No, Minister! You can’t just move deckchairs on the Titanic

BRIEFING NOTE #2

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. 

In recent decades, one new government announcement follows another. The speechwriter works from the familiar template: ‘we have a tech fix/a design fix/a financial fix/a policy fix’ (delete as applicable). More command-and -control policies are repackaged but prove, yet again, to be ineffective. Reorganisation follows reorganisation.  Flip follows flop, and back again

Another industry body/think tank/policy forum launches a new research paper/initiative/manifesto with a catchy title that tells us that the problem lies with planning/integration/fragmentation. Another expert tells us about the sheer scale of the problem, without providing any answers. Another complex funding concept from the developer of the moment keeps us in a state of suspended animation. Another modern method promises to save the housing industry, though the industry does not see the need for change. Another conference wafts on, its speakers’ interests deeply vested in the status quo. As the sheer scale of our housing shortage overwhelms us, there’s no better time than now to think and act differently. We cannot afford to waste the opportunity by shifting deck chairs on the Titanic. Now is the time to deal with the root causes and not just treat with the symptoms.

Civic leaders and urban professionals believe that they can control something as complex as a city, and they set forth their utopian plans, complex policies and bureaucratic practices precisely in a centralised regulatory system to do so. In our pursuit of certainty, we built the system this way. It was put in place in a different time, when governments believed they had to lead the process, deliver the homes and build the ideal urban society. How things have changed since those heady days. For years since that time, we have relied on ‘fixes’ to deal with the inadequacies of the system. Shifts towards sustainability, smart cities and urban resilience have become some of the patches we have made to its operations to hopefully make it work better. Most trend and then fail like most top-down strategic initiatives that have been tried and have failed in so many parts of the world. In truth, the system can’t be fixed. The bugs lie too deeply buried. The system has to be upgraded.

 Although delivering more and better housing is the sharp point of these briefing notes, they are framed within the larger challenges that our towns and cities face. These stem from the context of increasingly falling government effectiveness in addressing these challenges—all made worse by the its intentions to ‘do more with less’ and expressly withdraw from solving the full spectrum of urban problems. It is also set within the growing realisation that our current systems of planning, design and development have to change.

 So the briefing notes form part of a larger systems change perspective—how we need to move from restrictive top-down policies to generative urban protocols that release the potential of bottom-up action; how we need to move from deterministic practices that envision perfect end states to establishing the initial conditions for new urban vernaculars to emerge; and how we need new behaviours that move from our old, rigid, command-and-control processes to enabling and managing responsively in the present. The NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL gives us a way of starting without massive disruption.