Race and Planning

The UK Experience

Huw Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135366322
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Drawing on a number of research studies of planning and urban policy, ace and Planning asks why racial equality has not been higher on professional and government agendas, and suggests strategies for those working on change. It considers key issues such as how planning activities might lead to more emphasis on the significance of racial equality; might currently it be unwittingly underpinning racial disadvantage? Alternatively, can planning help challenge racism and promote equal opportunities? The book's arguments are sensitive to the rapidly changing focus of the politics of race including: 'fortress Europe', Macpherson and modernism.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The reason for a book

It would be a slippery slope of ethnic minorities asking for things, wanting special facilities.

(Councillor objecting to a planning application for an eruv, in the London Borough of Barnet; quoted in Cooper (1998:132))

The Rastafarians and that lot don’t fit in…don’t fit in my…look, I’ll be honest with you, in a Constable painting they do not fit in. It’s as simple as that.

(David Evans MP, quoted in the Guardian, 5 March 1997, p. 6)

this book…tells the story of [a] campaign to build an oracle, a structure for the observance of her faith, in her back garden…The scandal provoked by her action came from the fact that in building the oracle…she challenged the prevailing organisation of space in a white racist society.

(Cohen 1994:ii)¹

At the time of writing there is no other book on the subject of race and planning, and to some readers it may not be obvious that this is a gap which needs filling. My initial response to such scepticism would be that after twenty years working within and studying British planning, I am fairly confident that most planners could not confidently identify and discuss the conflicting views stated or hinted at in the quotations above of what contemporary British society is, and should be, and what these mean for planning. Planners are not comfortable discussing race or racism.² Some would say that this is because countering racism, and/or promoting race equality, is not a planning matter. It might be held that race, or racism, or racial discrimination (all terms to be discussed later in this chapter and in Chapter 2), are not as directly related to town planning as is, say, urban design. Improving urban design is very much a direct objective of the planning system, in a way in which, it might be suggested, eradicating racial discrimination is not. That is not to say that planners should tolerate discrimination, but simply that its eradication is not a direct policy objective of the planning system. Rather, it is a matter for lawyers or community workers. Consequently, while there may be a place for the occasional paper or lecture enjoining planners to be better citizens of a multi-cultural or multi-racial society (more terms in need of explication) there is hardly a need for a book-length discussion (even a short book such as this one). Loftman and Beazley (1998a), for example, found in their survey of UK planning authorities that:

Addressing race equality/ethnic minority issues within…Planning departments/divisions was rated as a relatively low priority by a significant proportion of local authority survey respondents.

(1998a:25; their emphasis)

But the comparison between promoting good urban design and combating racial discrimination is not a useful one. For whereas it makes some sense to see the former as a discrete policy objective, as something which can be fenced off, as it were, from the rest of public or private life, the latter cannot be conceived in this way. The choices made, for example, in a school about its curriculum have no relevance to urban design, but both the manner in which decisions are made and the content of those decisions can promote or retard the eradication of racial discrimination. This is because the idea and practice of racial discrimination or racism, depends upon the notion of ‘race’ having a social salience: that is, it depends upon ‘race’ being a social category which is significant in everyday social relations. To anticipate the discussion and terminology of Chapter 2, it depends upon the racialisation of social relations; and racialisation is a process which cannot be compartmentalised neatly for the purpose of public policy. Thus what happens in schools, on the street and in planning offices, is all important to combating racial discrimination and disadvantage. The kinds of attitudes and perspectives displayed in the quotations at the head of this chapter do not just form part of the context within which planning operates; they also employ a set of categories with which planners (and others involved in the planning system) may choose to interpret the world.

If we conceive of ourselves, and others, as members of particular racial groups then in doing so, we will be drawing upon a view of the world which does not limit itself to any one aspect of our lives. If we think races are part of the fabric of society (if we hold to what can be termed a racial ideology) then we take races to be part of the whole fabric, not just a section of it. This means the racialisation of society is sustained by its continuing significance in each and every part of social life, including town planning. Conversely, countering racialisation, depends upon its being eradicated in every sphere of social life. So in a sense, race is central to planning, not peripheral to it.

