Category: planning

More Chronicles of Nairn-ier: Outrage! and Counterattack

A Manifesto for Good Planning in Nairn’s Outrage!, 1955 (Architectural Review)

The aim of the last entry was to introduce Ian Nairn and his ideas, although it went down a rabbit hole of comparing two influential post-war urban theorists, ethnographers and flaneurs – almost centrist-Situtationist psychogeographers of the rising Anglo-American middle class on either side of the Atlantic. The two did have certain traits in common and a similar place in the societies to which they belong either side of the Atlantic. Indeed, they were mutually aware of each other and they did meet in New York in the 1960s where they collaborated briefly following Nairn receiving a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation.  Nairn’s work clearly influenced Jacobs and his Outrage! is referenced in “Death and Life” and subsequent essays.

So, now let’s talk about Outrage! and the follow-up, Counterattack. In 1955, Ian Nairn issued the Architectural Review with his critique of the concept he termed as coined Subtopia, or the slow tentacles of suburbia spilling over increasingly into the British countryside. In effect, it is a call to arms to increase urban densification and protect the countryside from a process of urban sprawl. Written in 1955, it is eerily prescient and the dawn of mass ownership of private car certainly accelerated this process in the following decade. As the distances that people could easily travel increased, so did the reach of towns into lower density settlements into the countryside as city dwellers increasingly sought larger homes with bigger gardens and more space without having to compromise city living and access to work.

In essence, Outrage! calls for better town planning strategy in the Dutch style of densely packed cities with clearly demarcated green belt countryside between each. There’s a lot to say for this, and I certainly see huge merit in compact, walkable (or cyclable) cities, particularly from the point of view of minimising carbon footprints and promoting urban cohesion. However, this requires careful land planning strategies and coordination at a national level, which is certainly lacking in the UK with successive governments pushing for more and more planning deregulation. It also requires a significant degree of social cohesion, which is extremely weak in the UK, partially due to a deeply engrained national obsession with individualism and privacy. However this has been significantly exacerbated by past brutal 12 years of Thatcherite razing state institutions to the ground so that the state barely exists anymore, turbo-charging the dismantling of public services and privatisation of any notion of collective space. With that comes extremely weak social ties, and a zombie UK state left completely hollow and in a fragile and weak condition with spiralling levels of inequality and deep-rooted structural problems in economy and society that I cannot see improving in the foreseeable.

Ian Nairn would no doubt be horrified at the condition of Britain today, and in many ways Outrage! was eerily prophetic without ever expressing any political dimension. In fact his politics seem somewhat unclear, much less so than that of Jacobs. He never really articulated the reasons for the march of Subtopia, and Outrage! seems largely an exercise in nostalgia for an golden era where the private car didn’t exist and the countryside consisted of idyllic villages and the rural peasant life.

Outrage! and the follow-up Counterattack! are beautifully illustrated by one of the lead Townscape theorists Gordon Cullen. While Nairn didn’t seem to present any immediate solutions to the rapid, messy and short-term thinking behind the sprawling out of post-war Britain’s urban, the beauty of his two polemics lie in his engaging narration style, and a running commentary of the concerns and fears of those living through the social democratic, state-led reconstruction of a Britain ravaged by the war. In particular, his manifesto at the back of Counterrattack! on what not to do when planning cities, and his case-book of bad practice and examples of ugly bits of town planning in a route he took from Southampton all the way up to the Scottish Highlands.

The short book rich in illustration and photographs offers a window into a time when Britain was re-moulding itself following the bloody first half of the twentieth century. Looking at it from the perspective of someone who has grown up largely under a period where the state has been weakened and diminished into something unrecognisable from the state-led development from 1945 onwards, it’s easy to forget that this was a huge period of significant social change which no doubt led to a degree of upheaval for those living through that time.

The most striking thing about Outrage! and Counterattack is their lightness on theory and political context. They barely make mention of the strong municipal-led politics and social democratic policies of the decades following the end of the two world wars that forged modern Britain and lifted many out of poverty and gave them free access to high-quality healthcare, subsidised and good quality housing, education, and the building up of a strong welfare state that ensured everyone had a decent start and end to life, supported by a consensus that this is what a modern state should look like between both Labour and Tories. This has been brutally dismantled since the 2008 crisis and erased from the collective imagination, to the point where Labour’s manifesto for the 2019 election was deemed as dangerous and insane by the political elite , when it reality what it wanted to do was re-imagine the welfare state of the 1950s and 1960s but updated to suit the needs of the 21st century. Clearly, the post-war cross-party consensus of caring for every individual from cradle to grave has retreated, and instead replaced with a Labour-Tory consensus of a return to a Victorian age where life was nasty, brutish and short for most, whose sole purpose of existence was to exploit just so that small hoard of landowners and business owners could live in ostentatiousness and eye-watering luxury. We, the left, lost that debate it seems and now we can do little but sit back and watch the horrors unfold.

Anyway: in the absence of social critique rooted in political context, Nairn’s main contribution was his stimulating additions to the debate on the quality and nature of town planning and its aesthetic considerations. He brought to the fore the Townscape theory, which Cullen was an advocate as well as Kevin Lynch, author of “The Image of the City” and wider questions around urban design which perhaps had been lacking in the town planning discipline until that point. His contributions as an outsider to the discipline (certainly he ruffled the feathers of technical experts in the profession such as architects and town planners), and his assertion that the character of place cannot be created in a top-down, technocratic manner but by large teams, including sociologists, cultural theorists, commentators and especially, regular citizens.

The Townscape theorists were concerned with how aesthetics and conservation of rural character of British countryside villages could be combined with the social democratic modernisation of post-war Britain. Nairn railed against “clutter” or man-made necessities of urban living – roundabouts, signage, fences, electricity pylons, lampposts taking over the British landscape, and wanted to see it carefully planned and managed so it could be harmonised with the rural landscape.

In Counterattack! Nairn maps out varying archetypes of lampposts and rates them in terms of their ugliness and lack of harmony with their settings. He also critiques local council’s attempts to manage public spaces, with the characteristic flower beds and hanging baskets that filled high streets and town centres, which I recognise from my upbringing in the suburb of a deindustrialising northern town in the 1980s and 1990s. I wonder today, how Nairn would take the average British northern town battered by over a decade of austerity. Gone are the hanging baskets, much of the lampposts and street lighting, and many councils have even removed trees in a bid to save money, which is a neat illustration of the sheer madness of such deep cuts to public spending as we face increasing challenges due to climate change. Trees are a great way to keep dense urban areas cool in the increasingly warm summers, as well as great for natural drainage as our climate gets wetter and floodrisk becomes a near constant threat each year. Our town centres now are sad places: colourless, joyless, soulless with barely any landscaping left, blighted by boarded-up shops and empty properties as high streets decline at a fairly shocking pace.

The starkest difference now from even 10 years ago and certainly in Nairn’s time is the sharp increase in homelessness as more and more people are forced into poverty by the cruel regime forced upon us since 2010. In any given British city, and increasingly also suburbs and smaller town centres, high street doorways are used to shelter an unforgivingly high homeless population. This is a crisis that shows no sign of abating and the noises made by the latest prime minister indicate that he has no intention of providing any structural solutions. In a country as rich as the UK, this is nothing short of a crime of the government’s making.

Planning departments now have been stripped bare, the only planners left in local authorities are mostly left to handle the consequences of an ineffective and inadequate community consultation process and managing the needs of private developers. The planning system has been deregulated and the idea of a cohesive, European-style state-led overarching planning strategy has been sacrificed to profit gains for private developers leading to fragmentation and competition for profit rather than collaboration over shared social goals. Long gone are the days where the municipal planning teams would count sociologists in their ranks. Nairn would be horrified that the densification and townscape debate have both been well and truly lost. The expanded suburbs, Barrattification, are now are seen as a sanctuary for the middle classes, shielding them in new-build estates with private gardens and a lives moulded around privacy and car use, from the horrors of the social and physical dereliction of provincial inner cities and towns that have been systematically hollowed out and left to rot.

Ian Nairn and Subtopia

After my four-part entry on Jane Jacobs and her magnum opus Death and Life of Great American Cities, it follows that Ian Nairn more than deserves at least an entry or two.

Like Jacobs, Ian Nairn’s writing on architecture and planning emerged from his role as a journalist. Where Jacobs wrote for the American magazine Architectural Forum, Nairn was British-born and based and wrote for the Architectural Review. Unlike Architectural Forum, which ceased publication in 1974, Architectural Review is still alive and well, and continued to be held in high esteem in the industry.

While they both had journalistic backgrounds and were very skilled at storytelling and weaving a compelling narrative, I would say the similarities end there. Nairn, unlike Jacobs, had a technical background. He was the son of a draughtsman for a the R101 airship (zeppelin), a government-backed project to expand civil airships capable of long-distance journeys between London and key routes within the British Empire. While Nairn was not a trained architect, he was a qualified pilot who did extended national service in the RAF and graduated in Mathematics from Birmingham University. Nairn was raised in Surrey, which even by the 1930s was already essentially a wealthy suburban belt of London, and it was here he cultivated his deep-seated hatred of the suburbs. The exploration of his aversion to the suburbs led to his Outrage! project where he coined the term Subtopia.

Nairn’s views of the suburbs, therefore, were inverted to those of Jacobs. While Jacobs seemed to have a positive predisposition towards the suburbs, never really articulating it but implying in her “eyes on the street” concept of neighbourhood surveillance that the one thing cities are lacking is a suburban mindset, and that the conditions that allow big cities to afford the right to anonymity of their inhabitants should be eradicated to as great an extent as possible.

Nairn, on the other hand, sees the suburbs as a scourge. In his view, they spread mediocrity and prevent creative and intelligent thinking, numbing all the senses by their blandness and striving to make life as free as possible of the discomfort and friction city life requires its inhabitants to navigate on a daily basis. One wonders, whether the British sense of apathy and quite frankly, levels of acceptance of abuses inflicted on the ruling class to ordinary citizens that would simply not be tolerated elsewhere, is a cultural trait or one that has been exacerbated by the post-war drive to bland, conflict-averse society organised in neat little suburbs characterised by individual family homes, small private gardens and reliance on private transport.

While they had different attitudes towards the suburbs,  it is fair to say that Nairn and Jacobs had in different ways both had strong views on increasing the density of cities and aiming for as high a density as possible. For Nairn, this was largely to protect the integrity of the countryside, keeping it as wild and free from manmade interference as possible. Jacobs, on the other hand, didn’t make much of a mention of the interaction between city and countryside, instead aiming for a walkable city composed of lots of different neighbourhoods, or mini cities within a bigger city, in which people would live, work, and play without ever needing to venture out into the greater metropolis to which they belong.

