Town Planning

The Basics

Tony Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000556575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The planning of urban and rural areas requires thinking about where people will live, work, play, study, shop and how they will get about the place, and to devise strategies for long time periods. Town Planning: The Basics provides a general introduction to the components of urban areas, including housing, transportation and infrastructure, and health and environment, showing how appropriate policies can be developed. Explaining planning activity at different scales of operation, this book distinguishes between the "big stuff", the grand strategy for providing homes, jobs and infrastructure; the "medium stuff", the design and location of development; and the "small stuff" affecting mainly small sites and individual households.

Planning as an activity is part of a complex web stretching way beyond the planning office, and this book provides an overview of the many components needed to create a successful town. It is invaluable to anyone with an interest in planning, from students learning about the subject for the first time to graduates thinking about embarking on a career in planning, to local councillors on planning committees and community boards.

1

THE BIG STUFF – PLANNING GETS STARTED

PLANNING IS CONCEIVED AS A WAY OF CONFRONTING SOME BIG ISSUES

Since ancient times, governments and rulers have, from time to time, ordered the construction of whole new settlements – villages, towns and even great cities – and laid down rules for their design. While there are lessons that can be learnt from studying them, they were not what town planning is really about in the modern sense. Planning systems, as we know them today, have their origins in the industrial cities of the 19th century and the public reaction to the problems they caused. These cities brought great wealth to sections of the population and employment to most of the inhabitants. At their best, they created fine streets and buildings, roads and railways and were the source of the new technologies that made these feasible. However, as is well known, they had their downside – slum conditions for the really poor, overcrowding, disease and air and water pollution. Some of these could be solved by technology especially in the shape of sewerage and piped water. City councils could be empowered to regulate the design and layout of houses to ensure access to light and air. The issue, though, that was to give rise to the call for the planned city was that, for all their economic success, industrial cities possessed internal contradictions. In the long term, if left to their own devices, they did not function efficiently and deliver optimal outcomes for all their inhabitants. At, and around, the centre of the cities, land values were very high. This is where everyone wanted to be and where a lot of jobs were concentrated. Trying to fit everyone, and everything, in led to overcrowding and pollution. The invention of railways, buses and trams allowed the better-off to escape the central city. They could live further out and travel to work using this new public transport. On the outer edge of city, the land was cheaper, and they could afford bigger houses on larger plots. The suburb was born. Unfortunately, the poor could not afford to travel out and were forced live where land was expensive resulting in cramped living conditions and poor facilities. Their jobs were local because the city required their labour to function – bus drivers, cleaners, shop assistants, in addition to the factory workers. Employment was still local.

The first half of the 20th century brought changes, often for the better, but they did not resolve this basic dilemma regarding land values. On the contrary, the clamour in enlightened circles for planning to solve the problem increased. The use of electric power and motor vehicles brought about light industry that was less polluting and could be located out-of-town. Electric suburban and underground railways could spread out far into the surrounding countryside, as could new arterial roads. During the 1920s and 1930s, vast tracts of land were opened up for low-density suburban houses. Many could take advantage of these new homes, but critics considered these new buildings environmentally and visually intrusive, wasteful in their use of land and uncoordinated with local facilities. Most importantly, the older, poor-quality houses surrounding the centres of cities remained. Could not something be done? Could a planned city resolve these problems?

NATURE OF TOWNS AND CITIES

Before continuing, it would be a good idea to pause to clarify what goes to make up towns and cities and introduce some technical terms.

Urban areas exist primarily because of people’s activities. Everyone needs somewhere to eat, sleep and relax. Most adults will be employed and will have somewhere where they work. Children need to go to school. All need to go to the shops, and the shops need to be supplied with goods. Factories also need to be supplied and to send out their products. People may need to go the doctor, dentist or seek hospital care. All will want to be entertained and some to engage in sports or other outdoor activities. The list could go on. All will need to travel between these activities by what are known as “modes” of transport: car, bus, train, walking or cycling. Goods need to be transported also, by lorry, van or train.

