An agenda for planning reform

In the forthcoming book The Future of Planning: beyond growth dependence I set out, in the final chapter, an agenda for reform of the planning system to support more community-based approaches. There are three areas where change is urgently needed if alternatives to growth-dependent planning are to become a real possibility in the localities where this is needed. The first reform is change to planning guidance, which has such an influence on local planning practice. The argument here is that just sustainability needs to be embedded in such guidance. The second set of reforms focus around the need for new planning tools. As well as specific proposed changes to planning regulation and new fiscal measures, the role of landownership as a planning tool needs to be readdressed. This has been a major lacuna in UK planning, particularly as compared to many other European countries. And thirdly, new forms of community engagement needs to be put into practice. This agenda is set ou fully in the book but also summarised in a UCL Public Policy Briefing available at: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/public-policy/public_policy_publications/Rydin_Policy_Briefing_September_2013.pdf

Lecture invitation 24th October at UCL

Sorry for blog silence but back from holidays and recovered form the chaos of the start of term. 

For those in London, you are cordially invited to a Public Lecture that I will be giving at UCL on Thursday 24th October from 17.30 - 19.00 with a wine reception afterwards. The location is the Gustav Tuck Lecture Theatre, Wilkins Building, UCL, London WC1E 6BT and you can book a ticket on Eventbrite at:

http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/planning/centenary-news-events-repository/centenary-lecture-yvonne-rydin

The topic will be The Future of Planning and I will be discussing some of the key themes of the new book as well as putting them in the context of current debates in planning theory. I look forward to seeing some of you there.

Advance notice of lecture

The Future of Planning: beyond growth dependence will be launched at UCL on Thursday 24th October at a reception following a public lecture by Yvonne Rydin. More details will be announced shortly but please keep the date in your diary if you can. 

This blog is now on holiday until 23rd September 2013.

Community pubs again

Community pubs are in the news once again as some 100 have been reported as achieving community asset status under the Localism Act. This sounds very positive. It gives local communities the right to delay any sale of the community asset for up to 6 months and gives them the opportunity then to raise funds to buy the asset and to do so as current use value, excluding any development gain from a change of use, say to residential. There is the prospects of the pub building be used not just as a hostelry but for a variety of local needs. But the sting in the tail is that funding for the purchase and subsequent running of the building still has to be raised. Only the wealthier communities will find it easy to find such funds. Elsewhere this potential will depend on much creativity and innovation in finding resources to make the building a true community asset. Where might such resources be found? Sweat equity is always a possibility, particularly for refurbishment. Community time banks might help with ongoing running of the asset. Crowd-funding and peer-to-peer lending  are two options that are making innovative use of the internet to provide small businesses and social enterprises with low cost loans. There are possibilities here but communities are going to need some basic business planning and financial advice to understand how to access them. A future of community-owned and managed assets is possible but it will require a clever and imaginative mix of expertise and ideas to become a reality.

Empty shops: is deregulation the answer?

Last week proposals were aired to loosen planning regulation so that empty shops can be converted into homes: see the Guardian article here: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/aug/04/councils-powers-high-street-planning. Well, there is a pressing need for more homes. And my last post pointed to the changes in our high streets with many blank shopfronts. But is this the answer? It leaves all the decision-making to the market. So what kind of homes will result? Upmarket or for those in the most urgent need? Bought by owner-occupiers or a buy-to-let landlord? Domestic or overseas buyers? Who can tell? In a property market place, these decisions are left to myriad individual decision backed by purchasing power. And any conversion back from residential to another use would work the same way. If and when demand for retail activities goes back up, who is to say that the (old) high street is where the most profitable sites will be found. So this small shift in deregulation could lead to considerable change in our local areas. That does not mean it is a bad idea if you think that market decisions will lead to the outcomes that people need. My view is that they will and they will not. Some people's needs, demands and wants will be met; others will not. But the more interesting question is what is the alternative? In  a market economy, all those atomised decision-makers don't really need to cooperate beyond working out how to hand over the money. Any alternative will put greater demands on our ability and desire to cooperate. This lies behind the calls for greater community involvement - it assumes more cooperation within communities. The real problem to address is how to foster this without coercion. How can people in a locality be brought together to decide on the future of, say, their high street in a real and concrete way, not just consultation on a plan. How can they be encouraged to feel sufficient ownership of their area, an area full of privately-owned properties, to want to cooperate on the future of any individual property, on that empty shop? These are a tricky questions and deregulation can seem a much easier answer. But that does not make it the right answer.

The High Street

Those walking the (currently) sunny streets of our town centres will be aware of the increasing number of vacant shop fronts. It is therefore timely to note that a review of the Portas initiative has just been published:
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/211536/Future_of_High_Street_-_Progress_Since_the_Portas_Review_-revised.pdf. For those who don't know about the Portas Review, it was an attempt by shopping guru Mary Portas to rethink what was needed to revitalise UK high streets. A mix of town management, financial measures and campaigns were proposed. In the event, the government established Portas Pilots in 27 towns with funding of up to £100,000, together with a mix of other funding pots for other areas. They also argued that their general deregulation strategy (for business and planning) would help. But the evidence of shop closures suggest that this is not working well. Is this just the current economic climate to too severe for such pump-priming of small retail businesses to work? Is the deregulation agenda an ill-conceived way to handle the nuanced needs of high streets? Or, perhaps, as a recent Local Government Information Unit briefing (by Majeed Neky, 18th July) suggests shopping streets are in the midst of a much more profound period of change. This is not a temporary down-turn but a sea-change in what such streets are for. In this case a broader debate is needed on what uses these premises can house and how they can meet local needs. As ever with this government, there is a tension between its localist rhetoric and its dependence on promoting market-led economic growth, with the latter usually winning out. Perhaps it is time to take the localist rhetoric more seriously to consider how the public spaces of the high street and the community assets of local retailing and services could be maintained in the absence of growth. This would require new and detailed attention to the mix of taxation and regulation that owners and occupiers of these properties face, with a view to thinking seriously about how to facilitate community-led activity.

From the Dublin conference

Last week planning academics from across the world met at the joint congress organised by UCD in a very sunny Dublin  for the European and North American associations of planning schools: http://aesop-acspdublin2013.com/. Around a thousand people attended so difficult to summarise the discussions or even the main themes! There was plenty of continuing evidence that market-led development often failed to deliver for local communities and, further, that it was running into problems as a strategy in current economic climates. But there were also a couple of interesting papers that linked very directly to the arguments and proposals in The Future of Planning.
A fascinating paper by David Adams, of Glasgow University, discussed urban land reform in Scotland - where he is advising the Scottish Government - and proposed a Community Right to Sell. This would be a measure whereby a community could force a plot of vacant or derelict land in their area to go to auction and be sold. The idea is that the auction process would result in the land being sold for a beneficial use even if this was a price below that desired by the current landowner. David's view is that often this lower price would enable communities to buy the land; even if they were outbid, land would be brought into use rather than being blocked by landowners.
Another interesting analysis was put forward by Peter Phibbs of the University of Sydney. His paper outlined the ACT Land Rent Scheme under which households are able to rent land and then buy a building to put on it, purchasing the land at a later stage to unify the two elements. There is an annual land rent fixed at 2% of the land value for lower income households and 4% for others. This seems an innovative idea which Peter describes as a government CLT and as having some significant success. He also points though to the opposition that it faced at the outset, a reminder of the need to build wide coalitions of support to challenge the existing growth-dependent paradigm.
Two ideas to watch....