Urban Design and the British Urban Renaissance

John Punter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135263911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Are Britain's cities attractive places in which to live, work and play? Asking that question, this is a critical review of how the design dimension of the Urban Renaissance strategy was developed and applied, based on expert academic assessments of progress in Britain's thirteen largest cities. The case studies are preceded by a dissection of New Labour's renaissance agenda, and concluded by a synthesis of achievements and failings. Exploring the implications of this strategy for the future of urban planning and design, this is a must-read for students, practitioners of these subjects and for all those who wish to improve the quality of the British urban environment.

1 An introduction to the British urban renaissance

John Punter

Introduction

This book examines the urban design dimension of the urban renaissance promoted in England by Lord Rogers’ Urban Task Force report of 1999, and the urban design advances that have taken place in the thirteen major cities in the UK since that date.

In this introductory chapter the background to, and recommendations of, the report are introduced alongside the more academic and professional debates which surrounded its launch and subsequent implementation. The report is dissected into four components – design excellence, housing delivery and design, urban environmental management, and local governance and delivery – and the extent to which the recommendations have been realised is assessed. The chapter concludes with the research questions that guide the sixteen city case studies in the book, and which provide the structure for the concluding chapter.

The urban renaissance is an English government policy that has also been influential in Northern Ireland because planning there is still a central government responsibility. It is not Welsh or Scottish policy, but the studies of the Celtic cities – Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, and Belfast – assess the wider UK influence of the Task Force report on devolved government policy and the planning and design practices in their major cities. Suffice it to say that in both Scotland and Wales the report has had some influence, and their largest cities have been subjected to largely identical development pressures, while their administrations have closely observed the English Core Cities and their promotion of urban renaissance.

Defining urban design and its recent evolution in the UK

Urban design has come to occupy an increasingly prominent role in planning, housing, regeneration and environmental improvement practices in the UK over the last decade. The English government’s key policy pronouncement, Planning Policy Statement (PPS) 1 now states that ‘good design is indivisible from good planning’, and that ‘high quality and inclusive design . . . should be the aim of all those involved in the development process’ (DCLG 2006a: paras 33–35). The Government’s definition of urban design, adopted as the foundation for this research, is as follows:

Urban design is the art of making places for people. It includes the way places work and matters such as community safety, as well as how they look. It concerns the connections between people and places, movement and urban form, nature and the built fabric, and the processes for ensuring successful villages, towns and cities.

Urban design is a key to creating sustainable developments and the conditions for a flourishing economic life, for the prudent use of natural resources and for social progress.

(DETR/CABE 2000: 8)

This is a definition that recognises the increasingly important sustainability agenda, but only hints at important issues such as biodiversity, sustainable drainage, public health and inclusive design. It does not explicitly encompass social inclusion, community participation or management, all of which are becoming key design concerns (RCEP 2007), as this study will confirm.

In this study the primary concern is urban design as public policy (Barnett 1974, 1982), a distinctive element and ethos of planning policy embedded in development plans/frameworks and development control practice (as recognised in the quotations from PPS 1 above). But urban design also has to be seen by local government as a corporate activity, a way of ‘joining up’ its diverse functions and injecting a design quality and ‘place-making’ dimension as it builds highways, pedestrianises streets, calms traffic, furnishes and lights public spaces, conserves green space, creates parks, disposes of land and builds all manner of public facilities. In both these roles urban design is ‘second order design’ (George 1997): it does not directly design the buildings and spaces or settlements but it shapes the ‘decision environments’ of all those who are involved in the process, working cross-professionally, collaborating with developers, public agencies and the wider public. In the words of the Urban Task Force ‘design is a core problem solving activity that not only determines the quality of the built environment but also delivers many of the instruments for the implementation of the urban renaissance’ (UTF 1999a: 39).