In recent years, Jacobs’ concepts has become extremely popular in Europe as a response to climate change and the move to decarbonisation through people-centric urban and residential planning. The walkable city, or 20-minute or 15-minute city, is gaining popularity as a strategy to try to phase out car traffic from city centres and reduce congestion. For example, the Scottish Government has embedded the 20-minute city in its national planning framework, Mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo is backing a 15-minute city model, and other cities are following suit, including Barcelona. The Catalonian capital has long been a pioneer and perfect case study in urban planning and testing new human-centric concepts from Cerdà’s superblock plans and design for Eixample in overcrowded 19th century Barcelona still constricted by medieval city walls to the more recent port area redevelopment. From Jacobs’ point of view, her focus on increasing density as a way to make cities “smaller” and more liveable and manageable rather than Nairn’s wish to increase density of cities to protect and conserve the integrity of the countryside was perhaps largely because the US is a vast, expansive territory and land is not exactly in short supply. Britain, on the other hand, as Nairn never fails to remind us, is a small, overcrowded, and at the time of Outrage! still a highly industrial country. Towns, therefore, had a propensity to spill over into the country, even in the remotest rural corners such as the Highlands of Scotland which even in 1955 were still pock-marked with man-made activity. Jacobs realised early the damage planners could make by building cities around the needs of the motorcar (let’s not forget her rise to fame was connected with her role and subsequent arrest in mobilising Manhattanites against the Robert Moses plan to build a highway cutting through dense city areas), Nairn’s view was complementary to this in his early realisation of the extent to which the rise of car ownership could damage the countryside by extending the reach and the spread of the city. In Outrage! he notes that

“Spread is dependent no longer on population increase but on the services a power-equipped society can think up for itself. With radio and supersonic speeds you get the capacity for infinite spread, the limiting factors of time and place having ceased to operate. The city is to-day not so much a growing as a spreading thing, fanning out over the land surface in the shape of suburban sprawl.

However, something even more sinister is at work: applied science is rendering meaningless the old distinction between urban and rural life; the village is becoming as much a commuter as the citizen; the old centres of gravity have been deprived of their pull at both ends and in the middle; no longer geographically tied, the industries which once muscled in on the urban set-up are getting out of the mess they did so much to make, and making a new mess outside.”

In time, both have proven to be correct, and we live in a world where the life of the average city dweller has been so ravaged by the use of the private car that it’s not even questioned anymore but taken as a usual and normal part of living in a city. Whether that’s excess deaths from air pollution, contribution to a changed climate, to appalling city planning, streets crowded with cars (both moving and parked) so all other street users are pushed aside and forced to make themselves as invisible as possible and take up as little space as they can. All of this is barely questioned by urban planners, especially in countries such as UK and the US where the fossil fuel industry have a chokehold over governments and the organisation of daily life. Speed, efficiency, and private consumption are also at the core of our global economy, and the private car is certainly seen as integral to this, especially in Europe where governments will not invest in mass-scale state of the art public transit systems and high speed trains as a great scale.

The UK is currently going through some extreme ideology manifesting in the disintegration of rail infrastructure because of a stubborn refusal to dip into shareholder profits to give it the upgrade it so badly needs. The country’s economic system is currently in what can really only be described as meltdown and this is just one symptom. In the US, it’s criminal that such a large, expansive country has such diabolic rail coverage and no high speed connection to speak of.

Spatial Planning in England: Act III

Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill: Final judgements

Levelling Up, i.e. bridging the gap between the economic performance of the north and south of the country, was always a vague, ambiguous aim. While I do indeed agree that the northern question must be tackled, thus far I haven’t seen anything to convince me that it’s little more than political appeasement and a potential bargaining chip to dangle in front of northern Tory voters in the so-called imaginary “Red Wall” when election time rolls round. Even as a tool of political manipulation, I haven’t even seen any cash on the table so as far as I’m concerned, it exists in rhetoric and nothing else and I hope that voters see that whenever our next election may be (could be much sooner than we think).

Now that this iteration of Government has collapsed, what happens to Levelling Up remains to be seen but likely it will be shelved once and for all, at least in its current guise. I could write angrily and bitterly about Levelling Up funds being used to fund housing in the stockbroker-infested greenbelts of Surrey instead of improving lives in the most forlorn and impoverished corners of post-industry, but I will desist for now.

But let’s look at what the long-awaited Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill actually means for planning in practice.

1. What does beauty actually mean?

Apparently the new planning system will be based on the principles of “beauty, infrastructure, democracy, environment, and neighbourhood engagement.”

Not sure if this is a citation of the Roman architect Vitruvius, who wrote to Augustus Caesar that good architecture must include “utilitas, firmitas, and venustas” – utility, strength, and beauty – but indeed I have no idea what to a Tory mind, beauty might look like.

Some people (popular among fascists…) think rationalism is beautiful. Others see beauty in brutalism (normally the same British leftists who worship Orwell). Personally I love Bauhaus and some types of modernism but many would argue against it on the grounds of pretentiousness (and they would have a point). Pomo could be beautiful to some. Baroque, especially of the English and German variants make me want to puke but I don’t think that opinion is shared across the board. Beaux-arts, Art Deco, Gothic, English Renaissance all have their merits. And the list goes on.

What I’m trying to say is this: beauty is wholly subjective. How can that be a principle upon which to base a modern planning system? How do we measure beauty? And will National Design Codes actually hamper aesthetically pleasing towns and cities?

2. No mention of the climate crisis
This is particularly astonishing. A government in 2022 should absolutely NOT be allowed to publish something as central to climate change mitigation as planning of the built environment without a clear, and detailed plan about how it aims to phase out fossil fuels and transition to carbon neutrality. What is their problem? The science is there. Other countries around the world are making at least token gestures (very slow and still we face a huge existential threat). But no mention. We should be making massive changes to our cities to reduce manifold public health crises and climate change induced problems with increased flooding events, biodiversity loss, and in the south extreme heating events. Where is the renewables plan? Where are the savings from the construction industry, one of the biggest contributors to the UK’s carbon emissions? Any ideas around biophiic design and expansion of green spaces? Carbon sinks? The time for imaginative ideas and learning from others around the world is now.

But here we just get a wilful radio silence.
These are not serious people.

3. No mention of cost of living crisis.
A toxic combination of Brexit and the war in Ukraine has had a terrifying upward spiral on prices in the UK. Food and heating in particular are impacting households across the country, but also the spiking costs of building materials will lead to a deflation of the building boom soon. The White Paper was published after both of these factors became the top headlines of the day. And still, nothing.

How do we address affordable housing?
How can we combine tackling climate change with the cost of living crisis?
Can we develop land to start cultivate land for urban farming?
How will we feed our people as the crisis deepens?
So many huge and life-threatening questions. So little imagination.

4. Roman Emperor-style dictatorial clauses disguised as “democratic decision-making;”
Street votes?
Nomenclature of streets and statues?
Really?
Granting the Secretary of State more centralised powers over seemingly trivial but local-level affairs while pushing fairly major and significant tasks to resource-strapped local authorities seems a bit backwards. Also, this government have shown time and again that they are out-of-touch and cannot be trusted to implement things effectively and competently so expanding their powers in areas where they really have little to no knowledge is a major risk in my book.

5. Less democratic
No realistic plan for community involvement or participatory planning.

It’s not rocket science. Participatory planning practices have been well implemented in major cities around the world, from Barcelona to
While partipatory planning hasn’t always been perfect and can also present as tokenistic (in Madrid, for example, it’s simply a portal where residents can vote “yes” or “no” on decisions without putting forward any qualitative suggestion.

However the LURB makes no mention of a shift to the post-2010 world. It feels outdated, uncreative and ineffective. One of the few elements of the current planning system that allows the public to make their voices heard is in planning consultations, and these are notoriously ineffective. With a bit of focus and attention, their format could easily be improved, upgraded, and better resourced to allow proper and effective community engagement.

All of this is ignored.

6. Quick-wins galore without addressing structural problems.
Which is indeed this government in a nutshell. This is largely what the design codes and new powers to auction leases for vacant properties on high streets is all about. As always, they prefer to address the symptom than the root cause and then wonders why everything continues to go to hell.

7. Where’s the money?
What I find most staggering is how the austerity agenda continues to permeate.
The new Bill puts so much additional pressure on council planning departments, who have already been decimated and stripped off much of their autonomy. There’s no mention of increasing resource, or training, or funding other than a bit of the new Infrastructure Levy fund which replaces CIL and S106. This is likely to be a tiny drop in the ocean in comparison with 1). The deep cuts and violently suppressed budgets of the past 12 years; 2). Scale and complexity of social, economic, political, and environmental crises facing the country; 3). Levels of responsibility and additional tasks forced on to local authorities.

Without properly taxing the rich and improving public spending to restore some form of adequate state (which currently functions as an outsourcing platform for a wild and unregulated profiteering private sector), we will sink deeper and deeper into the mire.

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TL:DR final words: Too shallow, too light, too vague and more undemocratic than ever before to make any real difference and certainly no antidote to our aged, anachronistic, fragmented and stretched planning system unfit for a modern state.

Spatial Planning in England: Act II

In terms of housing and planning, the hallmarks of the 12-year austere and increasingly blindly ideological Tory regime is a deep housing crisis, the removal of the right to a home as a basic human right, and a lack of mass, state-subsidised housing that has caused inequality to spiral in the UK. This is most visible in drastic increases in homelessness, but there is also a problem at the majority of people under 40, even with relatively decent (by post-2008 UK standards, so already lagging quite a bit behind those of France and Germany) salaries cannot afford to buy a home and are trapped in an unregulated and parasitic rental market with zero protection.

Undoubtedly this has got worse under Tory rule, but as discussed previously the problems began under Thatcher in her mass sell-off of Council-owned homes and the project was certainly exacerbated and continued under New Labour.

As outlined in my previous post, one thing I agree with the Tories, albeit for entirely different reasons, is that the UK planning system is broken. I radically disagree, however, with their proposed remedies for all the UK’s planning ailments. These are presented in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill. As a side note, given our most recent governmental collapse I do imagine this will be shelved anyhow, and the Levelling Up agenda (and what little impact it has made so far) will be abandoned. But that’s a different story.

I’ll present the proposed planning solutions outlined in the LUR Bill, and then let’s take each one piece by piece.