The manner in which racialisation can manifest itself will certainly differ from one social activity to another, and will depend upon the nature of the activity and the people taking a part in it. There is an obvious (and important) practical difference between the racist violence of a football hooligan and the stereotypes which a planning officer may have about various racial or ethnic groups (Gilroy 1993). But there is also an underlying and crucial similarity, namely that both believe that it helps them make sense of the social world if they think of it as populated by discrete races, each with a set of defining characteristics. This belief in the relevance of a racial ideology will be sustained or challenged in the whole life experience of the football hooligan and the planner, not simply by life on the terraces or in the office. Moreover, their sharing this belief will influence their responses to each other: racist hooliganism may be condemned, for example, as intolerance of difference without questioning how that difference is being constructed in the first place. In turn, the belief will manifest itself in more or less subtle ways in all aspects of their lives, some of which may clearly be illegal (such as racist assaults), some of which may be much more subtle (such as a continuing unease in dealing with members of ‘different racial groups\ albeit accompanied perhaps by scrupulous efforts to be fair).

This book, then, examines town planing in a racialised society, a society where race is a significant social category, and one which mediates relations between individuals and each other and between individuals and institutions. It will ask whether planning policies are informed by a critical awareness of racial ideologies and whether planning processes are sensitive to the possibility of discrimination and racism. In short, it will ask how planning fits into a society where ‘race relations’ are endlessly topical and potentially explosive.

Chapter 2 will expand upon the key ideas, which will inform the book’s analysis. In particular, it will discuss the terms ‘race’, ‘racialisation’ and ‘ethnicity’ and the role of space in defining racial and ethnic boundaries. It will also set out a view of the planning system as consisting of a number of policy processes, suggesting that this may help us analyse at least some of the ways in which racially based disadvantage can be underpinned, and countered, within and through planning.

The theoretical understanding which underpins this book eschews the view that there is any specific mapping of ‘race’ (or ethnicity) which can be undertaken independently of the way in which these categories are constructed, and observed to be constructed, in social life. Yet racism and racial inequality is a part of British life, and the planning process is not insulated from it. The lives of individuals, and the opportunities afforded them, are influenced in part by their being regarded as being members of a particular racial group. More positively, perhaps, for a number of people a strong sense of ethnic identity is an important part of their lives; often, the ethnic identity they develop is shaped by the racial hostility they come up against. At its most obvious, one response to racist hostility is to value the racialised identity as an oppositional strategy (Lopez and Hasso 1998). It is important, then, that the book’s discussion of planning in a racialised society is prefaced by an account of the demography of Britain and a review of the economic and social consequences of racism and discrimination. There are by now a number of excellent reviews of those topics and this chapter will confine itself to a very brief summary.³ It will concentrate on racial and ethnic diversity, the distribution of ethnic or racial groups by ages, sex and geography, residential segregation and the employment characteristics of various ethnic groups in Britain.

The black and ethnic minority population of Britain

There have been periodic influxes of migrants to Britain for many centuries, and although most of these have been from other European countries (notably Ireland), it is also the case that the country has long-established non-white minority ethnic populations.⁴ The pace of immigration, particularly of non-white people, picked up in the year following the Second World War, not least because of British government policies encouraging immigration to fill public sector jobs (Solomos 1993). However, from the immediate postwar period onward, there has been a consistent racialisation of immigration in British politics in the sense that non-white immigration has been portrayed as problematic (Solomos 1993; Spencer 1998). From the 1950s there have been influential voices calling for control of non-white immigration, and from the 1960s legal controls have indeed become increasingly tight, with a consequent fall in the numbers of immigrants. This will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3.

The 1991 Census was the first to asks questions about ethnicity, and its findings will be used as a basis for discussing the ethnic minority population in the mid 1990s. There was a considerable discussion (and testing) of an appropriate question (or set of questions) in preceding years (Bulmer 1996), and widespread acknowledgement that the question eventually used was sociologically imprecise and represented a political compromise (using the term in the broadest sense). As Peach (1996b:5–6) commented, in a passage worth quoting at length:

While birthplace is an unambiguous category, ethnic identity is more mercurial. Critically, ethnicity, is contextual rather than absolute. One may be Welsh in England, British in Germany, European in Thailand, White in Africa. A person may be Afro-Caribbean by descent but British by upbringing so that his or her census category might be either Black-Caribbean or Black-Other. Similarly, a person may be an East African Asian, an Indian, a Sikh or Ramgarhia. Thus ethnicity is a situational rather than an independent category. The Census Quality Validation has indicated confusion about which category to claim, especially for those of mixed ethnic background.

The ten main ethnic categories produced by the 1991 census are not unambiguous. The emphas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Some key ideas in understanding race, ethnicity and planning
• 3 Race, public policy and planning in postwar Britain
• 4 Planning in a racialised society: Britain in the 1990s
• 5 Gypsies, travellers and the planning system
• 6 Concluding comments
• Bibliography
• Index