These activities need buildings. People live in dwellings – houses or flats. Their jobs are located not only in factories and offices but also in shops, hospitals, schools and many other places. Education takes place in schools, colleges and universities. Health service needs hospitals and local surgeries. The supply of goods needs warehouses. Again, the list could go on.

These buildings are linked together by other facilities that go to make what is technically known as “infrastructure”. Travel takes place on roads, railways, cycleways and footpaths. There is also what is unseen: water supply, sewerage, gas and electricity.

All these buildings and infrastructure occupy land. This is where planning starts to get real as deciding which areas of land are to be used is something that it can control directly. Land is traded – it is bought and sold. Desirable land will have a high value. The buildings on the land also have a value and may be worth a lot of money. There is a market in land, and planning intervenes in this market.

All these activities, buildings and infrastructure should, in ideal circumstances, work together in a smooth and coordinated manner. The fact they do not always do this is why people often see a need for planning. However, planning is essentially preparation for the future, and the real need for it arises because things change over time. Change in urban areas is highly complex, mainly because change not only affects a lot of things but they all, in turn, have different components that can change at different rates. People may move house and move job, and children may move school, but these movements are not, in themselves, the main issue. The real challenge comes from the fact that people want more of them: more houses, more jobs, leading to more infrastructure. It is even more complex than that, because the nature of both employment and shopping changes over time as does the size and design of schools and hospitals. There is also the impact of new technology, particularly on transport and communications. If this were not enough, buildings and infrastructure can last for much longer than the activities they support so they have to be adaptable or be demolished. All in all, this adds up to quite a task.

THE BIG ISSUES

When it comes to finding solutions, it can be helpful to distinguish between the really big picture and smaller and more detailed issues. This definitely does not mean that the small stuff is less important – it certainly is not – nor that the big and small issues are not closely linked together – they certainly are. It is just that making the distinction can help to explain what is going on, given how complex it all is. In addition, when we talk of solutions, it is not just a matter of bricks and mortar but also of ways of managing urban areas over time, as they grow and change. By “managing” we are not just talking about law and procedures but how we handle both the big and small issues. What then are the big issues?

A DECENT HOME

People generally move to a city because they have, or want, a job there. In the 19th century, in spite of often squalid conditions, the industrial city still offered a better deal than that of the life of a farm labourer. The reason for the squalid conditions was that lots of people were all doing the same thing at the same time and in the same place. Doubtless, all would have liked a decent home, but they found, in practice, that nothing was available that they could afford and they had to put up with whatever they could get. The big challenge a planned city would face would be to provide well-designed homes in sufficient numbers for everybody and to keep on doing so.

A DECENT ENVIRONMENT

The competition for somewhere to live and work in urban areas not only created pollution, not just from factories but also from vehicles (horses then, petrol now) together with household sewage and other waste, all contributing to the squalid conditions. The big challenge for a planned city would be how to bring about a decent, healthy and liveable environment as well as provide transport, open space for recreation and places for education and entertainment, and to maintain all this over time.

LAND VALUES – THE CORE ISSUE

At the core of dilemma was, and has always been, the issue of land values. It is where the contradictions of the inner city lay and, consequently, the sub-standard living conditions. What the proponents of planning also drew attention to was the way that land values increased over time as urban areas expanded. Imagine you owned farmland fairly near to a city. As that edge of the urban area grew out towards it, its value went up. Once the city surrounded your land it became very valuable indeed. However, you had done nothing yourself to bring about the increase in value. You had not made anything, or provided any service, to cause it. It was what became known as an “unearned increment”, and the technical name for it was “betterment”. Could not this increase in value be captured for the public good? Could not some system be devised to resolve the contradictions in land values at the heart of the problem of the industrial city?

