cent of the total; reduce under-occupation, defined with amazing bureaucratic precision as 39 per cent of all owner-occupying households with two and more bedrooms than is "strictly necessary"; even, encourage people to take in lodgers. Here, the philosophical squirming becomes almost distressing: a Government, committed to freedom of choice, implicitly proposes controls that - as one observer has commented - failed in Stalin's Russia. Of course, there are no mechanisms to make it work here. The fact is that affluent people want extra space for all kinds of good and bad reasons: for the kids who have visiting rights at weekends; for mum and dad when they come on an occasional visit; for guests; and, increasingly important 1990s trend, for telework.

So there is no magic bullet - and surely the government knows it. Particularly, since it never makes clear why it has so enthusiastically adopted the CPRE's fundamentalist position on land. As a glance out of any train window will show, the alternative economic use of much of this rural land is as EU set-aside, growing crops of weeds. So the only safe way is to plan for urban higher densities where they can be well done, but to accept that even a 50 per cent brownfield target, let alone 60 per cent, is a pipedream.

So: if we can't and won't house the people in London and the other big cities, where will they go? The answer has to be: into Howard's ancient town-country magnet, or, perhaps a better name, town-in-country. The challenge is huge: it is to house well over one million households in ROSE, the rest of the South East, in a twenty-year period, while maintaining the principle of sustainable urban development. Further, it is to do this in a way that is politically acceptable to the present residents of ROSEland, who will otherwise be certain to pull up their drawbridges, pleading sustainability.

We have to demonstrate by good example that greenfield development can be sustainable. But it will almost certainly be sustainable in an early twenty-first--century way, not a late nineteenth-century one. Howard, and the postwar new town planners who followed him, tried to make their new towns self-contained by locating them outside London's commuting range; but, right from the start, it didn't work. True, Ray Thomas in 1969 was able to show that the new towns remained much more self-contained than equivalent older towns at similar distances from London. But when Michael Breheny came to rework the figures twenty years later, he found that they were losing this characteristic: the London commuter belt had expanded into their territory, and commuting had grown with wider car ownership. We can and should try to encourage new development that is as self-contained as possible, which will mean putting as much as possible at a distance from London, as the Mark Two new towns planners already did in the 1960s; but we will never be completely successful.

We've got a model for sustainable urban development in the 1990s. It comes from academic research from people like Susan Owens at Cambridge, David Banister at UCL and Michael Breheny at Reading; they tell a very consistent story. A sustainable urban form, they suggest, would contain many relatively small settlements, just like Howard's garden cities for 32,000 people apiece; but some would cluster into larger settlements of 200,000 and more people, just like his Social City. They could be developed at moderately high densities of about 40 people per hectare or 100 per acre, again just like Howard's garden city, allowing good access to shops and services. They would be compact and mixed-use, supporting maximum use of walking or biking to work and school and shop (again, just like the garden city), but would be arrayed along public transport spines (like the Hertfordshire version of Social City). These arrangements not only resemble Letchworth; with variations in density, higher near public transport stops, they are what Markelius and Sidenbladh were achieved in their Stockholm master plan of 1952.

There is one important new factor here. London Transport in its 1995 strategic planning document developed the concept of a Regional Metro, which more accurately could be called a Regional TGV: it consists of high-speed lines, with trains running up to 200 kilometres [125 miles] an hour, and connecting under central London to link cities and towns up to 130 kilometres (80 miles) from London on either side. Thameslink 2000, approved earlier this year, will link King's Lynn and Peterborough with Brighton. The Channel Tunnel Rail Link, a little noticed feature of London & Continental's winning bid, will carry high-speed trains running from Rugby and Northampton to Ashford and Dover. CrossRail, which has been put on the back burner but will probably be started within ten years, will similarly link Reading and Heathrow with Southend and perhaps Ipswich.

The new services will have at least as great an impact on urban development as the tube extensions of the 1920s and 1930s, on which Lord Ashfield and Frank Pick built modern London. But their spatial impact will be quite different: they will dramatically telescope times to places in the critical range 100 to 130 kilometres, 60-80 miles, from London. This could encourage long-distance commuting, which is hardly sustainable. But there is bound to be some long-distance commuting; so better to have it on rail rather than on road. And all the evidence suggests that urban development at distances like these will be relatively self-contained; further, many of the commuters will find local jobs within a few years.

So we should base our new settlement strategy on this system, by linking the regional TGV at key stations to local distributor transit systems, which might be light rail but might equally well be guided busway such as they have in Adelaide and Essen and now in Leeds, or unguided busway as in Ottawa. These systems would have a strongly linear form, which might be parallel to the regional TGV or might run at angles away from it; one useful form would connect two TGV stations by an indirect route. Bus transit systems have an advantage over light rail in that they can fan out in dendritic fashion to serve medium-density residential areas more widely spread out from the transit stops, as in Adelaide. In this, however, the important point would be to keep the linear emphasis, which encourages transit use, and at all costs to avoid land uses which encourage cross-trips. Along them, we would string clusters of mixed-use developments, typically with about 10-15,000 residents served by central service concentrations around the transit stations, and further grouped into linear or rectangular units with maximum populations of 200-250,000.

Consider for instance the corridor north of London, which includes Howard's original Social City, the town expansion at Huntingdon and the Mark Two new town of Peterborough, just being extended by a new township on old brickfields towards the south Here we could combine dense development along the Lea Valley alongside the regional park, with development of the corridor between Hitchin and Peterborough, along the main line of Thameslink 2000, by clusters of new settlements around stations like Sandy and St Neots and Huntingdon and a new station near Stilton; and we would build a light railway or guided busway on lines long abandoned to passengers, from Sandy to Cambridge and from Cambridge back to Huntingdon, along which we could string small new settlement units - new villages, in effect. At least one of these would be the Monkfield Park new village planned by the South Cambridgeshire district planners.

It would constitute a Sustainable Social City: an inspiring concept based on Ebenezer Howard's original vision. It could be an inspiring agenda for a new government contemplating the centenary - next year - of Ebenezer Howard's unique inspiration. But do we have his vision and his audacity?