Reconstruction, redevelopment, renewal, regeneration, renaissance: the evolution of British urban policy

Where does the urban renaissance fit into recent planning and urban policy? A concise conceptualisation of post-war urban policy describes it as successive decades of reconstruction, revitalisation, renewal, redevelopment, regeneration and renaissance (Roberts and Sykes 2000: 14). This summary reveals some of the key shifts in urban development practices, but it also obscures the complexities of central and local government intervention in the built environment.

The Thatcher years: urban policy under the Conservatives

At the end of the 1970s, with the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government, urban policy shifted dramatically towards property-led regeneration utilising the Urban Development Corporations and Enterprise Zones to drive new investment. But by the early 1990s the negative externalities of both laissez-faire planning policies and a-social regeneration approaches had forced the Conservative Government to introduce a more plan-led system to refocus development around existing urban centres (see Planning Policy Guidance Note 6 (PPG6) in DoE 1996a), and to begin to encourage a shift from private to public modes of transport (see PPG13 in DoE 1996b). A restatement of urban containment and concentration policies was spurred on by the 1992 household projections for England, which suggested that 4.4 million new homes would be required in England by 2016. A national target of 50 per cent of development on brownfield land was set. In regeneration an emphasis upon community participation, public–private partnership and local empowerment returned, though often not targeted on the areas of greatest social need, and funding was often disbursed by competitive bidding (Cullingworth and Nadin 2006: 366–371). Environment Ministers such as Chris Patten and especially John Gummer asserted the need to embrace urban design as a means of delivering better quality development, and set in motion the production of a national design manual (DETR/CABE 2000).

New Labour and the Third Way

New Labour under Tony Blair came to power in 1997, committed to ‘Third Way’ politics that sought to find the middle ground between the neoliberal economic and social policies of the Conservatives (deregulation, privatisation and specialist development agency-led) and the Keynesian welfare state (Tiesdell and Allmendinger 2001: 904). The aim was a more caring public policy balancing competitive individualism and personal freedoms with notions of social justice and the creation of a more socially inclusive and engaged community (Giddens 1998: 65). As in the late 1960s, Labour’s regeneration aspirations were driven by a desire to address widening inequalities through programmes of social inclusion, neighbourhood renewal and community involvement. However, these were tempered by a strong thrust towards reductions in welfare dependence, downplaying poverty as the main cause of social deprivation (Kearns 2003: 52–54).

A communitarian doctrine underpinned much of New Labour’s social welfare and urban policy (Johnstone and Whitehead 2004: 10). The neighbourhood was the ‘foundational principle’ of urban regeneration, through which anti-social behaviour and poor housing conditions in the most deprived communities could be addressed by the government’s Social Exclusion Unit. The wider regeneration of the cities and the delivery of ‘sustainable communities’ would be pursued through ‘urban renaissance’ policies (Whitehead 2004: 59–66) espousing the same ethos of vitality, social mix and community in order to encourage and accommodate an influx of more affluent residents into the inner city, though in turn creating obvious social tensions and further implementation challenges (Cochrane 2000).

New Labour had more of a ‘big city’ focus and a clearer aspiration for the qualities of continental European cities (Rogers and Fischer 1992; Rogers and Power 2000). Whereas their first urban policy moves were to tackle social exclusion and the regeneration of deprived inner-city neighbourhoods, in 1998 the deputy Prime Minister established the UTF (chaired by the Labour peer and eminent architect Richard Rogers) to devise an urban revival based on ‘co-ordinated action [and] the joint principles of design excellence, economic strength, environmental responsibility, good governance and social wellbeing’ (UTF 1999a: 3). This gave a massive boost to the urban design dimension of planning and development.

At the same time the government sought to modernise local government and reinvigorate local democracy through an emphasis upon ‘citizenship’, though it focused far more on the former (service delivery) than the latter (political participation) (Wilson and Game 2006: 353). It created a performance management culture replacing Compulsory Competitive Tendering with Best Value Indicators and later Comprehensive Performance Assessments (Stoker 2005: 86–107; Wilson and Game 2006: 353–375). It sought more dynamic local leadership through the introduction of elected mayors and cabinets, and more community re-engagement through reforms to voting and more extensive public consultation. ‘Partnership’ and ‘joining up’ were the keys to a multi dimensional approach to citizen and community needs, along with new powers to ensure community wellbeing and major initiatives on crime and anti-social behaviour to ‘civilise’ the inner city.

