Town and Country Planning articles from October 2003

Town and Country Planning archives from October 2003

T&cp back bites.
October 1, 2003... 25 years ago THE SPIRIT of the regional framework is important, not necessarily the quantitative forecasts that structure plans seem either to reject totally or follow blindly. It negates the intention of the system if a county pulls up...

Planning.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 5.9 Planning: Changes to the planning system, outlined in ODPM Circular 8/2003 come into operation. The changes include a reduction of the time limit for lodging an appeal from six months to three months after a local authority has made its...

Sustainable development.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 9.9 Sustainable development: The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) officially launches its report on education for sustainable development (ESD), Learming the Sustainlability Lesson (HC 472) (previously published on 31 July...

Homelessness.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 10.9 Homelessness: ODPM statutory figures for homelessness in England indicate that as of June 2003, 93,480 households were in temporary accommodation--an increase of 14 per cent on the previous year. Included in this figure are 3,730...

Neighbourhood renewal.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 16.9 Neighbourhood renewal: Regeneration Minister Jeff Rooker announces the allocation of 175 million [pounds sterling] of Neighbourhood Renewal Fund (NRF) money, to be targeted on 26 of the 88 current NRF local authority areas. The 26 areas...

Planning: the ODPM issues draft Planning Policy Statement 7 (PPS7) for rural areas of England.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 17.9 Planning: The ODPM issues draft Planning Policy Statement 7 (PPS7) for rural areas of England, the first of a a series of new planning policy statements (PPSs) being introduced as part of the Government's planning reforms and intended to...

Transport.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 16.9 Transport: The first section of the Channel Tunnel rail link officially opens, reducing journey times to Paris by 20 minutes.

Transport: the DFT and the DES launch an initiative aimed at reducing the use of cars in school runs.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 17.9 Transport: The DFT and the DES launch an initiative aimed at reducing the use of cars in school runs. Travelling to School--An Action Plan from the Departments for Education and Skills and for Transport is to be backed by 50 million...

Regional development.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 17.9 Regional development: The New Local Government Network publishes New Localism, New Finance, a report by Professor lain McLean and Alistair McMillan of Oxford University, calling for a 'UK Grants Commission' to be established to allocate...

Sustainable development: the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) publishes its Sustainable Development Headline Indicators 2002 report.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 18.9 Sustainable development: The House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) publishes its Sustainable Development Headline Indicators 2002 report. www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/ environmental_audit_committee.cfm

Transport: in a submission to rail regulator Tom Winsor, Network Rail publishes plans.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 23.9 Transport: In a submission to rail regulator Tom Winsor, Network Rail publishes plans to cut 5 billion [pounds sterling] from its planned spending on Britain's railways over the next five years.

Planning: the RTPI awards the Gold Medal--its highest accolade--to Professor Sir Peter Hall, the TCPA President, for his 'immense contribution to the planning profession'.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 24.9 Planning: The RTPI awards the Gold Medal--its highest accolade--to Professor Sir Peter Hall, the TCPA President, for his 'immense contribution to the planning profession'. The Gold Medal will be presented at a keynote lecture to be given...

Energy.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 24.9 Energy: The Energy Saving Trust (EST) publishes Energy Efficiency in New Housing, a 'whole house specification' guide to energy efficiency specifications for new housing. Aimed at building professionals, it offers tailored information...

Transport: Transport Secretary Alistair Darling tells a conference in London that the rail industry cannot rely on any more public money.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 26.9 Transport: Transport Secretary Alistair Darling tells a conference in London that the rail industry cannot rely on any more public money; funds already committed could only be justified if performance improves and costs are cut.

Population.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 26.9 Population: The Office for National Statistics (ONS) releases new 2002 mid-year population estimates and revised 2001 population estimates. www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/popest0903.pdf

Brownfield land.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 29.9 Brownfield land: Figures released by the National Land Use Database (NLUD) indicate that 66,000 hectares of brownfield land were available for development on 31 March 2002--virtually unchanged from a year ago (a continuing flow of new...

Planning: Sue Essex, Minister for Finance, Local Government and Public Services in the Welsh Assembly Government, launches People, Places, Futures, a consultation draft of the Wales Spatial Plan.(Context: news digest, September 2003)
October 1, 2003... * 30.9 Planning: Sue Essex, Minister for Finance, Local Government and Public Services in the Welsh Assembly Government, launches People, Places, Futures, a consultation draft of the Wales Spatial Plan. The plan is intended to set a 20-year...

