Urban Planning and Real Estate Development

John Ratcliffe, Michael Stubbs, Miles Keeping

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429677564
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This fourth edition of Urban Planning and Real Estate Development guides readers through the procedural and practical aspects of developing land from the point of view of both planner and developer. The twin processes of planning and property development are inextricably linked – it is not possible to carry out a development strategy without an understanding of the planning process, and, equally, planners need to know how real estate developers do their job.

The planning system is explained, from the increasing emphasis on spatial planning at a national, local, and neighbourhood level down to the detailed perspective of the development management process and the specialist requirements of historic buildings and conservation areas. At the same time, the authors explain the entire development process from inception, through appraisal, valuation, and financing, to completion. Sustainability and corporate social responsibility and their impact on planning and development are covered in detail, and the future consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are explored in new opening and closing chapters setting the text in a global context.

Written by a team of authors with many years of academic, professional, and research experience, and illustrated throughout with practical case studies and follow-up resources, this book is an invaluable textbook for real estate and planning students and helps to meet the requirements of the RICS and RTPI Assessment of Professional Competence.

Part 1

Urban Planning: Policies and Processes

1 Urban Planning and Real Estate Development

An Introduction

The modern-day planning system is a post-war invention with legal roots that may be traced to the enactment of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947. The ideas that sparked calls for such land-use regulation go back further. Visionaries of the 1800s and 1900s campaigned for open spaces, the protection of buildings, and the promotion of new, planned layouts with internal space standards based on a rightful amenity. Notable and leading names, among many others, included Octavia Hill (1838–1912; Open Spaces Society and the National Trust), William Morris (1843–96; the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings), Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928; garden cities movement), and Barry Parker (1867–1947) and Raymond Unwin (1863–1940; both Letchworth Garden City, Hampstead Garden Suburb, and the promotion of building standards). A reaction against the unplanned urbanisation of the new industrial age that gripped Britain from the late 1700s resulted in, at first, piecemeal controls of the inter-war years (mostly over ribbon development sprawling along new road corridors), but, ultimately, in the universal application of regulation over land and its use, including over historic buildings.

What best distinguishes the 1947 legislation is its scope, and principally that it established a comprehensive and universal system of land-use control. Then, as now, the system served the key function of balancing public and private interests. The creation of the post-war planning system effectively ‘nationalised’ the right of private individuals to develop land by stipulating that planning permission would be required for certain types of development. In return, these ‘applicants’ were afforded the automatic right of appeal (to a planning inspector or to the Secretary of State), should consent be refused. This newly created system of town and country planning would exist to secure the interests of the community, in cases where amenity would be harmed. Amenity itself was never defined, and, from 1947 to the present, it has been interpreted (usually by virtue of legal interpretation in the courts) in many ways. The public interest would, therefore, take precedence over the private right to develop land and property. Nevertheless, the private interest should not be unduly restricted or fettered (Pennington 2002), and, in a variety of circumstances, various freedoms, such as the right to extend a dwelling within a certain volume tolerance, would be deemed to fall outside planning control. Today, such freedoms from the need for planning permission are granted by subordinate (i.e. laid before Parliament) legislation, such as contained in the General Permitted Development Order and Use Classes Order (which permit certain building works and changes of use without planning permission).

What have changed since 1947 are the policy outcomes that the system is designed to achieve. In 1947, this meant post-war reconstruction. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, it meant ‘sustainable development’ and climate change mitigation and adaptation, so that, by way of example, government policy set an ambitious target that, by 2050, the UK’s emissions would be cut by at least 80 per cent and most probably 100 per cent of 1990 levels (Committee on Climate Change 2019). Year-on-year reductions in domestic emissions (up to 3 per cent annually) will be required. Planning is part of the mix of implementation mechanisms to achieve this. It is not the only one but is a significant player, so that planned layouts with transport choice reduce dependency on private vehicles and promote more fuel-efficient/carbon-reduced modes of living. In new housing schemes, planning can promote carbon-reduced/-efficient and/or carbon-zero design alternatives, based on renewables and energy-efficient passive solar gain-based designs.

A growing awareness of sustainability on an international stage has followed from work by the United Nations in hosting global summits in Rio de Janeiro (1992), Kyoto (1998), the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (2002), and that on climate change in Bali (2007). At its most fundamental, this subject area sets out to ‘make less last for longer’ (RICS 2002), so that future generations would still be able to use and benefit from environmental resources. Sustainability is to be embedded in the property lifestyle (that is to say, greenfield/estate management or urban open space, planning and procurement, new construction, occupation and use, including refurbishment and alterations and demolition and remediation; RICS 2009).