The net result of a very wide range of reforms has been a bewildering array of overlapping urban policy initiatives; frequent changes in programmes, departmental names and responsibilities; and national and local schemes funded by a multiplicity of agencies. New legislation has no sooner been digested than new White or Green papers have proposed more reforms, and all of this legislative and policy development has been set within a performance management and audit culture. Even ministers acknowledge that what was once a ‘patchwork quilt’ of urban policy has become a ‘bowl of spaghetti’ (Lord Rooker quoted in Cullingworth and Nadin 2006: 379). The Guardian coined the term ‘initiativitis’ (quoted in Johnstone and Whitehead 2004: 14) to describe the frenzied press releases and policy announcements, the frequent repackaging of policies and the presentation of existing funding streams as new resources. They all became integral to political spin. This state of affairs was perhaps an inevitable result of embarking on major programmes which had ten- to twenty-year time horizons (thirty years in the case of the urban renaissance) whereas political cycles demanded faster responses to public concerns and rapid results ‘on the ground’.

The bigger issue, however, was that New Labour came face to face with the impossibility of balancing a ‘dynamic capitalist economy, so coveted by the New Right, with the egalitarian city and community-based metropolis desired by the Old Left’ (Johnstone and Whitehead 2004: 15; cf. Callinicos 2001: 29) as they continued to ‘make obeisance at the shrine of deregulation, liberalism, privatisation, low taxes and the minimal state’ (Hutton 1998: 2). By late 2007 this very problem and associated issues was threatening the whole future of the government and indeed the future prosperity of the nation.

Towards an urban renaissance: the agenda of the Urban Task Force

The remit of the UTF was to identify the causes of urban decline and to recommend practical solutions. They were ‘to establish a vision for our cities, founded on the principles of design excellence, social wellbeing and environmental responsibility within appropriate delivery, fiscal and legal frameworks’ (UTF 2005: 2). The deputy Prime Minister recognised the potential for an urban renaissance based on the need to accommodate a projected 3.8 million additional households in England by 2021, and the already confirmed 60 per cent brownfield target for new housing. The Task Force Chair stressed the ‘need to create the quality of life and vitality that makes urban living desirable’, arguing that ‘regeneration has to be design-led . . . but to be sustainable . . . [it] has to be placed within its economic and social context’ (UTF 1999a: 7). Lord Rogers recognised that social issues vital to regeneration lay outside his remit, but his continental European vision of ‘well-designed, more compact and connected cities, with integrated public transport and supporting a range of diverse uses, allowing people to live at close quarters within a sustainable and adaptable urban environment’ (UTF 1999a: 8) was always intended to be socially inclusive.

Michael Keith has distilled four principles which underpin the rhetoric and these might be précised as follows:

• by building densely it should be possible to maximise land values;
• by maximising land values it should be possible to levy significant amounts of social value against enhanced profit, and to translate this into social housing;
• a rational planning framework can harness the self interest of profit and the equity of affordable housing to deliver mixed development and communities;
• a sustainable municipal revenue base generated from Section 106 agreements and enhanced revenue from property and business taxes will fund a high quality public realm and the future re-engineering of the city.

As Keith concluded tersely ‘at least this is the script’ (2008: 57–58).