THE FIRST SOLUTIONS

THE GARDEN CITY

It is here that we come to what could be seen as the first great step forward in the development of planning as we know it today, Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City”. It is important not just because of the publication of his ideas, remarkable as they were, at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, but because Howard and his associates carried their ideas into bricks and mortar by building the world’s first two garden cities, Letchworth and Welwyn, in England. They can still be seen today, and visitors can take a look at them themselves and make their own judgements about them. Howard’s basic idea was that publicly minded citizens could get together to form a legal trust, which would buy up a large area of land in a rural location at a low price. They would seek investors to put money in order to finance the construction, by the trust, of a new town on this land. New residents would rent from, and be shareholders in, the trust. As the town grew, the value of the land, and other assets owned by the trust, would rise. This increase in wealth, the betterment, would then be shared by the residents. It would also be used to repay the original investors and finance the further growth of the town. It would be neither a completely public nor an entirely private development – something in-between. The built form would be characteristic of neither the industrial city nor the countryside but would be something that incorporated the best of both of them, while having none of their disadvantages, in other words a “garden city”.

Figure 1.1: Street view in Letchworth Garden City, showing terraced houses with trees and lawns. Although terraces are common in Letchworth, there is a wide range of house types in the Garden City, including some fairly large detached houses. (Tony Hall)

Letchworth was built from 1903 onwards in a country cottage style, with ample trees and green spaces, as illustrated in Figure 1.1. It had its own railway station, although on a local line. Although some factories and shops came along, their number was below expectations. The second attempt was to prove more successful in this regard. Howard bought more land at Welwyn, around a railway station on the main line, and the second garden city was built there from 1919 onwards. From fairly early on, factories were built on one side of the line and a shopping centre with a department store on the other. The architectural style was neo-classical rather than “country cottage” but was still a house-and-garden form as can be seen in Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.2: Street view in Welwyn Garden City showing terraced houses with trees and lawns. Although the type of house is similar to that in Letchworth as shown in Figure 1.1, note the use of a neo-classical style. There is a wide range of other house types in Welwyn, including streets of fairly large detached houses. (Tony Hall)

A problem with the name “garden city” is that it often conjures up a “country cottage” picture in the mind and can obscure the wider principles that garden cities were meant to be all about. A house-and-garden layout with plenty of public open space and trees was, indeed, an important part of the plan but it did not need to be “country cottage” in style. What was just as important was how to deliver both houses and infrastructure in the right numbers, in the right place and in an affordable manner.

NEW LAWS FOR PLANNING AND HOUSING

In Britain, the period of the establishment of the first garden cities at the beginning of the 20th century also saw the first planning legislation, the 1909 Town and Country Planning Act. A second act followed in 1932. However, neither of these established a comprehensive planning system. All they did was to empower local councils to adopt planning schemes for specific localities. A nationwide system had to wait until after the end of the Second World War. 1919 saw the first legislation to introduce “council housing”, houses built by local councils on land they had purchased for subsidised rent to lower income households. The government published guidance on how they were to be designed that reflected the outward “house and garden” form of the garden cities, as can be seen in the example shown in Figure 1.3.

However, to get cheap land to build on meant locating large, uniform estates on the edge of existing urban areas, often some distance from main centres of shopping and entertainment.

Figure 1.3: Council houses in Morden, London, built in the 1930s. Note the use of terraced houses with front gardens, together with an avenue of trees and lawns. (Tony Hall)

The 1930s saw extensive, and almost unregulated, suburban expansion of towns and cities through the construction of privately built estates of family houses giving rise to public complaints about urban “sprawl”. Public debate in progressive circles calling for a planning system that would address wider social and economic issues increased as a result. In the 1940s, the experience of wartime conditions further bolstered the desire to build again in a new way that would be beneficial to society as a whole. In addition, the war effort showed how governments could make a big difference by organising public enterprise on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 The Big Stuff – Planning Gets Started: Planning Is Conceived as a Way of Confronting Some Big Issues
• 2 The First Big Issues – Houses and Infrastructure
• 3 More Big Issues – Employment and the Regions: Planning for Changing Employment
• 4 More Big Issues – Health, Environment and the Countryside
• 5 More Big Issues – Getting Around: Dealing with Transport in Urban Areas
• 6 The Medium Stuff – Where to Put Things?: The Design and Laying Out of Urban Areas
• 7 The Small Stuff – The Day-to-Day but Important Work of the Planning Office
• 8 Policies and Decisions – How a Planning System Works
• Conclusion
• Index