One key area of environmental threat comes from global warming, as the production of carbon dioxide and other emissions (from the burning of fossil fuels and other industrial processes) traps some of the sun’s energy and produces a rise in global temperature. Global consequences involve dramatic changes to weather patterns, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. At the 1998 Kyoto Agreement (Framework Protocol on Climate Change), the UK government committed itself to reducing the national production of such gases by 12.5 per cent (from a 1990 baseline) by 2012. This target represented a binding legal commitment, although the government subsequently set a series of more ambitious targets in line with the Paris Accord of 2015, including raising the bar to 80 or even 100 per cent by 2050 (UK Government 2019). Such an aggressive reduction within 30 years or so is often put forward as the minimum target to achieve a stabilisation of the levels of carbon and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the ability to peg global average temperature increases to below 2°C. To go beyond that level risks a runaway climate change effect that is both unrecoverable and unknown in its consequences, with a high probability of extreme weather, associated population movements, and consequential conflicts spread across the globe (Flannery 2007, UN Paris Accord 2015). Today, worldwide carbon emissions amount to some 38 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide released annually into the environment, as estimated by the Global Carbon Project, a research project run by the World Climate Research Programme. Yet, how can the planning system affect sustainability and climate change? This is the policy challenge for the system, today and in the future. The 2019 National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and its 2021 update sets the national agenda, calling for the planning system to support the transition to a low-carbon future and take a proactive approach in both mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (building resilience into the consequences). The national policy accepts that there will be long-term consequences for flood risk, coastal change, water supply, biodiversity, and landscapes as global temperatures rise and climatic impacts take effect.

The UK government is committed to the ‘roadmap’ established at Bali (2007) for the future international negotiations necessary to agree more aggressive cuts in carbon emissions, as then committed to at Paris and Glasgow (2015 and 2021) and in the UN’s Agenda 2030 and establishment of 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs; see Chapter 5 on sustainable urban development). The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) has also turned its attention to the implementation of these SDGs, with a recent focus on the delivery of partnerships (Goal 17), the business case for action (Goal 9), increasing capacity and knowledge building (Goal 4), fostering diversity, equality in the workplace (Goals 5, 8, and 10), and fighting corruption (Goal 16; RICS 2019). Spatial planning is centre stage in the challenge of delivering both climate change adaptation and mitigation and social justice (TCPA/RTPI 2018).

Sustainability, as a distinct discipline or component of town planning, is now some 30 years old and is much more mainstream and, indeed, embedded into the policy and delivery of planning (see TCPA/RTPI ibid.); advances in technology, coupled with dramatic price reductions, offer real solutions that both build resilience and offer new ways of thinking, with local energy supplies and renewable-based economic renewal strategies. Between 2010 and 2018, the cost of delivering solar photovoltaic electricity fell by 73 per cent (TCPA/RTPI ibid.), offering considerable incentives for the promotion of renewables in planning policy and planning applications. This harvesting of renewable energy thus took a considerable surge in the decade to 2019, so that, in the first 5 months of that year to May 2019, zero-carbon energy sources overtook fossil-fuel-based sources for the first time (that being 48 per cent renewables – including nuclear – 47 per cent coal and gas, and 5 per cent biomass). Within 10 years, coal-fuelled generation plunged from 30 per cent to 3 per cent. Although the planning system is not a generator of such costs and technologies of itself, it makes for the essential background, so that all local plans must set a carbon reduction target (as required in the Climate Change Act 2008), a strategic vision, and detailed policy targets. Place-making is a common policy objective now and easily fits this policy agenda with design policies that avoid flood-prone land and contain design treatments such as SUDS (sustainable urban drainage systems) and development patterns that reduce the need to travel, promote alternatives such as cycling, and rely on local energy production within each development (decentralised energy). All of this falls squarely within the realms of the planning system. As attitudes change, so the planning system leads the way and helps shift key thinking.

The World Commission on Environment and Development (the Brundtland Commission) provided the first and still most enduring definition of sustainable development: ‘Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (1987: 16). There is overwhelming scientific and demographic evidence in favour of action now (TCPA/RTPI ibid.).

Statistical evidence is compelling. For example, the United Nations estimated that, by 2030, 60 per cent of the world’s population will live in cities, and 68 per cent – or an additional 2.5 billion people – by 2050 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018). Put in the context of sheer numbers alone, the global urban population increased from 751 million in 1950 to 4.2 billion in 2018. The most rapid urbanisation will occur in Asia and Africa (currently where 50 per cent and 43 per cent resident populations live, respectively, and increases of up to 90 per cent are anticipated by 2050). A massive sustainability challenge unfolds that affects ‘housing, infrastructure, basic services, food security, health, education, decent jobs, and natural resources among others’, and in which an unprecedented global threat emerges from ‘unsustainable consumption and production patterns, loss of biodiversity both in urban and peri-urban areas, pollution, and disasters and climate change-related risks, undermining the efforts to end poverty in all its forms and dimensions and to achieve sustainable development’ (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018: see summary pages 3/33 and 4/33, to be found at Committee for Development Policy Report on the twentieth session, 12–16 March 2018). The phenomenon of the mega-city is on the increase, and, by 2030, a projected 43 such urban areas will exist, with populations in excess of 10 million people, although this conceals that fact that the largest urban agglomerations are cities with fewer than 500,000 people (accounting for half of all urban dwellers alone). For further information, see the UN’s World Urbanization Prospects 2018 (UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs 2018).

Of course, this is both a challenge and an opportunity, if immense ones at that, so that the successful management of urban growth becomes the goal, and especially so in low-income and middle-income countries where the pace of urbanisation is anticipated to be fastest. The effective implem...