No, Minister! Government alone can’t solve the housing crisis
BRIEFING NOTE #4
This is a series of briefing notes to yet another new housing minister. Here are some dangers to avoid, some well-trodden paths to be bypassed, and some barriers to thinking that need to be overcome (if we are serious about bringing about change)…….and, oh yes, here are some thoughts on how to deliver this change! Please stick around long enough to make it happen.
For three generations, governments the world over have tried to order and control the evolution of cities through rigid, top-down action. They have failed dismally. Everywhere masterplans lie unfulfilled, housing is in crisis, the environment is under threat, and the urban poor have become poorer. All around we see the unintended consequences of governments’ well-intended actions. Our cities are straining under the pressure of rapid population growth, rising inequality, inadequate infrastructure—all coupled with our governments’ ineffectiveness in the face of these challenges and their failure to deliver on their continued promises to build a better urban society for all of us. Everything we see out there is the outcome of the system. We struggle to point to any new viable and decent urban neighbourhoods anywhere in the world that we have created in the last three generations. The system is not broken: it was built this way.
Government alone cannot solve this problem. But there is another way. We need to change thinking, practices and language to enable government and people to work together to achieve the urban transformation that neither could achieve alone. The late Lord Kerslake, former head of the UK home civil service and the Department of Communities and Local Government, captured the need for change. The housing sector needed to find a common voice with a clear message to make best use of its high political status, he said. ‘There is an appetite to see new and different models develop. The challenge is who is going to come forward with the ambitious, innovative ideas to make things happen in the housing environment… What we want is for people to come forward with ideas and say we can do 80 per cent of this. What we need government to help us with is the 20 per cent. It’s about that demonstration of ambition across the sector that we really need to look for.’
Government must recognize that they can’t do everything, and nor should they. First, it needs to break down the full process into stages and find out where they should put in the 20 per cent. They need to see the whole system as different levels of intervention, from the scale of a whole city and its neighbourhoods to the individual householder. This will identify where they should lead and where others are more effective.
The current urban development model looks to justify change by calling it a pilot project, as if this process of experimenting and learning is an aberration or just ‘not normal’. In moving away from a system that focusses on fixed end states to one that sees trial and error, or emergent solutions, as the way forwards, we must recognise that at no point is the new system static. Evolution shows how a neighbourhood as a complex adaptive system is highly responsive to changing conditions. By its very nature, it is in permanent change, like a continuous experiment where we are always initiating, testing and accepting or rejecting outcomes as we learn about their success or failure.
Within this context, failure is necessary to learn, so we must not be scared of it, but embrace it. The secret is not to fail ‘big’ by focussing on big single outcomes. It is best to learn from many small failures because we can unpack these easily and try other options. This is evolution at work.
We should start by starting, and learn by doing. Using rapid and continuous feedback to evolve the NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL, we must always keep it open to challenge. By using simple rules to ensure open, responsive and collaborative environments, we should make it comprehensible to all.