1. New central powers implemented at the local level
Local Beauty
A nod towards vernacular architecture, whereby all local authorities would be required to have a design code in place covering their planning jurisdiction.

“The area-wide codes will act as a framework, for which subsequent detailed design codes can come forward, prepared for specific areas or sites and led either by the local planning authority, neighbourhood planning groups or by developers as part of planning applications. This will help ensure good design is considered at all spatial scales, down to development sites and individual plots.”

More streamlined decision-making
Local plans would be limited to locally specific matters, and key issues would be covered by national policies. I think this flies in the face of the whole decentralisation thing that is ostensibly at the heart of levelling up, but in principle I’m not against it. Certain things, like a real green energy policy, or net zero transition, or mass social housing require a national-level plan.

The problem is, our national level policymaking is inherently broken and policies are no longer made in the public interest. In practice then, this simply will not work to the benefit of the population.

Regional and local autonomy in decision making

The above seems to contradict other parts of the Bill, which stipulates that more weight will be given to neighbourhood plans and spatial development strategies proposed by Combined Authorities and Mayors. So, how does that play into key issues being covered only at national level? We need to understand then, what the Bill means by “key issues.”

Local authorities will also be allowed to quickly create supplementary plans for their areas (or part thereof). This means that local authorities will be able to quickly produce policies and designs for sites or whole areas rapidly.

New combined authorities created

Personally I think that the entire governance structure of the UK should not be relegated to a footnote in a planning bill but should be given its own entire department. But still, at least it recognises that the Combined Authority structure is designed for urban areas. The new Bill allows “upper tier” councils to combine (i.e. county level, often used for large but sparsely populated rural areas). Or as the Bill puts it:

“main difference between combined county authorities and combined authorities is the membership: a combined county authority must include one two-tier county council and at least one other upper tier county council or upper tier unitary authority (i.e. district councils cannot be members and do not consent to the forming of a combined county authority), whereas a combined authority has to include all the local authorities within the area it is to cover (i.e. in a two-tier area, the county council and all district councils must be members, and consent to the forming of the combined authority)”.

i.e: NAPOLEON!!!! WHERE ARE YOU?!!!!

2. More community

Street Votes
Under the new bill, there is a placeholder to add a clause to allow residents on a street would be allowed to propose developments on their street and hold a vote as to whether a proposed development should take place or not.

That might be a good suggestion in theory, but I would dread to think how it would actually play out IRL in bitter Britain of 2022….

Neighbourhood creation
The Bill introduces something called “a neighbourhood priorities statement” which provides communities with a “simpler and more accessible way to set out their key priorities and preferences for their local areas. Local authorities will need to take these into account, where relevant, when preparing their local plans for the areas concerned, enabling more communities to better engage in the local plan-making process”.

I’m not really sure what this means other than modernise local authorities planning portals. So far, I haven’t seen much evidence of this but there is a definite need for an upgrade to the 21st century.

Although, not entirely sure how this alone is supposed to magic up a cosy neighbourhood, community feel. I wonder if the Government simply do not understand the scale of the crisis the country, and especially the northern portion, is facing. It certainly feels like that.

Improved high streets
Local authorities could be granted new powers to instigate auctions to take leases on vacant high street properties.

It is certainly undeniable that our high streets are ailing, especially in Northern cities and outside of affluent areas. While leafy Surrey and Kent and Hampstead Garden Suburb etc. may be full of cutsey little boutiques and artisan bakeries, that is not the reality of much of the country. Even the betting shops, money lenders, pawnshops, poundlands, outdated newsagents and Greggs so ubiquitous on high streets in the immediate post-crash years, now even those are becoming scarce and replaced increasingly by empty, boarded up lots.

However, this is a quick and shallow fix to a much, much deeper problem. It’s no coincidence that high streets are dying in areas of the country where people can barely afford milk, bread, and cheese. They aren’t going to be buying cutsey little loaves, organic produce or handmade patisserie. The country has become poor and that is the fault of austerity politics peddled by this increasingly criminal and corrupt bunch and a total failure to address structural economic issues in our deindustrialised country by this dim-witted, greedy and unimaginative political class.

Council tax premium on second homes
“local authorities may levy a premium of up to an additional 100 per cent on council tax bills for second homes and for empty homes after one year (as opposed to two years which is the current requirement).”

In principle, fair enough. However, like closing loopholes or actually mapping out transparent land ownership structures, this pays lip service and I doubt the Tories would actually instigate anything. Also, there needs to be much more tightly regulated second home market and the Airbnbification of beauty spots, crippling local communities for example in the Lake District, is barely discussed in the UK (unlike, for example in Barcelona or Berlin). In the UK I would argue this is mainly a rural issue, and rural communities are facing dire consequences.

2. Improve transparency of land ownership and land use

Land control in England and Wales

Land control in all four corners of the United Kingdom is extraordinarily complicated. We never had a Napoleon to reform the land and standardise our system of governance. I would argue that the Domesday book, the first land census conducted in post-1066 (i.e after the Norman Conquest and the last time we were invaded, which has done all sorts of strange things to the British psyche and is one of the common explanations as to why our establishment are so weird and incompetent) was the last time any major attempt was made to map land ownership and understand how land is the wretched place is parcelled. We missed a trick with Cromwell in 1652, the English revolution more than a full century before the French Revolution and two before the Russian. It was a world first but we were too soon to be relevant, and to paraphrase a bunch of innovation-y motivational speaker-y type entrepreneurs (James Allworth and Howard Marks Google tells me), potentially stolen from an Italian politician (was it D’Alema?) and parroted by Ivanka Trump: too early is the same as being wrong.

So yes. Agreed. The United Kingdom is thirsty for land control.

But. The new bill is super vague and doesn’t stipulate how such a Herculean task would be undertaken:
The bill simply “includes measures that will facilitate a better understanding of who ultimately owns or controls land in England and Wales.” This supports a 2017 Housing White Paper commitment by “collecting and publishing data on contractual arrangements used by developers to control land, such as rights of pre-emption, options, and conditional contracts”.

Close Planning Loopholes
The Bill allegedly strengthens powers available to local authorities to enforce planning rules and laws. I am sceptical however: since when does this government do anything to close loopholes that ultimately benefit the propertied classes?

And: this country barely seems to have any laws, just recommendations and policies. Good luck enforcing those.

Amending the Compulsory Purchase Order (CPO) system.
CPO allows local authorities to purchase parcels of land that may belong to private owner(s) to develop new infrastructure. This will be extended to include CPOs for regeneration, especially of brownfield land.

In theory, again, a welcome change, but very vague as to how it might be implemented beyond “changes to     publicity requirements around CPOs and how their inquiries are held.”

3. Nomenclature

Centralised government oversight of street names

Again, in a perfect world with a nice, benevolent state this could not be a bad thing. Seemingly, it stemmed from the BLM movement in 2020 and could be used to remove monuments, street names, and plaques which could be deemed offensive. All local authorities would need to follow the same process to change names in consultation with residents. So far, so good.

But based on the current government’s track record, it could be a bit scary. Do we really want Thatcher Avenues, von Hayek Streets and Ayn Rand Roads to pop up all over our cities? Removal of everything related to anything remotely left or anti-Tory, such as the move in Manchester to rid Manchester of its statue of Fredriech Engels?

Sounds to me like another strand of the concocted culture war of the right wing. Remove the slave owners, racists and colonisers, and be done with it.

4. Heritage

Listed parks and gardens
Registered parks and gardens would get the same planning protection as Listed Buildings. A bit Victorian, but fine by me. Increasing the amount of public space and making it more inclusive and democratic would help, but that’s another battle for another day.

5. Replacing EIA and SEA

A new post-Brexit “Environmental Outcomes Report.”
Since Environmental Impact Assessments (EIA) and Strategic Environmental Assessments (SEA) are EU processes, we will need to create our own. Given this government’s track record on the environment, and the fact that our rivers have gone from one of the cleanest in Europe to open sewers in a mere 12 years, I’m not holding my breath on what this might entail.

The bill states that it will “[…] for the first time, allow the government to reflect its environmental priorities directly in the decision-making process.”

Under this government, this scares me since their only consistent priority is…cutting corners and making money?

6. Cross-boundary working

Combined Authorities and Mayoralties working together

Groups of CAs could voluntarily coordinate spatial strategies across borders on specific cross-boundary issues. This might include net zero plans, or transport for example. This imbues the CAs with more decision-making and executive power than they have (which, let’s face it, is currently minimal).

Creation of Local-Led Urban Development Corporations

The UK Planning system, as mentioned previously, is notoriously patchy and contains relics of planning theories past (many of which have been since wholly discredited, particularly the 1960s fixation with building cities to accommodate cars and not much else). Accordingly, there are currently four types of development corporation:

               • New Town Development Corporation
               • Urban Development Corporation
               • Mayoral Development Corporation
               • local-led New Town Development Corporation.

Being the UK, as everything here all of these have different levels of power, cover different remits, and have differing priorities (Napoleon please come and save us!!)

This bill focuses on locally-led Urban Development Corporations, with the aim of regenerating the local area and accountable to local authorities rather than the central state.

This is welcome, but only on two conditions: firstly, if it replaces the fragmentary and piecemeal current status (which there’s no indication it will, unless I interpreted it incorrectly it seems the bill just introduces a new strand to the existing hotchpotch); and secondly, local authorities are given more money, resource, and expertise to adequately oversee the activities of the Urban Development Corporation. If it’s just yet another thing tagged on to councils already stretched to breaking point, forget it. 
                

7. Replacement of S106 and CIL with a new Infrastructure Levy.

Section 106 merits an entry in its own rite, and it has been abused supremely over the years especially by super rich developers. CIL, which is similar to S106 but includes an expanded range of infrastructure, is similar in nature. Developers are expert at dodging their responsibilities and giving back to society.

Therefore, I don’t think a new Infrastructure Levy will hold much water. The wording is worrying vague, as per usual: “There will also be “a process to require developers to deliver some forms of infrastructure that are integral to the design and delivery of a site”.

So, that summarises what the Bill contains. The next task it to work out what each of these proposals actually mean in practice. More to follow.

Spatial Planning in England: Act I

The modern planning system in England is rooted in the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act This established two important elements:

(i). a legal framework for development, where land ownership alone was not the sole condition required for development and planning permission needed to be sought and certain criteria met; and

(ii) institutional re-structuring to grant county and borough councils ownership of planning processes, based on local development plans aligned to a national strategic planning framework.

