Sprawl plugs

Sprawl plugs


The only sustainable solution to the housing crisis lies in 'recycling' cities, not building on the greenbelt. Anne Power and John Houghton make the case for 'smart growth'

Wednesday March 14, 2007
The Guardian


Britain has never truly loved its industrial cities. They have been fixed in the collective psyche as a place of danger, dirt and disorder, in stark contrast to the order and calm that we associate with life in the country, small towns and cathedral cities.
England is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Nearly half the population lives in suburbs and urban flight is continuing. The perimeters of our urban jigsaw are constantly being stretched outward, loosening the connections between inner and outer neighbourhoods, leaving gaps where there should be linked communities. There are those who proclaim that the city of the smokestack industries is dead, an industrial "outcrop" that has no place in a post-industrial society; that in our age of knowledge-based economies, IT and instantaneous worldwide communication, there is no economic need for or social benefit from forcing people to group together in large numbers if they would prefer to live outside the big city.

The doomsayers and utopians have got it wrong. But there are many things to be fixed before we can attract people back to cities in significant numbers. In survey after survey, the same concerns are cited by people of all ages and from all walks of life: too much pollution and dirt; transport connections within and between cities are too slow and unreliable, too disjointed and overstretched; too much vandalism and crime. The dream of a continental cafe culture has taken off in city centres, but there are weakening communal bonds and shrunken civic pride. The frayed and fragmented pieces that make up today's complex, multi-layered urban centres must be made to fit together.

In response to these problems, many people, particularly families, continue to decide that city life is not for them and opt for the peaceful suburbs or the countryside. When households with money and choice leave a city, their skills, their spending power and their involvement in civic life goes with them, and economic growth eventually moves to suburbs and smaller towns too. As people depart, informal city boundaries sprawl outwards, and roads are widened, extended or built anew to carry the extra traffic that sprawl generates. Leftover parcels of "degraded" green belt land become incorporated, and the physical size of cities spreads inexorably.

Sprawl is a damaging reality. Britain has doubled the number of homes since the second world war, but the cores of all our cities have smaller populations than they had at its outset. The biggest problem of city growth and decline is density. In 1900, we built - by law - terraced houses at 250 homes to the hectare. By 2000, density had dropped to 25 properties to the hectare. Land is being released for new developments to house the projected increase in households at unsustainably low densities. Given the current average of around 2.3 people per household, and the predominance of single-person households in new household projections (70% of the total), we need at least 50 homes (120 people) per hectare just to keep a regular bus going.

Shrinking household size and lower density have played havoc with land use and urban form. Many suburbs of family homes struggle to generate a sense of activity and neighbourliness; they gain a reputation for soullessness because the population is too thin to sustain local facilities and other infrastructure. Many inner cities feel deserted. Car-borne suburbanites drive into city centres for the new cultural and commercial attractions, but inner cities, increasingly traffic jammed, become a knot of clogged arteries with a still pumping heart at the centre.

Vital infrastructure

It does not have to be like this. The government has grand designs for British cities. The 2003 Sustainable Communities Plan proposes mixed communities that will house people in neighbourhoods of lasting quality and protect the countryside from suburban sprawl. But this ambition may be thwarted by the political imperative to build quickly and cheaply, and the developer imperative to make a profit. Instead of slowly strengthening our cities by rebuilding within existing communities where there are almost infinite small sites and many larger brownfield sites, we still turn to grand plans that quickly run out of funding, undermining both community viability and historic value.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's 2005 five-year plan proposes that 1.1m extra homes will be built across the wider south-east region by 2016. In theory, new communities can be well-planned, well-designed, well-connected, eco-friendly neighbourhoods, offering high-quality facilities and services, housing a balance of households and services. If its intent converted readily into reality, it would create the kind of communities everyone dreams of. But there are many hurdles in the way, not least the sheer scale of public investment required to service these communities with public transport and other crucial infrastructure. With the private sector driving profits and the government driving numbers and lower costs, we are more likely to end up with the lowest common denominator.

Alarming examples are already appearing in the Thames Gateway, and in Kent and Essex, of poorly designed, poorly connected, largely private estates with few services, little vitality and "dumbed down" design, condemned even by developers. Far from creating "sustainable communities", the government's ambitious building targets threaten the urban and rural environment by making it too easy to build for demand outside the main cities rather than looking at how demand could be met and managed in favour of more sustainable existing communities.

The future of cities lies in what we call "smart growth". This means containing the expansion of cities, by creating a fixed urban growth boundary, and intensively regenerating existing neighbourhoods to reverse the flight of people, jobs and investment into land gobbling, congestion generating and environmentally damaging urban extensions. Cities have a pulse, a biorhythm based on their resource use, waste and dependence on natural capital. When they grow outwards, these patterns become overstretched.

