Town and Country Planning articles from January 2005

Town and Country Planning archives from January 2005

25 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
January 1, 2005... SELDOM can the future for planning have seemed so dark and uncertain. The mood of the age is categorically anti-planning. It is in favour of setting the people free, to see whether their unrestrained energies can help breathe some life into the...

10 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
January 1, 2005... WE could benefit from reminding ourselves of the wisdom and sustainability enshrined in the early garden cities. They offered low-density development at an acreage ideal for the use of solar energy, recycling and water collection, small-scale...

5 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
January 1, 2005... AS the 21st century dawns, locality is back in the frame, as is participative democracy, cooperative planning and long-term partnerships in governance, based on best value for the good of all and backed by indicators, sensitive monitoring and...

Context: news digest, December 2004.
January 1, 2005... * 1.12 Planning: A research report on Measuring Densities of New Dwellings and Proportions on Brownfield Land is published by the ODPM. www.odpm.gov.uk/stellent/groups/ odpm_planning/documents/page/odpm_plan_033078.pdf * 5.12...

Biodiversity and geological conservation.(Inside Stories)
January 1, 2005... * Consultation on Planning Policy Statement 9: Biodiversity and Geological Conservation. ODPM, London, Sept. 2004 The TCPA Response RESPONDING TO draft Planning Policy Statement 9: Biodiversity and Geological Conservation, the TCPA...

TCPA urges South East Assembly to recognise the housing crisis.(Inside Stories)
January 1, 2005... IN THE RUN-UP to the consultation on the draft South East Plan, the draft Regional Spatial Strategy for the South East, the TCPA urged the South East England Regional Assembly (SEERA) to recognise the acute housing shortages in the region and...

Travelling space.(People & Ideas)
January 1, 2005... PEOPLE WITH any particular reform or social change to advocate devote enormous energy to lobbying our legislators, and a usually less than ideal version finally emerges. Arthur Koestler used to tell the tale of the bewildered friend who asked...

History lessons and memory failure.(Planning World)
January 1, 2005... LIKE MOST magazines, Town & Country Planning is fond of taking its readers back down Memory Lane: what planners were up to five years ago, or even ten. It's salutary to take the game back a little further. What was happening in our planning...

Retail therapy or shock therapy?(Trading Places)
January 1, 2005... SOME YEARS AGO I took part in a study visit around several district centres in the West Midlands conurbation. We saw centres where investment had been made in enveloping schemes and other improvements, and others where nothing much had...

A pre-debate kind of debate: Pat Willoughby looks at the key features of the ODPM's Draft Revised Circular on Planning Obligations and at whether it is likely to deliver its objectives of speed, certainty, transparency, and accountability in the planning obligations system.(planning obligations)
January 1, 2005... READING THE Draft Revised Circular on Planning Obligations issued for consultation by the ODPM (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) reminds me that planning is becoming an increasingly complicated and lengthy process. Speaking at...

Stealth policy shift on transport: last summer's Transport White Paper suggests that there is a real danger that a congestion-centric transport policy will jeopardise a decade of environmental transport policy reforms.(transport policy)
January 1, 2005... JUST BEFORE Parliament rose last summer came the surprise publication a new transport policy White Paper. (1) The timing was probably intended to play down what amounts to a stealth shift in transport policy. In the six years since the...

Making places of delight: opening a special section on delivering sustainable communities, Peter Hall offers prescriptions for delivering sustainable communities in three different contexts--brownfield in the South, brownfield in the North, and greenfield in both North and South.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... BEFORE WE START delivering sustainable communities, we'd better define what we think sustainable communities are. That, as everyone knows, is where we enter the realms of medieval theological disputation, or even an Alice in Wonderland world;...

The unanswerable case for new homes: opposition to large-scale building of new homes remains as strident as ever, but the real question is not whether we build new homes, but when, where, and how quickly.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... SIX FIGURE SUMS--they have a certain ring about them. So as a Christmas story there was something unavoidably powerful about the fact that at the end of 2004 the number of families trapped in emergency accommodation had breached 100,000 for the...

Funding and delivering infrastructure for sustainable communities: under today's complex circumstances of mixed funding and delivery through partnerships, the keys to securing adequate finance for the infrastructure needed in the growth areas are leadership and joined-up agendas.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... THE NEAREST EQUIVALENT of many of the new 'Sustainable Communities Plan' growth areas are the new towns, and to a lesser extent the urban development corporation areas of the 1980s and 1990s. Delivery was via statutory development corporations...

Towards a Randstad of the North: attempts to tackle the growing regional economic disparities across Britain cannot succeed without a national spatial strategy.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... THERE ARE many 'wicked' issues facing Britain today. Some are obvious, but--equally obviously--too wicked. Transport and the progressive gridlocking of our transport system is the prime example which may challenge even the most fertile of...

So where's the vision for England? Given the lack of a strategy for England as a whole, plans and proposals for development sometimes seem like a wish-list without an essential route map.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... JOHN PRESCOTT'S VISION for 21st century living has sometimes appeared like a variation of the 'New Urbanism' so popular in liberal America. Across the Atlantic, from the Seaside new township in Florida to the towering structures of Chicago, the...