From its progressive roots, the English planning system since the late 1970s has undergone a significant paradigm shift. The state has taken an increasingly diminished role, making way for the market to lead, creating a tendency to sideline social and environmental outcomes.

A fundamental criticism of the English planning system is that it is cumbersome and opaque based around local development plans which are slow to prepare and even slower to implement. Lack of coherence and slow speed of implementation of Local Development Plans makes for a spatial planning system ill-equipped to respond to the challenges of the 21st century.

Legal standing

The spatial planning system in England today is guided top-down by the National Policy Planning Framework (NPPF), but local development plans, which are part of the Local Development Schemes which are a legal requirement for local authorities to produce following the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act, remain the cornerstone of implementation, albeit with plans for phase them out.

Local plans tend to be long, complex documents. For example, the Newcastle Local Plan consists of:
 1. 360-page Core Strategy and Urban Core Plan (CSUCP) for Gateshead and Newcastle 2010-2030.
2.147-page Development and Allocations Plan 2015-2030 (DAP).
3. 172-page appendices.


The overall result is a diluted and complex document from which it is difficult to obtain a tangible sense of what the spatial vision for the area seeks to achieve beyond economic prosperity.

Successive planning reforms (e.g. 1990, 1991, 2004, 2011, 2015, 2018, 2020) indicate that there is cross-party consensus that the spatial planning system, the NPPF and, by design, Local Development Plans is flawed. However, so far, planning reforms have been at best, incremental, and at worst, entrench existing issues.

The deeply fragmented, incoherent system means that English planners are tasked with achieving too many policy objectives with little resource in a flawed institutional system that is the highly centralised political system of England.  

The housing crisis rages on

The affordable housing crisis at the centre of the critique of the English planning system. The housing issue is structural and partially related to land ownership models in England, and partially due to the structure of the housing market which is over-dominated by large private developers with little interest beyond economic gain in the places in which they secure development rights.  

The failure to address the housing crisis is symptomatic of the incoherent, fragmented nature of English spatial planning. Planning and housing sectors would be well placed to work closely together to tackle the deep inequalities in English society and their impacts, as well as developing deliverable strategies to tackling climate change.

Until the affordable housing crisis is tackled through a radical redistribution of property-based wealth, the spatial planning system is unable to deliver meaningful impact in terms of integrating with other sector to address inequalities in cities.

Skeffington Report (1969)


The 1969 People and Planning (Skeffington Report) continues to provide the benchmark for engaging the British public in earlier on in the process of developing local development plans. In response to the highly centralised planning system framed by the 1947 TPCA, the 1968 amendment mandated that planning authorities must share local development plans with the public, provide an opportunity for affected residents respond. In line with the discretionary, common-law system which shapes public life in Britain, the new recommendations provided no legal grounds or details in how they could be implemented. It was therefore the responsibility of local authorities to interpret the public participation amendment how they saw fit, leading to uneven results.

While the Skeffington Report did make mention of increasing engagement with the planning system by people from underrepresented groups, it did not mention exactly who, or how (Community Planning Toolkit, 2016). This continues to be vital for the modern planning system to overcome, given that the majority of public engagement is with people over 55 and 56% of people in England have never engaged with the planning system at all.

While available data lacks granularity of ethnicity of those engaged in the planning system in England, an ethnographic data shows that even in a London borough where 54% of the population are not white, planning consultation meetings were almost entirely white, the planners and developers themselves were white, and all of the people in the rendering of proposed developments were white. When this is placed in the context of 37% of black people in England having no access to a garden, balcony, or outdoor space (ONS, 2020), it makes the failure of the planning to engage those who are most likely to rely on public parks and green spaces for their leisure time even more startling.

While local politicians have the right to vote on new planning developments, as in the current system, the planning system in England will remain highly politicised. Planning committees are responsible for passing local planning decisions, but they are constituted of elected councillors who often have limited knowledge of planning systems.

Impact of austerity on planning

Spatial planning preparations and development delivery and implementation at local level have been constrained by local authorities a decade of austerity measures, which the Joseph Rowntree Foundation estimated for planning departments by 2015 was around a cumulative average of 45%. With such limited resources for a time-consuming and resource intensive activity as community engagement, it is of little surprise then that Local Development Plan formulation is estimated by the RTPI to have a 1% public rate of engagement, and the participation in the individual planning process is estimated to be at 3%. These figures, coupled with inability of councillors to genuinely represent a cross-section of interests in their local constituencies, highlight a serious problem of democracy and participation in the England planning system.

Discretionary planning systems

Discretionary planning means that central government sets guidance, policies, and visions for how planning will be implemented by regional and local tiers of government, but local authorities have a large degree of discretion on how these translate into reality through formulation of local development plans.

Discretionary systems are characterised by overlapping planning and policy systems often involving different processes or aims, and it is the role of planning departments to interpret these aims to inform negotiations over final planning decisions. This contrasts with the codification of statutory systems.

An effective spatial planning system should be able to merge the benefits of a discretionary system, where flexibility allows the planning system to respond to changes in circumstances and place-specific conditions, with the consistency and predictability of the planning outcomes of a regulatory planning system. The Planning for the Future Reforms published in 2020 recognise that the English discretionary planning system in its current guise is flawed, and opened the prospect of implementing a zoning system of sorts in the English planning system.

Section 106

Progressive aims of the TCPA 1947 manifested in nationalised development rights for land use. Consecutive reforms since 1979 have increasingly returned to the pre-1947 system of land ownership concentrated in the hands of a minority of private individuals. The concept of “planning gains,” an ostensibly mitigating factor, was introduced by the Town and Country Planning Act 1990 under Section 106, where local authorities could exercise the right to benefit from selling land to developers by capturing the difference between land value and its uplift as a developable site. The logic was that this gain could then be used to fund public infrastructure (libraries, parks, social housing). However, while this initially appears to be a progressive amendment, it does not always achieve socially progressive outcomes. In a recent example, the Nine Elms developers in London used the S106 clause to fund a new tube station under the guise of constructing a new station as a public good. Whether a new tube station is needed in an area of London that mostly consists of luxury apartments during an ongoing and chronic housing affordability crisis remains highly dubious.

PDs

Permitted Development rights (PDs) are a feature of the English planning system where planning proposals meeting specific criteria do not require planning permission. The logic is to ease the pressure on the housing market by making it easier to “flip” buildings to residential usage with minimal bureaucracy. However, this unfettered approach to planning continues to place pressure on local authorities who are required to spend limited time and resource in verifying whether developments met the criteria for PDs, and producing certification to prove their status. It has not reduced the burden on planning departments. This is one example of unsustainable solutions to avoid what is really required to address the housing crisis: rent controls and adequate state intervention, i.e. a significant spend to increase the mass supply of affordable housing as those seen in the 1950s-70s.

Summary

The English spatial planning system is deeply flawed. While it does reflect a flawed and difficult wider political context, there are some measures that can be taken to improve the situation. While the Planning for the Future White Paper set out by the Government in 2020 recognises these flaws, there has been no mention of preventing misuse of S106 agreements and the remedies it does put forward, particularly pertaining to improving public participation and tackling spatial inequality provoked by English land use laws, are inadequate.

Spatial Planning: Introduction

This is the introduction to an Act in Three Parts about Planning-related drama in England. These are the last in the series of dry, policy-related commentary and legal stuff. I just need to store them here for future reference.

Then – back to fun urbanist stuff!

Spatial planning sits at the intersection of a broad range of future-oriented policies which determine social, economic, and environmental outcomes for a given area. A successful planning system will seek to harmonise as many of competing actions as possible. So, the main objective of any planning system is therefore to uncover social processes, values, and power relations associated with patterns of land use. A good planning system should act as a counterweight to level power imbalances by providing a framework to manage trade-offs between competing factors.

There are two key strands to an effective spatial planning system:
 i). A decision-making framework for handling factors that cannot be treated in isolation and are independent on other factors to contribute towards public good (e.g clear air, reduced noise pollution, green spaces)

ii). Decisions that should seek to maximise collective social good for the greatest number possible (a la Bentham).

Cities in the UK (and this country is far from unique in this) are becoming increasingly complicated: the way they are conceptualised and governed has changed dramatically in recent decades. It was evolved from a more “managerial” system led by the state to an increasingly fragmented array of institutions and organisations by social actors, private sector developers, designers, architects, consultants, planners, third sector and non-government agencies which eclipse the tasks previously undertaken by the state  

This fragmented system of urban governance coupled with economic, political, and environmental global instability demands an agility in spatial planning systems not seen anytime since 1945.

Key criteria for an effective spatial planning system

In her 1958 paper, Ruth Glass stated that ideological flexibility was one of the main factors behind the pragmatism of the 1947 system and the cross-party consensus generated by the UK’s Town and Country Planning Act. Planning has to reflect social policy for it to become meaningful.

  1. Integrated, systems-based planning

If spatial planning is a mechanism for shaping urban environments, then planning policy must interact with other policy sectors. The hallmark of an effective integrated spatial planning system should be one that can cross-pollinate with policies that protect the lives of future generations and facilitate equal access.  It should provide the conditions for intersectional and just usage of land for everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, health, or class.

2 Inclusive, accessible and democratic

Spatial planning systems involve many actors and stakeholders. So, power structures between different actors must be clear and there must be a mechanism in place to level off power imbalances. This means that a robust, well-resourced, and well-designed stakeholder engagement process is required to ensure that the views of all stakeholders are weighted equally.

An accessible spatial planning system is one that is straightforward to engage with. This might include easily accessible online consultation processes, and well-organised digital resources. If decisions are taken behind closed doors and without any opportunity for public engagement, this is likely to erode trust in public institutions and undermine democratic principles, produce planning outcomes that benefit a small minority and that are unlikely to achieve outcomes for the common good.


3. Proportional, balanced, unbiased

A strong spatial planning system is one which is flexible enough to respond to regional and urban challenges through strong capacity to work across, within, and between policy sectors at both vertical and horizontal levels. This refers to a planning system that works from local scale to global, or national to regional (horizontal) on different policy sectors (for example, national scale climate change mitigation policy with local level transport policy). The more integrated regional or local spatial planning systems are with other policy sectors, the more nuanced and effective the responses to macro challenges at the local level.

4. Agile (within reason)

While there is an argument for a planning system that can rapidly produce results, speed alone is not necessarily an advantage. In terms of hierarchy, striving for an inclusive, democratic and participatory system is more likely to produce high-quality outcomes. Facilitating discussion and creating spaces for as many stakeholder groups as possible to provide their input and shape planning outcomes is a time-consuming process. A speedy planning process would simply not be able to capture in-depth stakeholder perspectives. 