Reform for sustainable homes--report points the way.(TCPA)
October 1, 2003... A NEW REPORT from the TCPA, WWF-UK, and others has called for reform of the Building Regulations and the planning system to help bring sustainable housing into the mainstream. The report, Building Sustainably: How to Plan and Construct New...

Breaking one-size-fits-all.
October 1, 2003... PUBLIC SECTOR RELOCATION is a policy tool of considerable importance that has been neglected for over throe decades. The relocations undertaken during the 1960s and 1970s showed that decentralising central government activities can help to...

Home truths on housing need.(Inside Stories)
October 1, 2003... SEVEN NATIONAL housing and planning organisations have joined the TCPA's Home Truths initiative to put the case for building 250,000 sustainable homes per year over the next ten years in areas of the country where there are serious shortages....

More home truths at the conferences.(Director's Diary)
October 1, 2003... SEPTEMBER AND OCTOBER really have been conference season. At the Oxford Joint Planning Law Conference in September, Graeme Bell provided the star turn as after-dinner speaker. Gone are the days, he pointed out, in which a major planning...

South East housebuilding welcome--but delivery weaknesses cause concern, says TCPA.
October 1, 2003... THE TCPA HAS WELCOMED the Government's confirmation that it is pressing ahead with delivering the 200,000 extra homes announced for the South East earlier this year in Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future. 'We are finally realising...

Changing places.(People & Ideas)
October 1, 2003... OVER 40 YEARS AGO, Huw Wheldon conducted an interview with the writer Frank O'Connor for the TV programme Monitor in which O'Connor raised an issue which we seldom discuss: the fact that we all have assumptions about the right place for making...

Cities beyond the 49th parallel.(Planning World)
October 1, 2003... CANADIANS have always had a small-scale niggling identity crisis. Living in a country that's effectively 3,000 miles long and 200 miles wide, as they themselves put it, it's their incessant worry that in all the ways that matter--economically,...

Carry on at your convenience.(Trading Places)
October 1, 2003... IT IS EASY to gain the impression that small-shop retailing in Britain is seriously if not terminally unwell. A recent report from the London Green Party bemoans the loss of local food shops. (1) This echoes the conclusions of the New Economics...

Three unintended consequences.(Off the Fence)
October 1, 2003... The first... I WROTE A LETTER of Complaint to my local authority's highways department. The subject matter isn't relevant here but, since you ask, it was provoked by the wasteful and plain ugly smearing of double yellow lines where we had...

A nation ever more divided: Danny Dorling and Phil Rees summarise some of the key findings of one of the first studies of the preliminary Census results--a study that provides statistical evidence of increasing social division.(regional policy)
October 1, 2003... A CENSUS HAS BEEN HELD in the UK every ten years for the last 200 years, other than in 1941. Censuses are the only source of reliable information on the changing social geography of the nation. The 1991 Census, when analysed, revealed the...

Rethinking the regional question: the Government's current approach to tackling regional inequality fails to address the acute spatial concentration of power that leads to geographically unequal effects favouring one corner of the nation.(regional policy)
October 1, 2003... HOW IS IT THAT the Labour Patty, in the main elected by people from outside London and the South East, should so quickly have fallen under the region's spell, so that New Labour nowadays feels almost irrevocably metropolitan? We believe...

Forked tongues and invisible cities.
October 1, 2003... The Government's ambiguous approach to regional policy means it is nominally attempting to reduce disparities between regions while at the same time supporting growth and innovation in all regions simultaneously, and occasionally concentration...

New order--planning and local government reforms.(development planning)
October 1, 2003... It may be tempting to see recent and impending changes in the planning system as part of a longer-term ebb and flow, but such a view misses the significant impact that recent local government 'modernisation' reforms are having on the operation...

Is planning up to it? Is the planning system up to delivering sustainable development? Yvonne Rydin suggests that it may be more appropriate for the planning system to adopt the goal of environmental sustainability.(sustainable development)
October 1, 2003... SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT is now firmly on the planning policy agenda. Numerous policy statements make reference to sustainable development as a policy goal, from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister down to your local plan. New planning...

To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform.
October 1, 2003... By Ebenezer Howard Original edition with commentary by Peter Hall, Dennis Hardy & Colin Ward 'To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform is almost without question work in the history of modern town planning.' Sir Peter Hall, Director...

A good start ... but could do better: looking at the Making It Happen progress report on plans for development in the South East growth areas, Lee Shostak finds a decent start to delivering the promised sustainable communities but three major causes for concern.(communities plan)
October 1, 2003... IN JULY 2003, the Deputy Prime Minister published Creating Sustainable Communities: Making It Happen: Thames Gateway and the Growth Areas, (1) a report on the Government's efforts to implement the national strategy laid out in Sustainable...