The UTF Report included 105 recommendations grouped under ten key headings of urban design, connections, management of the environment, urban regeneration, skills and innovation, planning, land supply, recycling buildings, and finance (UTF 1999a). These are set out in Table 1.1 alongside a very brief headline summary of their achievement drawing on a wide range of evidence. The subsequent Urban White Paper (ODPM 2000), which was a much wider statement about government urban policy, gave an explicit response to each UTF recommendation, demurring at only nine of these (mainly fiscal measures relating to taxation of work-place car parking, vacant land, removing Value Added Tax (VAT) on refurbishments, and removing Council Tax exemptions on empty properties – the last introduced more recently). In 2005 many members of the original UTF team collaborated on an independent stock take of achievements six years on. Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance (UTF 2005) contained further recommendations designed to ‘stimulate public debate and encourage new thinking’ and these remain very relevant to future reforms.

Critiques of the Urban Task Force report

The urban renaissance report received a warm welcome from many quarters, notably from architects, planning and urban design professionals, local government and some countryside lobbyists. There was widespread support for the clear articulation of a positive urban agenda (countering decades of English anti-urbanism), for a reassertion of the central role to be played by local government in regeneration (particularly through stronger planning policies), and for an emphasis on community involvement and community development to address deprivation and improve social cohesion (Robson 1999; Amin et al. 2000). Some criticised a ‘physicalist’ urban design view of cities with its limited understanding of the complex social worlds of the city or of the implications of participatory governance (Healey 2004). Even urban designers on the UTF doubted the extent to which the urban renaissance could be ‘design-led’ as Rogers had suggested, and there was professional recognition that good design was a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for successful urban regeneration (Crookston 2001). There was some suspicion of the proliferation of the new breed of urban design professionals in government bodies and consultancies and their capacity to listen to the community, and debates as to whether a quality public realm was a tool for, or an outcome of, social cohesion (Holden and Iveson 2003). Others questioned the notion of ‘sustainable local communities’ and whether social mix and local community could be delivered, and at what scale and with what scope (Colomb 2007).

There was widespread criticism in professional, academic and political circles of many of the Report’s assumptions and recommendations. Some saw it as a classic restatement of European urban romanticism celebrating the aesthetic, cultural and environmental virtues of the west European city (Amin et al. 2000). They argued that it promoted the myth of harmonious inner-city communities rather than the reality of constant struggles over employability, housing affordability, public service quality, security, neighbourhood identity and amenity. Others emphasised the weakness of the economic analysis in the UTF report and argued that the sharp decline of urban employment, and the continuing decentralisation of jobs, would not be reversed by consumption-oriented economies (Turok 1999: 268–269). Some recognised post-war British planning’s familiar rhetoric of ‘containment’ of urban sprawl and ‘protection of the countryside’, and wondered about the equity implications of the promotion of an ‘urban idyll’ as a counterweight to the longstanding rural idyll (Hoskins and Tallon 2004).

Table 1.1 Selected Task Force recommendations and their achievement

Other critics argued that the UTF report ignored the essentially suburban culture and housing preferences of the English (Oc 2002; Price 2002) and the need to build more compact (New Urbanist) new suburbs in southern England (Hall 2002). Some saw the UTF report as a ‘gentrifier’s charter’ (Lees 2003), promoting the return of the middle classes to the city to rebuild neighbourhoods, generate consumption-led jobs, revive sociability, create a cafẽ culture and improve local amenity, while simultaneously inflating house prices and deepening social exclusion. Others questioned the notion that good design would attract people back to the city when the primary reasons they had left were access to good state schools, urban crime rates, and race relations (Williams 1999). Many saw architectural determinism at the heart of the urban renaissance project, particularly perhaps the idea that ‘compact city’ living would reduce car use and deliver more energy efficient and less polluted cities and suburbs (Haughton 1999). Others posited the counter view that the proposed densification of cities and suburbs would undermine urban sustainability by reducing urban green space and residential...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Plates
• Figures
• Tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Common acronyms
• 1: An introduction to the British urban renaissance
• The English ‘Core Cities’: An introduction
• London and the Thames Gateway: An introduction
• The ‘Celtic Capitals’: An introduction
• Wales: An introduction
• Northern Ireland An introduction
• Conclusions
• Selected bibliography and references