We can expand our housing supply virtually without touching new greenfield land and almost entirely within the framework of existing communities by reusing buildings, reusing infill sites and operating at a density that will sustain the services we want. Some places are already doing this. Given that at least 70% of the homes and urban infrastructure that we will have in 2050 already exist, it is crucial that we make what is already there work better.

The smart growth approach works best by engaging residents to develop specific improvement plans that include changing the use of some buildings, mixing tenures, nurturing small businesses and revitalising social spaces, particularly parks. By revitalising social and physical infrastructure, a critical mass of people large enough to sustain local services and compact enough to retain a sense of community can be created. As much as any financial or physical improvement, it is a sense of community that makes a neighbourhood successful and liveable.

Smart growth works because it offers people something that dull, predictable, out-of-town housing developments and shopping complexes can't: the buzz that goes with variety in condensed, worn-in spaces. If we apply the smart growth principle to our cities, we neither need as many new houses as the Sustainable Communities Plan assumes, nor do we need the vast growth areas covering virtually the entire southern part of the country.

Only a smart growth approach to accommodating the continuing increase in households, particularly in London and the south-east, can subvert the return to the discredited policy of "predicting" the number of homes we need and simply "providing" them. The government's restrictions on extremely low density, limiting new building increasingly to brownfield sites, has begun to create a smart growth attitude. If pushed, these powerful planning levers could gradually help repopulate the existing urban communities that have halved in population over the last 50 years. Taking 50 homes per hectare - around 115 people - as our viable baseline for a regular bus service and a local school, we need to jump from 40 homes per hectare on average, a 30% improvement on the government minimum density guideline in 2000, to 50 homes per hectare very quickly. Greater density reduces land use and therefore the cost of each home as land makes up about 60% of the cost. It supports public transport that reduces the need for multiple cars per household, and even a car at all.

There is a danger in idealising dense city centre life. Living among large numbers of strangers can be noisy, alienating and sometimes lonely, even threatening. Noise between flats, maintenance of common areas and the integration of families with different incomes and cultural backgrounds are all major hurdles in the pursuit of a viable city. It is hard to get the balance right between the "24-hour city" and people's desire for "peaceful occupation of the home". New growth in city centres almost entirely excludes families, who have a humanising influence on social relations and community conditions. There is a lot more to do before we make our cities smart.

Unless cities consume a small fraction of today's energy and recycle virtually everything, they will never be sustainable. Whereas we dump most of our waste, we could compost half our rubbish, to feed our parks, gardens, urban forests and street planters. Some councils have pushed their recycling up to 50% but many cities only reach 15%. Neglect of neighbourhood environments drives people to spread out, use more land, drive more cars and destroy more essential environmental goods. Thus the social and economic problems of cities have to be addressed as part of a bigger environmental strategy. The environmental damage cities have wrought over vast tracts of land for the past two centuries has to be made good.

The critical challenges within existing communities are threefold: to upgrade homes and environments to the point where they counter the attraction of new-build communities; to add with immense care the buildings and spaces we now need within the spaces that are bare; and to make each existing and new home into a highly insulated, energy efficient micro-generator and recycler.

This is easier said than done but the Sustainable Development Commission, the Building Research Establishment and English Heritage have all conducted in-depth research to show that in practice existing homes can be made as energy efficient as the average new-build home; using one sixth of the energy, their inputs of materials and waste are far lower, they last longer and they are cheaper to maintain.

The Oxford University environmental research unit has now shown that with micro-generation using proven local technologies, existing houses can be made as eco-sustainable as new. This is crucial evidence and it requires a different approach to planning. It does not mean "no" to new-build; it means building in ways that enhance existing communities and cities. Applying this knowledge with the right incentives, cities can help our life and death battle against environmental destruction.

It is unsurprising that so many communities up and down the country are concerned about the future. The government's almost frenetic desire to relax planning and release land for development will unleash more and more overdevelopment. Involving local people in upgrading their communities will encourage upgrading and infill to make them more sustainable.

Slash and burn

Many people think that we have built an urban jungle from which we must escape, destroying all in our path. But this "urban jungle" is not tamed by clear felling, slash and burn; for it creates a wealth of diversity that keeps us alive. If we think of cities as "rainforests" instead of urban jungles, we will recognise their immense potential value as richly diverse, crowded and intense medleys of colour, sound and constant renewal to be harvested and protected simultaneously.

Cities, large, difficult and ambitious, stretch human capacity to its limit, yet within their small crowded spaces we find myriad signs of regrowth. In this lies our hope for the future.

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