5. Progressive  

Progressive refers to the political willingness of leaders and owners of the planning process (e.g. local authorities, politicians, national/regional governments) to draw on Hegelian ideas of redistributive wealth to prevent economic inequality from stifling social development.  

6. Sustainable

The neoliberal political system places economic development and growth as the driving force of every sectoral policy, and planning has been no exception. The emphasis on GDP as the universal comparator is not really fit for purpose anymore. In light of the climate crisis, there is an opportunity growing for spatial planning system to implement new universal set of metrics related to wellbeing and environmental impact over GDP. There is some talk around wellbeing indicators, but they are not being implemented universally across the country and GDP is still the go-to metric for measuring the health of a country. Which is ridiculous, when it has been demonstrated time and time again that there is obviously no correlation between GDP and social health (the US is the richest country in the world for example, and it’s falling apart at the seams).

Tolyatti: the “poster child” of the Soviet Union.

Michele Cera and Guido Sechi’s ethnographic and photographic study of Tolyatti. Published by the Velvet Cell (2019)

This is a hastily scribbled post covering some massive topics so apologies for the lack of depth and meandering in places. There are a few things that I would like to re-visit in a more focused way later, so consider this an introduction to parts of a wider series of:

1. Lessons from Soviet Union’s experimental urban planning;
2. Deindustrialisation and what happens next;
3. Decarbonising the global economy: we need to do it and it is going to hurt like hell.

Rise and rise of motordom

Detroit. Coventry. Turin. Barcelona. Stuttgart & Wolfsburg. Sochaux. In the Western World, these are all obvious examples of “motor cities,” where the automotive industry employs a significant proportion of the population and forms the backbone of local (or, regional, or even national) economies and organisation of public and social life.

Stuttgart was the original birthplace of the car (late 1800s) where two rival engineers, Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler both raced to nail the design of the first horseless carriage. Following WWI, a key engineer at Daimler, Ferdinand Porsche, joined Volkswagen and right after WWII, produced his own design for the first ever Porsche. Although Stuttgart was a key centre of production, from an urban planning point of view Wolfsburg is more interesting. Wolfsburg, home of the Autostadt museum, is one of Germany’s very few new planned towns (unlike in the UK where new towns such as Stevenage, Basildon, Milton Keynes, are a separate genre unto themselves, especially in the South East to mop up overspill in the 1950s from war-ravaged London). It was designed by Viennese-born architect and urban planner Peter Koller, who designed a town to house 90,000 to support the Volkswagen factory. The plan strictly segregated the housing quarters in the south from the factory in the north.

While Detroit is widely recognised as the first Motorcity (Motown), the original concept was exported from Europe. Combined with booming American industrialisation and the post-WWII expansion of global capitalism and American hegemony, in the mid-20th century the US became a global flagship for the automobile industry. This was to the extent that even for us growing up in the 1990s, American culture was synonymous with the car. One of the first things we Europeans learn about the US is that you need a car to get around and Americans drive absolutely everywhere regardless of how short or long the distance.

In other words, urbanisation in the US is inextricably intertwined with the motor industry. The UK, especially the suburban areas which expanded rapidly from 1945 – 1970s at the time when private car ownership exploded, is similarly shaped by access to private car. Luckily for us, we are geographically a much smaller country, so we have ended up like the US in miniature form.

Although, as Canadian urbanist and journalist Charles Montgomery outlines in his book Happy City, there is a big chunk of North American history that has been lost. Dubbed “Motordom” by the writer Peter D. Norton, author of Fighting Traffic: the Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, the pro-car lobby in the US was not always the de facto voice. In the 1920s, there was a strong anti-car movement, due to the noise, speed, and danger they produced. The re-arranging of the use of the street, where people could no longer use roads for walking, was an unpopular move. In Cincinnati in 1923, there was a petition to force all cars to install devices to prevent them from exceeding 25mph. As the exact opposite from today, the pro-car group were those who saw the car as progress, while the reactionaries were against expanding the use of the private car. Today, the same demographic of people who were against the car are likely those now who most fiercely advocate the freedom to use their private car and progressives are much more likely to want to see car use reduced in cities, if not abolished all together in favour of public or active transport solutions. At the time, the response of the car industry was to re-frame the priority of the street: the issue was not cars running over pedestrians, but pedestrians walking into cars. This is a very telling response from industry, and the longevity and deep entrenching of this belief in the American (and to be fair, British too) national psyche is astounding.

While Detroit was not the first motor town, it was the first to make a major contribution to the global political economy as the birthplace of Fordism after WWI. The Henry Ford’s factory, producing the Ford car was the first example of technological techniques used for mass production and standardisation, acting as the blueprint for the mass consumption that has defined us as a species for the past half century. At the other side, an important element of Fordism was ensuring that workers were paid enough to consume the products they were producing, the creation of the “aspirational worker.”

The story of Detroit, as we all know, is not a happy one and technological advancements put an end to the neatly organised system of labour from the first half of the 20th century in the 1970s. The 1978 film, Blue Collar, which L and I watched during lockdown last year was a cutting portrayal of a Detroit, and a labour market, and race relations, that had gone completely off-the-rails and was slipping into ruin as a direct consequence of the demise of Fordism. In short, Japan’s rise was the American car industry’s fall, combined with the emergence of neoliberal thought in the 1970s marking the last almost 50 years of assault on workers.

Tolyatti! The background story.

Cera & Sechi, pp. 12 – illustration of the vision for a Soviet Motor-city.

So! How does all of this relate to Tolyatti? As Owen Hatherley beautifully details in Landscapes of Communism his meticulous account outlining the key ingredients of Soviet Union urban planning, city design, and architecture, in the USSR the collective was the main point of everything. Therefore the idea of the private car flew in the face of this. Public transport (the clue is in the name) was excellent, dense networks and well-designed before we even reach the levels of aestheticism afforded to Soviet metro systems (the Moscow Metro, MCM as the flagship which provided a blueprint for other Soviet cities and indeed some of the ideas and engineering expertise were also exported to the West). Much of which was built by prison labour I hasten to add, but that is a different story.

After Stalin’s death and the consequent decline of Stalinism which happened to coincide with the boom of the car industry in the West, there was a period of relative relaxation (the Khruschev Thaw) of the strictest Soviet principles, and demand for private transport rose. This was also the beginning of the mass housebuilding project across the USSR (which is detailed in the Sotsogorod film I’ve referred to in previous entries – I will get to this at a later date).

Demand for car ownership, combined with an economy devastated by war and chronic housing shortages for similar reasons, all came together as a counterpoint for one solution: the construction of the USSR’s very own automotive centre of production.

Company towns built around centres of production, as also seen in the US, the UK, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and elsewhere in the West, were certainly not novel in the USSR either. Many

of these, as in my home region in the North East of England, were centred around extractive industries (in my region’s case, coal), copper, lead, coal, and mining for other minerals and metals. However, a car industry and a Soviet version of Detroit-style Fordism was a new concept. As the article on Tolyatti in Jacobin “What a Communist City Can Teach Us About Urban Planning” highlights, this pragmatism of learning from the West to support the modernisation of the USSR was indeed typical of the Soviet Union in terms of applying international technological, architectural, and design trends to their own ends.

While it certainly would have been a jarring move to take pages directly from the USA’s book, to support development of an automobile centre of production in the Soviet Union, Khruschev enlisted the help of Italy’s trusted PCI (Communist Party of Italy)’s leader, Luigi Longo. The chosen city in the Samara region of Western Russia, was a small settlement of barely a couple of thousand inhabitants on the Volga river, Stavropol-na-Volge. With Longo’s support, FIAT factory workers, engineers, and technicians were sent over from Turin to support with training up Soviet counterparts. In 1966, the town was to be renamed Togliatti, or Tolyatti, after Palmiro Togliatti, Il migliore, the great Italian Communist leader who had died a couple of years previously.

The starting point of the urbanisation project was a hydroelectric dam and power plant, and a workers’ district (rayon) was constructed to house the construction workers. Once this was completed, work started to construct the automobile plant AvtoVAZ, the national automotive company which is still the main production plant for Lada cars. Although, with the Russian economy sinking under international sanctions, it is fairly likely that this won’t be much longer. A second rayon was constructed (Komsomol and Tsentralnyy respectively) to house workers. Foreign experts were enlisted mostly from Italy and Germany, and FIAT was in charge of the entire project. In 1967, a housing district around the new factory site was rapidly completed and still stands today (Avtozavodskyy rayon, or the auto-factory district). This was so large and ambitious that it was originally planned as a new town in its own right, and is still celebrated as the most ambitious urban planning project in the entire history of the USSR.

Avtozavodsky rayon – the car factory workers’ living district and seen by many in the USSR as a model Soviet town. Notice the well-spaced blocks of housing interspersed with ample green space and sporting facilities.

What (if anything) can we learn from Soviet experimental urban planning? Two Italian academic urbanists, sociologists and researchers, Michele Cera and Guido Sechi both from Bari undertook an incredible project to document the story of Tolyatti, its history and the aftermath of the demise of AvtoVAZ following the fall of the USSR.

One of the most striking changes after the transition to capitalism was surely the loss of public spaces. In the Microrayon, the workers’ districts, there were spaces for workers to socialise and relax while women could share the burden of domestic labour. There were chess clubs and cultural centres (dry ones as well as ones with bars) for both men and women. Shared kitchens where communal meals would be served were also a feature of the standard microrayon.

Similar things existed in the West of course. L explained to me the system of Italian cultural associations, Arci, which were founded by the Italian Communist Party in Florence and are nowadays linked to the main Italian Trade Unions and is the biggest non-profit organisation not linked to the Catholic Church. In the UK, Working Men’s Clubs were, and to an extent still are, ubiquitous and formed a similar function. In the UK however, they were largely spaces for men to gather and drink outside of work, while women would be expected to stay at home and tend to domestic duties.

One of the most striking changes after the transition to capitalism was surely the loss of public spaces. In the Microrayon, the workers’ districts, there were spaces for workers to socialise and relax while women could share the burden of domestic labour. There were chess clubs and cultural centres (dry ones as well as ones with bars) for both men and women. Shared kitchens where communal meals would be served were also a feature of the standard microrayon.