New urbanism--friend or foe? Despite some obvious failings, 'New Urbanism' has played a leading role in re-establishing the importance of urban design, presenting us with an opportunity to advance the debate on the theory and practice of urbanism--an opportunity that would be wasted by easy acceptance, or rejection, of New Urbanist ideas.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... WHILE WORKING on one of the ODPM's Design Coding Pilot Programme projects, one of my senior urban designer colleagues--a young Australian who has collaborated on major new settlements with the likes of Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and...

The missing ingredient: attempts to deliver more sustainable communities could all too easily be thwarted by our process management inadequacies.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... SOME YEARS AGO, the University of the West of England published a book entitled Sustainable Settlements; a superb compendium of ideas for what to include to create a truly sustainable settlement. Sadly, it lacked a key chapter. Although full of...

Wildlife = quality of life: the 'Sustainable Communities' agenda should be promoting wildlife habitat as a positive component in the regeneration of our urban areas and as an integral feature of the growth areas.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... IS BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION relevant to sustainable communities? Can wildlife and ecology contribute to the liveability agenda? Does hearing a song thrush on your walk to work, or simply knowing that water voles are present in the river...

The disability challenge: one of the 'Sustainable Communities' issues uppermost in the minds of disabled people is whether the major housing crisis that they face will be fully addressed.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... ACCESSIBLE and affordable housing is key to independent living for 10 million disabled people in Britain; but for many it is more a dream than reality. The current lack of accessible housing severely limits independence, geographical mobility,...

Back from tomorrow--letters to the Deputy Prime Minister.(delivering sustainable communities)
January 1, 2005... The TCPA is now over 100 years old. Ebenezer Howard, its founder and author of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, was one of the first champions of sustainable communities. Lee Shostak speculates on what Howard might be saying to John...

Smarter growth and the reform of the business rate: Nicholas Falk suggests ways in which the Local Authority Business Growth Incentive scheme could be turned into something that would have lasting beneficial impact on the shape and condition of our towns and cities.(financing the public realm)
January 1, 2005... THE LYONS INQUIRY into Local Government Funding has to address some fundamental issues about where taxes are raised, and how they are distributed. The current situation is unsustainable: Britain is more centralised than almost any other Western...

Creativity, wealth creation, and place: if cities are to prosper and create wealth--to provide jobs, income, and funds for public spending income and to pay for environmental husbandry--it is essential that they retain in balance a creative and dynamic economy, an innovative cultural life, and a 'good fit' of the built form to activity.(city dynamics)(Cover Story)
January 1, 2005... THE DEATH of the city has been predicted with enthusiastic gloom at various points during the last 150 years. The best-known example would be Lewis Mumford's 1938 classic The Culture of Cities, (1) in which he predicted that the 'Megalopolis'...

Time for a new water course?(water use and supply)
January 1, 2005... With serious questions being asked about the feasibility of meeting the likely water supply needs of new developments in the South East and Eastern regions of England, Caroline Brown suggests that, with some minor tweaking, the planning system...

Towards a civic renascence? In the second of three articles on Patrick Geddes, Neil Grieve, Deborah Peel, and Greg Lloyd examine contemporary Geddesian resonances in the emergent interest in urban renaissance and regionalism.(planning history and current practice)
January 1, 2005... PUBLIC POLICY increasingly turns on a perceived need for a 'civic renascence' in modern society. This aspiration is not confined simply to the economic, social, and physical renaissance of towns and cities and the regeneration of communities,...

The cutting edge of sustainability.(Low-Impact Living)
January 1, 2005... READERS OF David Lock's column (T&CP, Sept. 2004) will know that 'Gummer's Law'--allowing an exemption for large, high-quality 'Country Houses' to be built in the open countryside--resurfaced in the Government's new planning policy statement...

The end of the road for NDCs?(The Regeneration Game)
January 1, 2005... THE NEW DEAL for Communities programme has been the largest area-based government regeneration project for deprived neighbourhoods. Recent months have seen New Deal for Communities projects (NDCs) subject to well publicised financial and...

The two minds of Gordon Brown.(Going Local)
January 1, 2005... IT USED to be said, about the old Soviet Union, and similar benighted regimes, that citizens fell into the habit of interpreting their media rather than believing exactly what it said. It wasn't that they believed the opposite, as it used to be...

Who guards the Guardian?(writeback)
January 1, 2005... I ALWAYS ENJOY David Lock's inimitable knock-about journalism, take 'formidable advocate of green strategies' as a compliment, and am chuffed to be in his stocks if the others lined up to cop the rotten tomatoes that miss me include such...

Trouble in Oregon.(Inside America)
January 1, 2005... Amid the wreckage of the 2004 US presidential election, the attack on planning in Oregon probably passed unnoticed on the European side of the Atlantic. Nonetheless, it may turn out to be very significant. If one were to ask a random sample...