Who’d be a planner?

The UK is experiencing an outbreak of localism, propagated by all the main political parties. No doubt this is a response to the widespread distrust not just of Members of Parliament, but of the financial elite which landed us in our present condition. We are having a ‘Mr Smith Goes to Washington’ moment, where ancient tv campaigners are encouraged to stand for election and the so-called ‘man in the street’ is invested with wisdom and judgement in stark contrast to the ruling elite which got us into our current mess.

For the government, the legislative expression of this new-found desire to premiate ordinary folk is to be found in the Local Democracy, Economic Development and Construction Bill, now completing its legislative passage. The Conservatives have been talking up the virtues of local decision-making as opposed the regionalism and top-down approach they say the Government has inflicted on unwilling electors. The Lib Dems have always been big on promoting the idea that the man in the street knows best (except, say cynics, when it comes to anything important).

As far as architecture, planning and development are concerned, none of this looks helpful. What all political parties promote is the idea that you can have more consultation and speedier planning. Why any rational person would believe such a proposition is never explained. However, what we do know is that very few people wish to see any sort of development on their doorstep, whether in Belgravia, suburbia, or one of those picturesque villages where locals cannot find a dwelling (because of they have been snaffled as second and third homes by the usual ghastly types).

Almost all of us are nimby’s to some extent (cf the cliff-edge vote on OMA’s Commonwealth Institute project, happily approved). The point about the planning system is that it acknowledges and deals with this natural human condition. The question is whether it deals with it efficiently and honestly, and no doubt there is room for improvement here. Hence the creation of the Infrastructure Planning Commission which will have a big say on where major projects of regional or national significance will be located. This is being introduced in parallel with the aforementioned legislation promoting a greater say for local communities in the development process. In short, the circle cannot be squared, and it is better to accept that this is so.

This is not an argument against consultation, but an observation that relevant context may be a wider one than the close-up perspective of most single-interest local pressure groups. An obvious example of this is in relation to carbon emissions, where the context is a global one, and where world leaders in the forthcoming Copenhagen climate summit will be agreeing measures which may have profound (we hope beneficial) effects on local communities whose own ideas will carry relatively little weight.

If we are to transform the bulk of our building stock, so that it becomes more virtuous from an environmental perspective, we will require major collective effort, with political leadership at a wider level than local communities can themselves supply. That is also true of beneficial regeneration projects, which have infrastructure and transport implications way beyond the scope of localist community engagement. The danger is that the inability of local communities to control the big picture results in them turning on what they can control in a hostile and negative way – imposing personal aesthetic tastes on someone who wants to building a house that is ‘modernistic’, for example.

In these circumstances, we rely on planners and planning committees to hold the ring in a robust but fair way. There are bound to be some failures of judgement but then there are mechanisms to deal with that. The real question is whether the system is basically ok or fundamentally flawed. I tend towards the former, but given the complexity of the tasks they face, and the pressures under which they operate, you have to ask: ‘Who’d be a planner’? And you have to acknowledge that Richard Rogers has a point when he says that all architecture is politics.