Cera & Sechi, pp.62-63. Playing chess in the Microrayon

Similar things existed in the West of course. L explained to me the system of Italian cultural associations, Arci, which were founded by the Italian Communist Party in Florence and are nowadays linked to the main Italian Trade Unions and is the biggest non-profit organisation not linked to the Catholic Church. In the UK, Working Men’s Clubs were, and to an extent still are, ubiquitous and formed a similar function. In the UK however, they were largely spaces for men to gather and drink outside of work, while women would be expected to stay at home and tend to domestic duties.

Nowadays, the Working Men’s Clubs are mostly used by old men who have been retired (or unemployed after the 1980s never to find work again) for decades and have lost their primary function.

In capitalist system there is a lack of public space to meet for the purpose of socialising. We do famously have pubs, or public houses in the UK, but they are increasingly alienating places, riddled with class conflict and increasingly prohibitively expensive for many who would traditionally fall under the banner of working-class. Moreover, they are completely exclusionary for those who do not drink alcohol.

In general, imaginative urban planning system that afforded places to socialise and organise domestic work has long since disappeared. In the UK, urban planning has traditionally felt fearful and defensive, even in the heyday of social democracy in the 1960s. There has always been the sense that workers cannot fully be trusted not to conspire against the ruling classes. Thus, collective space has always been limited and the private sphere and nuclear family has always been emphasised over everything else. The Garden City idea itself was borne out of the ruling class’ fear of the Bolshevism sweeping Europe: give them a garden and a decent place to live and they won’t revolt. Most key to this, make sure they cannot fraternise with each other easily. An Englishman’s home is his castle. We have long been a nation of tiny fortresses.

I think the attitude of our ruling elite has been extremely detrimental and our class system is nothing short of devastating. Our lonely, ageing, alienated society is riddled with social problems that are direct consequences of poor political choices, lack of imagination and understanding of public good, and short-term and uninformed decisions over the past decades is a manifestation of that.

The birth and death of company towns

Mono-industrial towns are clearly a bad idea and the examples around the world of failures following deindustrialisation are far, far too many. Detroit is not unique, for example, in basing almost its entire economy around a handful of companies (General Motors, Ford, Chrysler) in one particular industry. The demise of motor cities in the Anglo-American world (Coventry and Detroit have both seen better days, to put it mildly) are a perfect illustration of what a fragile economic model this is and we should be frantically taking notes as the imperative to decarbonise economies becomes ever more pressing.

The devastation wrought by the Anglo-American model deindustrialisation more broadly has been so deep and so violent that it has been, in the crudest possible way, the root cause of the destabilisation the entire political systems of the Anglo-American world and weakened their democracies. Beyond the Anglo-American world, the marks of mono-industry are rampant across the former Soviet Union, too. Tolyatti is one example but there are countless other shipbuilding, mining, and timber towns that face precisely the same causes of misery as their counterparts in the west. Lack of work leading to breakdown of families, widespread substance misuse, mental health issues, and all of the other symptoms stemming from hopelessness, poverty, and lack of meaning and social coherence and relevance in a brutal world.

From this, there are a few messy questions emerging in my brain to be more clearly defined at a later date. Nobody knows where we are going as a species and to be honest, I don’t see an easy route out of the corner our civilisation is backed into (as usual, all roads lead back to the Mark Fisher thesis then).

1. Are we going backwards, regressing? Did we reach the peak of civilisation in the Global north in the 1960s? We hadn’t yet burned the planet (industrialising countries today cannot boom in prosperity in the environmentally damaged planet and broken economies they cannot inherit) and there was a general understand that society should be collective and there was a broad political agreement and understanding of acting in the public good. Now both the planet and any chance of collective social forms have been hollowed and burned.

2.What extreme event will it take to make things better? Will a transition to a decarbonised economy afford is a new way of organising our lives? Having lived through a global pandemic where there was a lot of talk around glimpses of a better world, but most of that has not materialised and we’ve gone back to precisely how things were before, just sadder, crueller, more brutal and massively destabilised. If something as huge as a global pandemic does not provide an impetus to change, then what will it take? And in a changed world, how do we ensure that the Global North and the Global South benefit equally? If lives in the Global North are organised around utopian ideals but the Global South are still working in dangerous factories producing our goods for starvation wages and near-bonded labour, then is that really freedom?

3. How will we organise and fair, social condensed and decarbonised economy? Will we ever be able to organise society around coherent collective principles again? What would be the catalyst? Organising lives around economic productivity cannot easily be translated to our technologically advanced world. It also begs questions around gender roles – what worked in a heteronormative world perhaps cannot be easily translated today. The nature of the work at the centre of collectively organised societies around economic principles also left much to be desired in terms of public health. Or will we continue to fragment, drift apart in jobs that actually have very little function beyond upholding the principles of late capitalist society.

The Left in the US are looking to Detroit to show us a glimpse of what something better might look like – sure, there are many grassroots initiatives and social organisation to try to build something from the ashes of wrecked capital. However, for me, without real robust structures in place to support real and widespread change, while they are fantastic to see and it’s great that something good is happening, for me it’s not enough. There are hundreds of thousands of Detroits across the world now, and there will be more before this year is out. The problems are structural. While Detroit was indeed an extreme example, it exists on a spectrum.

Personally, I’m more on the Mark Fisher side of things and I cannot imagine a full-scale radical overhaul of economic and social organisation and new logics and hegemony without going through a major catastrophe first (from which we might not even come out the other end as a species intact) but especially during these grim days it’s healthy to dream of better things.

EUR and the Fascist Colosseum

Palace of Italian Civilisation (c) Marianne Kell, 2022

A second and final entry on Rome before we move on to other things. I might squeeze one out at a later date on Italian urban planning more generally, but for now I think this is enough.

Hipster boyfriend long had a quest in mind to track down the abbey which produces the only Italian trappiste beer. He mentioned it a few years back, and we found it online, via a webshop called Holy Art selling among other things priest robes and statues of Mary. We dabbled with the idea of placing an order, but the shipping costs were extortionate, and we felt it would be overly decadent to have them ship from Italy a few bottles of beer since we can easily buy perfectly good Belgian or English trappistes within a 3 mile radius of our house.

When we decided that we must go to Rome, it dawned on us that we could visit the abbey, Tre Fontane, and buy the beer from their shop to bring home. Luckily for us, Tre Fontane is well-connected to Rome city and located close to the blue metro line (Linea B). To get there, we simply had to jump on the metro at Termini and then pass through the EUR district on foot.

We got off the metro at EUR Fermi, the third of the three EUR metro stops (EUR Palasport and EUR Magliana the other two). It was a fairly long walk around administrative buildings, post office and bank headquarters that seem to characterise EUR Fermi, around a somewhat creepy near-deserted funfair, uphill through a surprisingly luscious and verdant park (given it was wedged between dual carriageways) and then back down toward the road. We crossed the busy dual carriageway, and then noticed a brown sign directing us to Tre Fontane behind a high wall.  The moment we entered the gates, we found a long, tree-lined avenue leading to the abbey. Although the dual carriageway was right alongside us, the high stone wall and the trees prove surprisingly effective at blocking out traffic noise and it felt strangely still and quiet.

Tre Fontane abbey, Rome. (c) Marianne Kell, 2022

We entered the abbey grounds and the feeling of calm and tranquillity prevailed. The monastery consisted quite simply of a church and crypt, a chapel, and not one but two shops (clearly these monks have their house in order) arranged around a courtyard. Inside one of the shops was a room for chocolate tasting, as well as a small café-bakery and an impressively stocked bar. We succeeded in buying our trappistes, a eucalyptus-flavoured one and a selection of others. After debating whether or not to buy chocolate too (we decided against it as it was already hot outside and we didn’t fancy carrying a dripping bag of melted chocolate around), we boxed up our haul of trappistes and left the calm little oasis to head back up the hill to EUR.

What is EUR?

The architecture of EUR is quite striking, I have to say. It feels imposing, somewhat Orwellian (to use a stereotypically British adjective) and I would imagine it would be the perfect backdrop for a re-make of the film adaptation of 1984.

EUR itself is a rather odd suburb of Rome city. The acronymn EUR stands for Esposizione Universale Roma, and its construction was originally intended for a special Expo in 1940 (in the same vein as the World Expos still taking place now, such as Dubai Expo 2020 and Milan Expo 2015). Obviously, as Italy entered World War II in 1942, this did not turn out as planned and the exhibition never took place.

The concept of the suburb was concocted by Mussolini to celebrate 20 years of fascism. The suburb itself is the biggest example of urban planning and architecture from the fascist period in Italy ,and it is as austere and pompous as one might expect from a projection of fascist vision. The style is highly rationalist, all straight lines, colonnades, marble, and travertine cladding and the idea underpinning the design was to heavily draw upon classical Roman city planning.  Piazza Guglielmo Marconi for example is centred around an obelisk typical of the Roman ones you find dotted around the squares of Rome historical city centre. The chief architect and urban planner for EUR was Marcello Piacentini, the official architect of the fascist regime in the typical stripped-down neoclassical style which was also prevalent in Nazi Germany.

Palace of Italian Civilisation, (c) Marianne Kell, 2022

The Palace of Italian Civilisation (pictured above), or Squared Colosseum (or as L called it, the Fascist Colosseum) is the marble centrepiece of the district and looks like a mash-up of Roman temples and various administrative buildings from the Roman age. Designed by three architects of the fascist era, Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto La Padula, and Mario Romano, it was supposed to represent Italian history from Roman times and, in true fascist style, connecting this with the superiority of the Italian race. L explained that the inscription at the top was taken from a speech by Mussolini, and referred to Italy as a nation of thinkers, poets, artists, scientists, heroes, and so on. The sculptures on podiums around the structure itself represent these qualities, cared from Carrara marble.

The actual Roman colosseum. (c) Marianne Kell, 2022

Knowing very little about the period of fascism in Italy beyond the basics, I was unsure whether Mussolini drew upon myths of origin as the Nazi Party used as the basis of their disgusting and scary race laws. L explained that there was a weird picking-and-choosing of elements drawn from Roman history, and weaving in elements of Roman culture to justify or strengthen their horrible fascist beliefs. The symbolism and iconography around EUR was in many ways a reflection of this.

The Palace of Civilisation itself I found horrifying and fascinating in equal measure. It was so unbelievably stark, placed atop a hill overlooking the entire district. The white marble juxtaposes sharply with the green treelined avenues and parks dotted around EUR, which despite the austere rationalist architecture, leaves a weirdly pleasant feeling of coolness and airiness in a city that gets extraordinarily hot and humid in summer.

