No, Minister! It is about enabling neighbourhoods
BRIEFING NOTE #5
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.
Believe it or not, we haven’t built a viable new urban neighbourhood anywhere in the past three generations!
The housing crisis is not just a crisis in delivery - it is a crisis in thinking how we want live. We are clearly not building enough homes, but we are also not building homes that meet our citizen’s whole-life needs. We have seen housing solely as a product, not as one of the most essential ingredients for building a well-developed urban society. Housing must be seen as part of a wider picture that embraces building community - not just building houses. We must think about how we build neighbourhoods not just the monolithic buildings and housing estates we are still building today (whether they are public are private) - no matter how well they are designed. A housing estate will always be the individual expression of collective needs. People take what they are given. A single hand defines it. One size fits all. It struggles to find its soul. A neighbourhood, on the other hand, is the collective expression of individual needs. People are free to operate within a clear framework of structured choices. Many hands shape it. It is long-life and loose-fit so it endures. It is all about soul. It often referred to as the best example of ‘sustainable urbanism’.
Firstly, we must recognise neighbourhoods as both the coalfaces and building blocks of urban society: that critical coming together of people and place to build our great city. As the building blocks of our urban fabric, they are the single most important unit of social, cultural and local economic development. They provide a sufficient scale of human settlement where collective social capital can be developed and harnessed to achieve a greater whole. They are places where social integration, social transformation and social advancement can flourish. They are places where wounds can be mended and new relationships can be built. They are places where social concern can be exercised, the less-well-off can be cared for, and the latent assets that exist in the young and old can be harnessed. They are the hotbeds of innovation and the springboards of evolution. They are too important to ignore in building viable cities and towns. Like family and friends, they are all we have. In this sense, they are larger versions of households.
We know this is a big challenge, but our best chance of delivering the kind of neighbourhoods we want, with scalable housing solutions, lies in intensifying our well-located pre-war and inter-war suburbs - where a full spectrum of fine-grained mixed-use housing opportunities should be explored for all. This could be from the smallest actions such as secondary dwellings on back mews, to rebuilding within the confines of individual plots to localised consolidation to increase housing density. In all instances, we must find ways of releasing underutilised space without displacing people. We must open up the potential from shared housing to live/work solutions to provide opportunities for those starting up in life. In order to bring about change that people understand (and embrace), we must invite participation by landowners acting together. We must incentivise action and provide necessary support to make this happen.
To build a better urban society, we must build social capital in every possible instance. In turn, we must use the social capital to build the type of neighbourhoods we want. The only way we can do this is by creating a facilitative environment where a new type of NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL can thrive.