Town and Country Planning articles from March 2006

Town and Country Planning archives from March 2006

25 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
March 1, 2006... PLANNERS recognise that planing policies pose political choices, but, paradoxically, they maintain that planning must be seen as a neutral, even a technical activity offering support and advice for politicians. There is an obvious contradiction...

10 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
March 1, 2006... EVEN though most of us still live in towns and cities, and so have a direct interest in overcoming their problems, there is no mass movement to support the maintenance and enhancement of the quality of life in towns and cities as a whole...

5 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
March 1, 2006... THE TRUTH is that a combination of technology, design, and planning can deliver all the luxuries expected by people today without overloading the earth's regenerative capacity. That is the first message that needs driving home. Only then can we...

Context: news digest, february 2006.(Public notice)
March 1, 2006... 2.2 Planning: The ODPM publishes Planning Circular 01/2006: Planning for Gypsy and Traveller Caravan Sites, replacing Circular 01/1994: Gypsy Sites and Planning. The ODPM also issues draft practice guidance for local authorities, Gypsy and...

TCPA publishes major book on Poundbury.(HOMES & COMMUNITIES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE)(Poundbury: The Town that Charles Built )(Book review)
March 1, 2006... THE TCPA has published a major book the Poundbury extension to Dorchester, providing the first comprehensive account of the important experiment pioneered by the Prince of Wales. Poundbury: The Town that Charles Built is written by Dennis...

Sustainable design and construction guide from the TCPA.(HOMES & COMMUNITIES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE)(Town and Country Planning Association)(Brief article)
March 1, 2006... THE TCPA's Sustainable Housing Forum has produced guidance on how spatial planning--at local and regional levels--can improve quality of life, reduce the impacts of climate change, and help to prevent future climate chaos by aiming for...

Tom Hancock--an appreciation.(HOMES & COMMUNITIES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE)
March 1, 2006... IT WAS with great sadness that the TCPA learnt of the death of Tom Hancock in January at the age of 73. Tom was a prominent architect-planner who worked on the initial masterplan for Greater Peterborough under the New Towns Act, working in...

City-region parallels.(Planning World)
March 1, 2006... AMERICA IS DIFFERENT. That long-rehearsed notion of American exceptionalism tends to recur whenever you seriously engage with events in that country. For one thing, the United States is a vast continental-scale country--far larger in...

School policy and planning.
March 1, 2006... WE HAVE recently experienced the dramatic reduction of rush-hour traffic that occurs during the school half-term holiday. The reduction can be as much as 40 per cent, and most of it occurs because children are not being driven to school in a...

A vision of mixed communities.(Talking Houses)
March 1, 2006... IN A SPEECH in the House of Commons in 1947 Nye Bevan set out his vision of the kind of communities the Labour government of the day sought to promote. He argued that "it is entirely undesirable that on modern housing estates only one type of...

Water of life: if we are to find working solutions to the urgent water resource management problems we face, the water regulator's role must be made more transparent and more responsive to the public interest.
March 1, 2006... DOWN IN deepest Sussex, 50 miles south of London, we were all praying for a wet rather than a white Christmas. The largest reservoir in the county, Bewl Water, was only 35 per cent full at the end of last year. Smaller reservoirs at Arlington...

A guide to building our futures: David Waterhouse explains how a newly published guide aims to help planners to predict the housing needs of an ageing population.
March 1, 2006... LOW BIRTH RATES and an increasing life expectancy are undisputed causal factors in the skewing demographic profile we see in the United Kingdom today. This is more pronounced in certain parts of the country than others: the South Coast and...

Housing design--towards a consumer-oriented view? Barry Goodchild reports the findings of a survey of views on current housing design conducted among residential surveyors.(housing design)
March 1, 2006... HOUSE BUILDING and design raise persistent questions of quality and, as part of this, questions as to whether developers provide what consumers want. Consumers influence the design of housing through the cumulative impact of patterns of demand....

Alley-gating--a view from the streets: Colin Rogers reports the findings of research on the outcomes of an alley-gating scheme in South Wales, introduced to reduce burglary, crime and the fear of crime.
March 1, 2006... 'Spaces such as communal walkways and pathways, children's play areas and alleyways behind houses that have been out of bounds for residents will be given make-overs to make them safer, cleaner and more attractive thanks to a 1.2 million...

New environments to fight retail fatigue: Peter Jones, David Hillier and Daphne Comfort look at the emergence in the USA of a new breed of 'lifestyle' shopping centres, which retailers hope will create a sense of place to counter the 'sameness' of many modern shopping environments and dispel nascent symptoms of retail fatigue.
March 1, 2006... WHILE THE UK now seems to be more of a nation of shoppers than the nation of shopkeepers Adam Smith described in the Wealth of Nations in 1776, retailing is certainly a major element in the UK economy. In 2004, for example, retailing generated...

Coming soon to a public space near you ...
March 1, 2006... I HAVE WATCHED with increasing fascination the transformation of two public spaces at either end of my journey to work. Both are consequences of a privately owned public realm and an associated view that public space can be made to 'work for...

The Nelson touch.(Horatio Nelson )
March 1, 2006... AS DARKNESS FELL on the evening of 1 August 1798, Admiral Horatio Nelson led the British fleet into action against the French in Aboukir Bay. The result was the first of his overwhelming victories, culminating in a catastrophic explosion that...

Shanghai's urban development.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2006... A RECENT ARTICLE by Matthew Carmona in his Design Matters column ('A tale of two cities', Town & Country Planning, Dec. 2005, pp.352-353) characterises Shanghai's urban development as telling a tale of two cities, one of 'unprecedented...

Financing 'smart growth'.(Letter to the editor)
March 1, 2006... JOHN WALKER rightly points out (Town & Country Planning, February 2006) how much could be achieved through a more strategic use of section 106. He also warns of the difficulties in calculating land value uplift when it comes to raising finance...

Transport--the key challenge.(global warming emissions)
March 1, 2006... I MAKE NO EXCUSE for devoting the whole of this column to transport: it is, after all, the only UK sector where climate change emissions seem to be completely out of control. Between 1990 and 2003, the global warming emissions from transport...

Stealth regionalism in California.
March 1, 2006... REGIONALISM in the US seems to come in waves, a little like religious revivals. And like waves, it dashes itself on the rocks of local land use control and the implacable hostility of local governments and populations to any increase in the...

Local delivery vehicles--talking shops or agents for change?
March 1, 2006... Introduction The number and type of Local Delivery Vehicles (LDVs) concerned with housing and growth has increased dramatically over the past five years. In addition to the emergence of community-based organisations--such as Development...