EUR district. Marie Ginette Amirault at Unsplash

EURPalas was also architecturally intriguing. The Palasport is a stadium that was completed later, in 1960 for the Rome Olympics. It has a pleasingly 1960s style aesthetic, spaceship-like and a bit Buckminster Fuller-esque. Although it underwent major renovations in the early 2000s and is nowadays still used as a basketball arena and concert venue, it still retains the typical 1960s form. The artificial lake, also constructed for the 1960 Olympics, is still intact.

In general, the EUR district was a surprising contrast to the historical city centre of Rome. We went there on a Thursday morning, and the area was extremely quiet so we had plenty of time and space to wander around the district. Definitely worth doing, if only to enjoy the contrast with the rest of the city which is absolutely stuffed full of ancient Roman ruins.

Municipal Dreams (Review, part 2)

Reading the book was a genuine pleasure and a fully absorbing experience, not least due to Boughton’s engaging style and the well-structured approach which strikes the perfect balance between empirics, anecdotal evidence, and historical account. Throughout the journey from Victorian filth to Grenfell, I was struck by six key observations:

1. The paternalistic approach to organising society.
Despite noble origins, from the inception of council housing in Britain to the current prevailing neo-Victorian attitudes of what the working class need to do to improve their living conditions in the face of such things as economic stagnation, lack of significant government spending for the best part of half a century, a shrinking economy, 30 years of flat-lining wages, out-of-control house prices and lack of any regulation in the private rental market leading to high rents and poor quality, a top-down approach from the political establishment has pervaded. Often, without having done any background work to engage with those who will live in the homes to identify their real needs, even the most well-meaning ideological designs have back-fired spectacularly.


For example, the Garden City movement and New Towns of the 1950s were designed to give the working classes access to green spaces and reduced urban density which was considered to promise a healthier way of live. The work of Frederick Gibberd, the master planner of the new town Harlow, in Essex, was informed by the idea that “[…] English urbanism prefers segregation of home and work, which enjoys open-air exercise, which has an innate love of nature” (p.82). However, had Gibberd and other master planners and chief city architects consulted with the prospective housing tenants, they would have discovered that in the new two-storey dwellings with large green spaces between, the new inhabitants “instead of feeling themselves secure within an environment devoted to their convenience and pleasure, find themselves marooned in a desert of grass verges and concrete roadways.” (p.83).

Although today following the Localism Act 2011, Section 122 introduces a legal requirement to consult with local communities before submitting planning applications for specific developments, this comes with its own set of failings and inadequacies. Consultation is a totally different beast to co-design, and there are ways and means to dilute the consultation process. While introducing an act to include communities in decision-making, it falls way short of the mark in terms of designing cities to meet the real needs of communities, not developers or landowners.

2. Does it need to be so complicated?
The management of supply, use, and distribution of social housing is a complex undertaking regardless of parliamentary system, local context, or political ideology. Social housing programmes in the UK were as complex to manage as successful social housing programmes in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and 1960s, 1980s Vienna or the Million Project in Sweden of the 1965-74.

However, from the 1980s onwards the legal structure for managing social housing in the UK became far more complex than anything ever seen before elsewhere in Europe. For all the neoliberal ideology of “rolling back the state,” governance structures and creating clear lines of responsibility for specific matters became far more complex than that of the various state-managed institutions and bodies.  

While the Right to Buy scheme was expanded in 1980, councils and local authorities faced harsh restrictions on their powers to build new social housing. It took only 3 years for this to have an impact, and between 1980 to 1983 the volume of social housing built in the UK had halved. Meanwhile, powers that previously belonged solely to local authorities to manage the pipeline of social housing as well as existing stock were transferred to a myriad of housing associations and Arms’ Length Management Organisations (ALMOs), backed up by private finance rather than state budget. This was codified in the 1988 Housing Act.

The introduction of new layers of governance and lack of uniformity across the country created a diffuse network and fragmented landscape. This system of complex interplay between state and private sector in a non-uniform way, often through incredibly dense networks, makes it almost impossible to discern interrelations between different actors.

Creating complexity in this way is a means to spread out accountability and makes it impossible to pinpoint blame for any failures on one specific actors. The Grenfell fiasco is a living example of how such a fragmented landscape can lead to tragedy without any real political consequences.



3. The public and private sphere and how space is conceptualised
The most striking element of social housing in Britain compared with the European mainland is how quickly urban planners, architects, city councillors and others with decision-making powers over housing jumped on the vision of the ideal dwelling as a private space secluded from others. Building vertically would create compact housing arrangements with greater possibility of using shared spaces and building communities and the potential for spaces of solidarity. Instead, however, British urban designers preferred cottage estates with one or two-storey houses or low-rise blocks, each with private gardens.

Whether this is a reaction to the horror and misery of the slums which were part and parcel of British industrial cities until the mass slum clearances of the 1930s remains to be seen. Ensuring that space is divided up into private sections comes with a price. The cottage estates and single-family semi-detached houses were unaffordable for many working-class families, and the sprawling nature of building dwellings in this way meant that quantities were limited due to spatial factors. Therefore, the more affluent working classes moved out to the suburbs, while the poorer remained in inner city areas creating a class-based social segregation.

4. The role of youth in shaping modern London.
The experimental and sociologically-minded period of re-building Britain in the mid 20th century was driven by proponents of an incredibly tender age, often recently graduated from design schools. From the perspective of someone aged 35 flailing around in a career that has not really started yet after a number of false starts and interludes of further education, this is a fascinating discovery. Today, even the greased wheels of nepotism and the most connected individual is still not trusted to do much more than make coffee and take charge of the proverbial photocopying until at least age 30. Countless internships, paid and unpaid, stints overseas getting “international experience,” and various post-graduate career development moves are part and parcel of those born in the 1980s onwards. While this may sound a development in the right direction, a meritocratic approach based on experience and “earning your stripes”, it should of course be heavily caveated. The playing field today is certainly not level: those with social and economic capital will advance up the career ladder further and quicker than those starting at the very bottom.

In 1960s Camden, the Whittington Estate was conceptualised and planned by Peter Tábori, at the time a student in his mid-twenties at Regent Street Polytechnic. The estate, which was his final-year project, was carefully designed to meet the needs of its inhabitants: play areas for children, pedestrian decks, areas to meet with neighbours, estate shopping centres. It was criticised at the time for being too ideological, which reflected not so much on the design of the estate itself but a social criticism of the estate as a concept (p.61).

In the London Borough of Camden of the 1960s a full third of the Labour council were under 40 years old (p 59). It also had a young team of urban planners and designers under Borough Architect Sydney Cook. One of his team, Neave Brown, was commissioned in 1969 to design the Alexandra Road Estate aged just 40 years old.

South of the river, the story was similar. The London Borough of Lambeth’s Chief Architect, Ted Hollamby, was just 40 when he was appointed Chief Architect of the London Borough of Hammersmith and a few years later, moved to the equivalent role in Lambeth. By his mid-30s, he had already delivered the Brandon Estate, once the tallest point in the capital (p. 155).

London Borough of Southwark’s Dawson’s Heights, East Dulwich, was designed by Kate Macintosh in 1972, when she was just 26 years old (p.147). The imposing double-ziggurat style structure, following a few modifications throughout the years to improve safety measures according to various ideologies and zeitgeists, still stands today and is considered to be a fine structure when compared with other large-scale social housing built around the same time.

On the one hand, it could be easy to dismiss some of the less successful examples of mass social housing projects, poorly designed system-builds and failed urban design initiatives developed in the post-war period by young architects as examples of inexperience and the naivety of youth. At the same time, however, perhaps the youthfulness brought an ideological breath of fresh air in a time of rapid social change. The perspectives of middle-class, middle-aged Oxbridge educated, white, male architects and planners perhaps do not always reflect the needs of wider society. Does this sound familiar?

5. The role of progressive politics in shaping modern London.
There is (or was, I think it was shattered once and for all following the 2019 general election) a misconception in the UK that northern areas vote red and the south votes blue. This completely overlooks the role and legacy of radical politics and the labour movement in London. While it is assumed that Newcastle, or Liverpool, or Manchester will remain steadfastly Labour, London rarely comes to mind in the national imaginary as the country’s bastion of red. However successive general and local election results from Tower Hamlets, Camden, Islington, Lewisham, Newham and other inner London boroughs show a long line of unbroken red.

In the 1950s and 1960s, one could find card-carrying communists such as Ted Hollamby having decision-making authority in significant positions of power over the urban environment. This is unthinkable today: recall the viciousness with which Corbyn was treated by the media and his own party alike, and the purge of the left from the Labour party continues to advance under Starmer’s watch.

In 2021, unless you have the interests of capital at heart, it’s very difficult to get close to the levers of power. Boughton brings us a glimpse of the past to show that it was not always thus, and this brings a glimmer of hope for the future as well.  

6. The human cost of gentrification.
The term gentrification, coined by Ruth Glass in her 1964 work London: Aspects of change is applied to the process of transformation of a poor neighbourhood in cities by the process of middle- and upper-middle income groups buying properties in such neighbourhoods and upgrading them.

Today, the term is no longer confined the realms of urban sociology and is widely used and understood across a broad spectrum. However, the modern usage has somewhat diluted the violence with which the gentrification (and its ugly sister regeneration) process takes place: it often conjures up images of independent eateries and craft beer micropubs in newly vibrant neighbourhoods that were once stagnant. It glosses over the displacement process in practical terms: unable to meet rising rents, families or elderly residents are often forced out from the place they call home, where they are part of networks that has often formed over years and even decades.

These connections and networks, the fragile social fabric that provide the building blocks of a community, are destroyed practically overnight by the gentrification process. Boughton points to the Hendon Waterside scheme in North London (p. 275), where secure council housing tenants from the West Hendon estate have been “decanted” to alternative tower blocks elsewhere. Neighbours and friends have been forcibly moved away from each other, to a new block of inferior quality to the tenants’ original homes. Leaseholders have been given compensation that does not match the cost of renting in the area in today’s rental rates. Many of the original inhabitants of the estate have simply moved away, worn out by the physical and emotional upheaval of the process.

A similar story is outlined in other cases all over London: Carpenter’s Estate in Newham, West Kensington and Gibbs Green Estates in Hammersmith, the New Era Estate in Hoxton, and Northwold Estate in Hackney for example. While London is the site of conflict for most of the displacement processes, due to a combination of population growth and the value of land a property, other cities in the UK are not immune. Most recently, Manchester is in the throes of a massive property boom which has displaced thousands of the city’s poorest.

