It took a riot to change this? – revisited. Planning for people - not profit.

By DAVID WALSH

A hell of a lot of harrumphing and acres of printed sermonising followed the recent riots. Most concentrated on criminality - and criminality was there aplenty, for sure.

We may not - I don't - shed buckets of tears for JD Sports, PC World or Vodaphone as corporate, wealthy entities - but we should shed tears at the spectacle of elderly working class shopkeepers who saw their hairdressers or local newsagents torched for no gain by those who who merely wanted spectacle.

So on to the seemingly arcane question about what may link the Government's Planning Bill to the recent riots?

As someone involved over the years in the seemingly boring and mundane processes of local authority planning (as both a Planning Committee Chair and then a Council leader), let me venture some thoughts that the two are more tightly interlinked that most people think.

Planning, whether from the perspective of developers or from the perspective of local authority planning officers and politicians, is at heart, a process of determining the built form of a town, a village or an estate. It is seen by the elites as a mediative process, viewing it as a way of resolving contradicting views on the built environment and therefore, in theory, utterly apolitical or, indeed, unpolitical.

But of course it is nothing but political - and highly political too. This is apparent to all but the politically blind. Development can be, and usually at heart is, for the pursuit of simple profit from land, aggrandisement or for the corporate satisfaction of the need on the part of the wealthy for the goods and services they covet and can afford.
The new planning bill, by explicitly arguing for an automatic presumption for 'development' and 'growth', now underwrites this ideology by giving it the full force of law.

In a polarised society such as ours today, one where patterns of inequality, now the norm, are as wide as they have ever been since the 1930's, the development industry is simply the instrument for the creation and re-cycling of wealth for the already wealthy.

Over recent years the process of 'urban renewal' has led, seemingly inexorably, to the gentrification of major parts of our former manufacturing cities, luxury apartment blocks, loft conversions in old factories, the throwing up of new 'gated' communities to keep the poor and the criminal from the door and the erection of new shopping complexes catering for the consumption needs of the wealthy and for the rising new middle class.



These gleaming developments, either tasteful rendering of old apartment blocks or old school or mills and factories, or new gleaming glass, anodised steel and titanium dream palaces, are not projects that are moulded for, or intended to meet, the needs of the poor and dispossessed.

Their place is either in poor city centre sub-standard housing, literally a stones throw from the new opulence, or in our own version of the French banlieue on the peripheral estates.

These communities - like Hemlington or Hardwick, Thorntree or Thornaby New Town - were thrown up in the 1960's as seemingly desirable new housing for local families from the street terraces, but, starved of any real investment or TLC as they have been since Mrs Thatcher's time, they have become mere parking lots for families and individuals increasingly excluded from most of civil society and especially from the jobs market.

They are everywhere - from Birmingham's Chelmlsey Wood to London's Thamesmead and from Glasgow's Drumchapel to Edinburgh's Wester Hailes.

But these communities did not - at least by and large - feature in the rioting. Why?

To answer that we need to look at those places that did riot. The cities and communities that erupted on Monday 8th August are those where the rich live cheek by jowl next to the poor: £1,000,000 Georgian terraces next to estates with some of the deepest poverty in the EU. They are towns and estates where shopping parades made up of 99p stores are just a short bus ride from retail parks and glittering and guarded shopping malls selling clothes, jewellery and household electronics that are denied by price, availability and cachet from the poor estates.

In short wealth and poverty are like oil and water. They can never and will never mix, however close they may be on the surface of a river.

The urban design writer and socialist critic, Owen Hatherley, put it brilliantly in a recent essay.
"Look at the looted, torched places, look at what they all have in common. Look at Bristol, a port where you could walk for miles and wonder where its working class had disappeared to, which seems to have been given over completely to post-hippy tourism, 'subversive' graffiti, students and shopping.

Look at Croydon, where you can walk along the spotless main street of the central privately owned, privately patrolled Business Improvement District and then suddenly find yourself in the rotting mess around West Croydon station.

Look at Manchester's city centre, the most complete regeneration showpiece, practically walled-off from those who exist outside the ring-road.

Look at Salford, where Urban Splash sells terraces gutted and cleared of their working class population, to Media City employees with the slogan 'own your own Coronation Street home'.

Look at Nottingham, where private student accommodation looming over council estates features a giant advert promising 'a plasma screen TV in every room'.

Look at Brixton, where Zaha Hadid's hedge-funded Academy has a disciplinary regime harsher than some prisons, and aims to create little entrepreneurs, or little future CEOs out of the presently lamentably unaspirational estate-dwellers.

Look at Birmingham's new Bull Ring, yards away from the scar of no-man's land separating it from the dilapidated estates and empty light-industrial units of Digbeth and Deritend.

This is our urban Britain, and though the cuts have made it worse, the damage was done long before."


The rioting is not a the revolt of a new, politicised, post working class, looking to new ways to their salvation and self-awareness. It is no more or less that a new 'politics of despair'.
As I said in my opening paragraph, there is nothing to be happy about in the plight of working class people losing their homes or occupations from the actions of other working lass people and it would be infantile to cheer on rioters against corner shopkeepers trying to defend their already small livelihoods; but equally so to pretend that this had nothing to do with the press caricatures of the young and poor, of the nightmares of editors and overpaid commentators of the 'feral underclass' and hooded hoodlums, or nothing to do with our brutally unequal society where the poor are steadily becoming poorer and where the unhealthy die younger, or nothing to do with our failed and pathetic trickle-down attempts at amelioration is to simply deny reality.
It is time then for the labour movement to recognise that the urban environment we live in is not one that is 'neutral', and that the actions of developers, big retailers and land owners are the actions of people wishing to both maximise their wealth and to protect that wealth from any attempts by others to use the planning system to - in any way - redistribute that wealth or power.

People on the Left may still feel a sense of achievement about some of the changes that have taken place in British society since the 1960s, and which past Labour Governments and past Labour Town Halls bought about, but we also need to be asking some very fundamental questions about how our urban development policies are structured and - above all - to see that future urban policies are ones based on the real needs and aspirations of working class communities and are devised, structured and built, not by the professional elites of the planning and architectural world, but rather on the consent of the people who, at the end of the day, have to be the inhabitants of that new urban world.

They deserve better and they should have better.