At cost? Lynda Addison looks at the arrangements--or lack of them--for transport provision in the four growth areas.
October 1, 2003... TRANSPORT IS a crucial but so far neglected factor in making the Government's vision of 'sustainable communities' a reality. Britain certainly needs more housing (particularly affordable housing), but the new homes to be built within the four...

The paradox of homework-family gridlock.(liveability and land use)
October 1, 2003... If we attend exclusively to the physical arrangement of land use, neglecting the way social, transport, education, and work provision are becoming increasingly uncoupled and assuming that local access to jobs, housing, shops, and education will...

A better kind of choice: the idea of increased consumer choice seems attractive, but the devil is in the detail, says Riki Therivel; and a key prerequisite for a better type of choice is often a decent public service.(services and quality of life)
October 1, 2003... AT THE SUPERMARKET, we are offered dozens of variants of sausage and toothpaste. We can download hundreds of ring-tones for our mobile phones, and we can dress the phones up in hundreds of pretty covers. We can send our children to private...

Howard's sub-urban horror: one hundred years on from the start of work on Letchworth Garden City, Geoff Steeley revisits Ebenezer Howard's ideas with an eye to the future.(Letchworth centenary)
October 1, 2003... SWEATED LABOUR, foul air, sickness, family life degraded, overcrowding, noise, Malthusian morality. Is it any wonder that for Ebenezer Howard the need for reform was urgent--or that it remains so in many places in of the world today? Tackling...

Affordable, flexible, convenient: car clubs provide a vital link between private and public transport.(car clubs)
October 1, 2003... 'NO OTHER single transport policy hits so many Government targets' is the verdict on car clubs from David Begg, Chair of the Commission for Integrated Transport. (1) 'And they do it without swallowing up taxpayer's money.' So what targets do...

Inner city blues, Olympic gold: when it comes to initiatives to tackle deprivation, Hackney seems to have seen it all; yet its problems have remained stubbornly unyielding. But recent emerging trends have begun to look more promising, and the hope of fast-track revitalisation through the Olympics hangs in the air.(Hardy country: Hackney)
October 1, 2003... FOR FOLLOWERS of the inner city regeneration saga, Hackney seems to say it all. Repeatedly bottom or near bottom of important league tables of deprivation, it must seem to many an area without hope; if this were a football club it would long...

Can we do better?(Design Matters)
October 1, 2003... A GOOD FRIEND of mine asked me a little while ago to name my favourite town or city. My mind flittered from Paris to New York from Venice to Barcelona, and from Edinburgh to Hong Kong, but with the entire world to choose from, and after much...

A brief 'told you so' moment.(Future Work)
October 1, 2003... I WAS IN AUSTRALIA when I heard reports that plug is finally to be pulled on the Thorp nuclear reprocessing centre by 2010. It is completely uneconomic, its products aren't wanted by anybody, and the much vaunted reprocessing contracts with...

Models for compact quality.
October 1, 2003... Housing for a Compact City Architecture and Urbanism Unit Greater London Authority, 2003, ISBN 1 85261 493 0, PB, 36 pp. THE MAYOR OF LONDON set up his Architecture and Urbanism Unit under Lord Rogers in a conscious attempt to mimic the...

Clear, concise conservation guide.
October 1, 2003... Conservation Planning: A Guide to Planning Legislation and Managing Change By Ruth Richards and Maggie Urquart Planning Aid for London, 2003, ISBN, PB, 80 pp., 11.95 [pounds sterling] plus 2 [pounds sterling] p&p (Available from PAL. T:...

A re-introduction to Ebenezer's ideas.
October 1, 2003... To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform By Ebenezer Howard original edition with commentary by Peter Hall, Dennis Hardy, and Colin Ward Routledge, London, 2003, ISBN 0-415-31747-9, HB, 220 pp. + xii, 65 [pounds sterling] TO BE...

Explorations and discovery in Lisbon.(The Euro-Files)
October 1, 2003... WE HAVE BECOME used to seeing both Barcelona and Bilboa paraded in articles, magazines, and Sunday supplements as examples par excellence of European urban renaissance. Both cities have been transformed into vibrant, cosmopolitan, and exciting...

What's on.(Calendar)
October 1, 2003... October 28-29 Car Clubs: Achieving Integration. Carplus Annual Conference, Bristol. Details: Carplus (Car Club Network), Bristol. T: 0113-234 9299. W: www.carclubs.org.uk 30 Creating Sustainable Communities: Urban Extensions and...