Rising East Online

‘Sustainability’ suspends debate

James Stevens

When Town Planning by Thomas Sharp was published by Pelican in 1940 it sold over a quarter of a million copies, something unprecedented in planning literature before and since. Even or perhaps especially in the midst of war, it demonstrated at once a public appetite for discussing the principles of land-use and town design, and a desire to ‘build a better Britain’ with which the many, not just a few, felt fully engaged. The dank, overcrowded slums would be swept away and new towns constructed in the countryside. European high-modernism collided with English arcadianism: Corbusian-style skyscrapers in the park for the teeming metropolitan masses; Ebenezer Howard’s ‘garden-cities’ for bombed-out East End workers; and all such plans up for discussion.

The possibility of radically changing the physical landscape of Britain captured the public’s imagination. Servicemen overseas read and discussed Sharp’s ideas and air-raid weary civilians visited the exhibitions organised by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) to catch a glimpse of the shape of things to come. Weekly meetings organised by the TCPA were regularly attended by members of the public keen to debate the ideals and objectives of post-war reconstruction. After the Second World War, property development rights were nationalised. Permission to develop land was now determined by the state. Control over development was justified as serving the ‘public interest’, a justification which reflected the consensus for reconstruction in a planned, egalitarian and democratically accountable manner.

Today, by contrast, there seems little opportunity for debate about the

future of land policies in Britain. There has, for example, been no real attempt to engage the public in a national debate to re-define what constitutes the public interest: who benefits from the current system and who loses.

Planners traditionally have justified their actions on the basis of shared public values. The legitimacy and prestige of the profession demands this. But closer inspection reveals that these values have remained largely the same since they were expressed in the 1940s, which in turn suggests they must now be disconnected from half-a-century of social change: no wonder there is a gap between planners and people.

That there was a debate in the 1940s about the public interest, does not mean that sectional interests were not presented in the debate in the name of the common good: that’s politics. Thus the public interest came to be defined as protection of the countryside for agricultural production and the use of green belts to contain urban expansion (and thereby the urban masses). In reality these policies protected the interests of the elite: the rural lobby, politicians anxious to maintain the demographic complexion of their constituencies, and an intelligentsia with a horror of suburbia.

Despite the best efforts of some, such as Peter Hall and Eric Reade, to expose the more inegalitarian consequences of our post-war planning policies, the planning profession proved adept at side-stepping this central discrepancy – that it materially benefits certain privileged groups in society over others. It has looked for ways to reinvigorate the concept of public interest while safeguarding the privileges of the elite. Sustainability is the most recent weapon in the planner’s ideological armoury. Talk to any planner today and s/he will tell you that the containment of urban sprawl is still necessary in pursuit of environmental or ‘sustainable development’ objectives, or to maintain ‘sustainable communities’.

For a public increasingly dependent upon investment in property in the face of disappearing pension provision and falling wages, one might think that the time was right for a robust debate about the purposes and consequences of planning. But despite endless talk about participation and the need to engage the public, the profession continues to avoid subjecting planning to any rigorous external critique. They see no need. Sustainability makes common sense. Everyone wants to protect the countryside from urban sprawl, surely? All right thinking people feel this way. Just like their forebears, they despise the aspirations of the lower middle classes to acquire their own homes, and to live in spacious suburbia. They recoil from such demonstrations of petit bourgeois narrow mindedness. Instead ‘sustainable community’ is promoted as an unquestionable ideal, thereby removing the possibility of debate and making ‘consultation’ necessarily hollow.

When planners talk about the need for participation, what they really have in mind is not a debate at national level about who benefits from planning, but consultation with myriad, small community groups over what are essentially landscaping issues: the style of litter bin; where to put the community centre; which bits should be paid for by private investment and which from the public purse. Planners increasingly adjudicate between different community groups, thereby defining the parameters of the debate, and deciding what is permissible.

If we acquiesce to the moral force of sustainability, we accept that certain questions are placed off-limits. No chance of spacious homes, car-parking or gardens, and only limited choice over where you live. The ‘experts’ have judged all these things environmentally unsustainable. Hardly surprising, then, if most people do not participate: they can tell that the limited range of outcomes is predetermined.

What might I define as being in the public interest today? Certainly nothing to do with sustainability. It’s more likely something to do with the provision of well designed housing, in attractive, well-planned settlements. But hold on, it’s not down to me; it’s for the public to decide.

James Stevens works for English Heritage and is training to be a planner.

Return to top

---

© 2004·06