While these examples all have their own specific features and character, they all have one thing in common: tenants, once supported by the state, are now being aggressively pushed aside to create space for private companies to extract more rent and increase their capital. Through these case studies, Boughton illustrates clearly how the gentrification process, and the housing crisis more generally, is down to a political choice rather than an economic necessity. Final chapter brings us to Grenfell, and starkly brings together everything that has failed in the – hackneyed though this phrase is – neoliberal political project (I cringe now as I write this) in the UK over the past 30 years. The mass privatisation of national assets since the late 1970s onwards has ensured accountability and responsibilities are diffuse and intangible. Most chillingly has been the total absence of redistributed wealth and the clear focus on leveraging profit for a tiny minority over absolutely everything else, including – and especially, human lives.

Boughton shows us that good-quality housing as a social good was an obvious and rational pursuit at the dawn of the first council estate in 1900. Tracing the journey through a socialist-led national effort to raise the standard of living to today, where making humane and socially-oriented choices is no longer seen as a viable option by our increasingly flailing political system. A radical overhaul is once again required to solve the housing crisis in any meaningful way and this requires levelling the playing field in all aspects of society, not only housing.

Happy International Women’s Day!

Photo credit: “Sotsgorod: Cities for Utopia” (Icarus films, 1995)

IWD 2022: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky

I haven’t updated this thing for a while and judging by the visitor stats, nobody reads it anyway. It’s mostly a chronicle for my own sake at the moment. The world is dark and monstrous and, selfishly, I need an outlet.

However, the aim of this journal is not political analysis; there are several thousand million journals and blogs and substacks etc (one of these days I will gather and share a reading list) out there that are far more insightful than I could ever be. I will bend this rule a little bit in the coming days or weeks or months (unavoidable in the present climate), but I will keep the analysis light as the last thing the world needs is one more hot take from a comfortable Brit looking on from the computer screen as the horror unfolds. Nevertheless, I will aim to keep any political chat relevant to the task at hand: trying to make sense of the urban environment around us.

I have a couple of dry book-review-y/recommendation-y type entries stacked up, but since it is International Women’s Day today I will write a little homage to a good international woman:  committed communist, feminist designer, and architect-activist Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky.

Recently I watched the film Sotsgorod: Cities for Utopia which merits its own entry. In a nutshell, it details a group of architects (known as the “May Brigade” led by the Dutch architect Ernst May) from the West – mainly Netherlands, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, who went to the Soviet Union to help deliver panellised housing to create planned socialist cities in Magnitogorsk,Siberia during the USSR building programme in 1920s and 1930s. One of these architects was Schütte-Lihotzky.

Schütte-Lihotzky was the first female student at the University of the Applied Arts in her hometown, Vienna, and one of the first female architects in Europe. She studied under Oskar Strnad, who was extremely influential in the mass social housing projects in Vienna (sozialer Wohnbau). Vienna has long been an object of interest for planners, urban designers, and architects in terms of social housing (and this also warrants an entry in its own right).

In 1926, she was commissioned by the City of Frankfurt to support an effort to resolve the city’s acute housing crisis led by the architect and city planner Ernst May. Schütte-Lihotzky worked on the New Frankfurt project, bringing her humanitarian values to housing to create a space that was affordable, comfortable, and stylish.

Her work on the New Frankfurt project gave rise the Frankfurt kitchen in 1926 (insert cap from film clip) based on the principle of a small kitchen to maximise a housewife’s efficiency and reduce the amount of time spent on unpaid domestic labour. The Frankfurt kitchen model is extremely common in the mass-built social housing prevalent across mainland Europe.

Photo: “Sotsgorod: Cities for Utopia” (Icarus films, 1995)

Beyond her design activities, she remained a committed communist until her death in 2000. She became a member of the Austrian Community Party (KPÖ) in 1939 where she worked with the Austrian Communist resistance. She was caught by the Gestapo in Istanbul in 1941, and imprisoned by 15 years in Bavaria. She was liberated by US troops at the end of the Second World War, upon which she no longer wished to return to Austria immediately. She worked in Bulgaria for a few years before returning to Vienna, although her communist views prevented her from receiving any major public commissions in Austria.

To finish up, here is an excerpt from Schütte-Lihotzky’s work “Why I became an architect,” published by Juliet Kinchin in West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring-Summer 2011), pp. 86-96:

“What were the theoretical foundations and ideals that lay behind the Frankfurt
Kitchen that led to its being reproduced in the thousands? For me there were
two motives that led to the creation of the Frankfurt Kitchen. The first was
the recognition that in the foreseeable future women would have proper paid
employment, and would not solely be expected to be on hand to wait upon their
husbands. I was convinced that women’s struggle for economic independence
and personal development meant that the rationalization of housework was an
absolute necessity. Foremost in my mind when working on housing projects was
the idea that the design and, above all, the layout could save work. . . . Second,
I felt the Frankfurt Kitchen—a design so connected to the architectural fabric
and to the planning and built-in features of rooms—was only the very first
step toward developing a new way of living and at the same time a new kind
of housing construction.”

Dwellings, units, homes, houses, and investments.

Block of nine houses advertised as an investment opportunity and a dark kitchen. Durham Road, Gateshead, 2020. Photo credit: Marianne Kell.

Anyone who has lived and/or worked in an environment dominated by British people cannot fail to have noticed the national obsession with property. By this I do not refer to housing, nor architecture and physical form. To the average Brit, property is considered an asset with an emphasis on ownership and increasing value. We are a nation of wannabe estate agents and small-time real estate developers. The specific nature with which property is discussed among friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and strangers using the same casual tone with which one might discuss the weather, or the same earnestness as applied to the post-mortem of a Premier League football match, demonstrates the special place property holds in the national psyche. To Brits, property ownership is a sport. To inhabitants of other countries where the relationship between property, land, and society isn’t so perverted, this attitude is completely alien.


There are indeed active and lively resistance movements in Germany over rent controls, debates in Barcelona and other cities with a tourism-oriented economy on the Airbnb-ification of their neighbourhoods, discussions in Stockholm and other Scandinavian cities over the future of collective rent bargaining and gaining secure tenancies in the face of chronic housing shortages, and we all see widespread social displacement from increasingly unaffordable city living across in the face of a yawning inequality gap and stagnating economies in major cities of both the global north and south. While both the spectrum and root causes of these struggles are broad, they have one thing in common: all depart from the definition of housing as home, as a place to live.

In the Anglo world, housing is viewed from a different angle. Houses here are first and foremost treated as investments. Cue the continual cycle of modifications to increase property value: conservatories, extensions, loft conversions, patios, restorations, and so it goes. Once on the “property ladder” there is the never-ending quest to move up to the next rung. Buy small, extend, increase value, sell, upsize and upscale. Or make a sideways step by using the proceeds to build tiny empires: buy even more properties you can upsize, and upscale while extracting rent, to eventual sell and the cycle continues.

In the UK specifically, housing is so deeply embedded within the class system that I would argue that a house, or dwelling (in technocratic planner-speak), is first and foremost a social status signifier. Tower blocks are historically the domain, literally, of the working classes (side note: although in London this has shifted considerably since the 1980s). The middle-class ideal of the single or two-storey house in the suburbs with a private garden has withstood the test of time. For the upper-middle, gated communities and private estates continue to exist, segregating new and old money from the lower classes. The real old money continues to own land, unhindered since the last time this island was invaded in 1066.

Within each social class, there is even more granularity in the attitudes towards housing. The British middle class has a disconcerting talent for knowing exactly what each postcode means in relation not only to house prices and whether they are likely to increase significantly (an “investment opportunity” the aspiring British landlord will purr), but also the types of people who live there. This extends not only to which ethnic group, but also career, age demographic, levels of education, and even whether more people in the area were privately educated or attended state school. While the US is similarly configured, although more markedly along racial lines, this level of social segregation is unheard of elsewhere in Europe.

This attitude to housing is problematic, to say the least. If housing is considered an investment opportunity in a competitive market, what happens to those people who fail to step into the housing ladder? Here, the situation becomes complicated.

Previously, the gap was filled by council housing which was rented at affordable rates in relation to wages. In 1980, Thatcher introduced the Housing Act which saw a turbo-charged Right to Buy scheme. This saw a mass-scale transfer of ownership of council housing from the state to private hands where 500,000 council homes were sold off between 1980 and 1985. Today the renting classes continue to suffer the consequence of this action, while the rentiers of the world have increased their riches extraordinarily. There is an acute shortage of affordable housing, which pushes people into the unregulated private rental sector. High rents prevent workers on stagnant salaries from saving up a deposit required for securing a mortgage. Low deposits for first time buyers is no good either, as the monthly re-payments are often higher still than the already uncontrolled rents on the private market.

In the deregulated market of the 1980s and 1990s, mortgages were easier than ever before to obtain. This, coupled with the possibility of buying heavily discounted Council housing, created the perfect conditions for an expanding inequality gap to exacerbate the difference between those who own property and those who do not. Those who purchased their Council homes in the 1980s at heavily discounted rates were then able to sell them off at enormously inflated values a decade later. The proceeds with which were then able to either upsize significantly or purchase additional houses for the purpose of leverages rents on the private market. The expansion of Rent to Buy in 1996 formalised this structure. Since then, the housing market has become increasingly lopsided and the structural crisis is becoming increasingly entrenched. Without radical state intervention, the situation is unlikely to be rectified anytime soon.

Consequently, British society is very much organised into two groups: those who own property, and those who do not. Increasingly, those who own property own not just a roof over their heads but multiple properties that are rented out on the private market. Often, this alone can provide a household income – there’s no need to work a 9-5 job for an employer. The professional landlord now makes more money than would be possible working in a regular salaried profession, thanks to a combination of decades of wage stagnation, an affordable housing shortage and spiralling property prices.

Without drawing any further conclusions or speculations on what must, could, or should be done to resolve this flaming hot issue, this brings me to the main point of this blog: the understanding that housing, property, and land ownership in the Anglo-American world is at the very core of our political, social, and economic system. Our access to and relationship with property dictates our social values, who we are most likely to vote for, where we are likely to live, what our employment prospects might be. Our entire political system, at its heart, is based around the nature of property ownership: do we protect the interests of rentiers, or renters? Should housing be treated as a right whereby everyone should be granted access to a roof over their head, or as an asset from which to extract profit?

Understanding attitudes to social housing in the UK provides a picture of the political and social conditions and the likely trajectory in the decade to come. And we better strap ourselves in – it’s going to be a hell of a ride.