Cul-de-sacs and Perverse Incentives

The few homes we do build today are an expression of the environment in which they are built. This is a political environment: shortly, it is based on what builders are allowed to do and what they are not. Contemporary housing, therefore, registers the successes and failures of our planning system like emotions rendered on a face. 

Take a quick look at the National Planning Policy Framework—the document which controls most of our planning rules in this country—and you notice a running theme. Harm. Many things are seen in terms of ‘harm’, ‘substantial harm’, which must be guarded against as ‘exceptional’ or ‘wholly exceptional’. What things can one harm? Heritage, of course, but also much more arbitrary inventions of the planning system like our so-called ‘green belts’. 

The planning system as it currently stands behaves as though building is tantamount to invasive surgery. Some projects cut deep into the heart—in an urban centre, for instance—others are simple skin grafts. All building is, to a greater or lesser degree, considered damaging. It is only that certain levels of damage can be accepted for the greater good. You will notice a negative loading of the dice here—and it stands to my experience and that of many others in my field (I’m a heritage consultant so active in the planning world) that positive descriptions of a building project by the authorities are very rare indeed. 

The problem with all this is that construction is not invasive surgery. It is, of course, constructive. Yet the attitude towards buildings sticks, and it characterises what is and is not possible to create. 

One type of development that is miraculously easy to build in this country is very visible indeed, and yet it does little at all to alleviate our woes. These aren’t just housing crisis woes but climate woes. This is what one could call the ‘subtopian village’—in reference to Ian Nairn’s apt phrase. 

The ‘subtopian village’ isn’t just a grim, low-density suburb, but it looks towards the village model of minimal density and fully detached houses. It also eschews the neatly organised streets of a true garden village like Letchworth or Welwyn. No—the design of the ‘subtopian village’ is based on a pencil scribble cul-de-sac road. It meanders according to no particular reason, like an intestinal tract to maximise workable surface area. Yet the houses along these roads are far from efficient: they are invariably small and rotated at odd angles. 

Perhaps most importantly of all, these ‘subtopian villages’ are plonked either in rural locations, or in urban fringes. As a result, they are totally car dependent. This means that the residents of such a place are condemned to a big carbon footprint, and the environment in which they and their children exist is characterised more by tarmac than by brick and cobble. As ever, the places where the internal combustion engine is prioritised are ones where the human is sidelined. 

Because of the location of these developments, however, they are extremely visible. They stick out as collections of boxes on hillsides, as brick doll’s houses one zooms past on the train. Their ugliness is undeniable and their cynicism is palpable. The tragedy is that they claim the reputation of housebuilding as a whole. It does not have to be like this. 

As I have emphasised before and will continue to do, the beautiful terraces of the late 18th and 19th centuries were built by none other than ‘greedy developers’. They were not built by local authorities but by entrepreneurs who wanted nothing but to make money. The modern housebuilder also wants to make money. What’s changed? 

The answer is, of course, the planning system, which did not constrain the terrace builders of yesteryear. The constrained housebuilder of today ends up with a much uglier, and oddly, much more carbon-intensive project than before. The reason? Part of it comes back to our opening lines—harm. 

The thing is, a car-dependent, rural development does not have existing neighbours. Fields do not have a ‘right to privacy’. Places that do not have jobs and do not have transport do not have an ‘infrastructure burden’ in the eyes of NIMBY residents. The planning system sees the high-damage, low benefit development as a ‘harmless’ development. In other words, while we’d hope that planning is a productive system, using the arm of the state to improve projects,  in reality it is the mother of perverse incentives. 

I have personally overseen a number of tiny-scale house building and extension projects in urban infill sites. In all cases, such developments are met with a torrent of objection comments from neighbours and intense scrutiny from local planning officers. The small-scale, often visually exceptional and interesting projects are those that either get refused permission, or shrunken in scale and ambition. On the other hand, I have seen numerous ‘subtopian villages’ in my time which aren’t met with a single objection. As long as they can prove that they are ‘infill’ or ‘rounding off’, there is no ‘harm’ or ‘sensitivities’ to be worried about. The subtopian village, therefore, is about the easiest, most lucrative thing that can be built under current conditions. 

What is the result of all this? Sure, a house is a house, but these are very visible houses which asphalt over swathes of land, while providing very little space for people. In the mean-time, the carbon dioxide adds up, and the social cohesion that comes with denser places is lost. 

This is a symbol of the broader problems of the planning system. It separates the wheat from the chaff—and then tries to make flour out of the chaff. Incentives for beauty and density need to be vigorously restored if we are to solve our climate commitments, and our commitment to the health, wealth and prosperity of future generations.