SERIES 1: No, Minister! Briefing notes (as if) from your Housing Adviser
BRIEFING NOTES 1.1-12
This is the first in a series of briefing notes written 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.
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No, Minister! Don’t be caught in the headlights of big numbers
BRIEFING NOTE #1.1: THE BURNING TEMPTATION
Left and right politics have become the same side of the coin in the UK. Both believe they can solve the housing problem by promising big numbers and delivering big solutions. Targets are set and never met. The big risk is that the government continues to do even more of what it did before, in the hope that it will solve the problem. So, each new housing minister falls into the same trap. In some form, all have failed. Now the magic number is 1,500,000 homes (and by 2029)! Once we are caught in the headlights of such a big number, it’s inevitable that you grab for big solutions. This leads to more strategic initiatives, more big visions and, more big procurement processes that promise big change but always fail to deliver both the numbers and the kind of places we want.
In blind desperation, we play the New Towns ticket, forgetting their reality. They were delivered in the post-war Beveridge years, when the government seriously intervened – a principle that will prove difficult to mobilise in the social market economy of today. They were delivered with the promise of a social utopian, ‘Brave New World’, which never materialised – a promise that has little or no meaning today. They were delivered in a time when the necessary public sector skills and resources existed – a quality we have lost in recent decades. We also forget that probably our best example of a new town, Milton Keynes, took 10 years to incubate and another 30 years to develop. It only produced over 100,000 new homes. So, from start to finish, this only represented some 2,500 homes per year. A drop in the ocean when we are considering our big numbers. Clearly a non-starter, given the government’s 5-year window of opportunity. The green belt (or ‘grey belt’, as it is also referred to) also becomes a same old target…same old problem! There may be some opportunities but they will take endless time to unlock these.
Grey belt [definition]: A place free of objectors, where imaginary housing numbers are dreamt up, at the expense of good urbanism.
This is the time for upside down thinking. We need to come out of the glare of the headlights and zoom in from the large sites to the hyperlocal level. This is the realm of low hanging fruit – the endless number of small opportunities in private ownership that will quickly deliver the numbers and type of housing we are looking for. By releasing the collective power of many small actions, we can see how quickly they add up to the big numbers. By focusing on granular small change and scaling these up, we open up endless opportunities. Housing as a distributed system that can be disaggregated down to its smallest component. We don’t need big solutions.
There are vast parts of our cities and towns, where the planning system has arrested the natural evolution of these places into more urban neighbourhoods. As an example, these could be in places like our pebble-dashed, interwar housing estates that are well-connected, well-laid out, but have a housing stock that is largely energy inefficient. We need to free these places and allow them to intensify in a progressive, organic way that meets the individual needs of the population. We’re not talking about high-density, but enabling good solid, medium-density neighbourhoods that provide a full range of long-life, loose-fit, mixed-use living conditions. Small shifts in the planning system will allow this to happen. We don’t have to wait for large-scale reform.
Our next briefing notes will explore a NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL that aims to unlock the potential of many bottom-up ideas and actions by many people and scale these up to build great urban neighbourhoods.
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No, Minister! You can’t just move deckchairs on the Titanic
BRIEFING NOTE #1.2: THE PERPETUAL FIX
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.
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No, Minister! Don’t add more fuel to a self-inflicted fire
BRIEFING NOTE #1.3: THE SYSTEM FAILURE
Another day goes by and the housing crisis in the UK deepens. It is now talked of as the its biggest policy failure. The front cover of the Economist damns it as a ‘Housing Blunder: Why are we so far from a solution?’, it asks. But, is the housing crisis just a self-inflicted problem? Can it be fixed by fiddling with the system, or do we need a fundamental rethink? Pre-1945, housing was hardly the domain of government. It was as distributed system. People did it. Thousands of small builders built it. The supply chain was hyperlocal. It was not a problem to be solved. Government, with all its good intentions, triggered the problem.
Housing is now largely the domain of the big guys: big developers have become the proxy for big government. This is a natural consequence of government’s withdrawal from its post-war promises to take full responsibility to house all its citizens. By relying on the big private sector alone to solve the housing crisis, it hopes for different outcomes. But the big housebuilders see their job as being to keep their shareholders happy (the housing shortage is sending their share prices soaring). They don’t see it as their job to solve the housing crisis. They are just as happy to sit on the land watching the prices go up.
Why has the system failed:
It treats housing as a numbers game, not as a matter of building neighbourhoods. The focus is too much on the technical aspects of housing rather than the social dynamics.
More than that, the system has put a brake on the normal evolutionary processes that drove good neighbourhood development in the past.
The system breeds adversarial positions between communities and government, as long as people see large amounts of housing dumped on their doorsteps without any regard to social cohesion. Communities see housing development as a threat, not an opportunity.
The government looks to the housebuilders to get its answers from - the very people who are creating the problem. It is a self-perpetuating cycle.
After the second world war big government was prepared to implement utopian visions. Today the government still puts its faith in big visions but struggles implementing them.
Demographics have changed. We have moved away from the typical nuclear family with 2.4 children to a socially diverse, multigenerational and atypical household composition that cannot be boxed into a simple statistic, blindly applied as the perfect end-user across the board.
The way we build is now not scalable, replicable and efficient. We constantly go back to first principles. Housing bears the costs.
Adding another layer of complexity to the planning system will not solve the problem and may just add more fuel to the fire. We need fundamental system change, but it must come from the bottom and locally. A focus on a progressive and innovative NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL will give us a chance of unlocking the potential.
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No, Minister! Government alone can’t solve the crisis
BRIEFING NOTE #1.4: THE 80/20 CHALLENGE
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 focuses on fixed end states to one that sees trial and error, or emergent solutions, as the way forward, 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 easier 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.
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No, Minister! It is about enabling neighbourhoods
BRIEFING NOTE #1.5: THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF URBAN SOCIETY
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’s 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 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 a viable London. 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.
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No, Minister! Don’t ask the Big Guys to help.
BRIEFING NOTE #1.6: Problem Mountains to Molehills
The government has a problem mountain to climb. The subject is so big and wide-reaching, it needs to be broken down into problem molehills that will be easier to talk about and overcome.
The nature and scale of the problem is also multi-faceted and is dominated by the BIG DEVELOPER MODEL - the favoured housing delivery system in recent decades, characterised as follows:
Agency for change lies in fewer big players
Financial model driven by big capital and is land value-driven with a limited range of tenures and entry points to market
Housing is limited in bandwidth to solving the problems of accommodation alone.
High density/low family in central areas and low density/high family on the periphery as part of a ‘Big Architecture’ solution
Form of development is driven by exclusivity (closed and isolated) with a typically, homogeneous/single use market that focuses on individual rights
The ‘scheme’ determines brand identity with change driven by the ‘big bang’/wow factor
We need a NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL, a powerful new initiative by government, to unlock the potential of homes in the country and scale up many small-scale development opportunities to build great urban neighbourhoods from the bottom-up. The model is characterised as follows:
Agency for change lies in many smaller players operating locally
Financial model driven by land management approaches that are social purpose-driven (locally) with a mixed and flexible range of tenures and entry points to market
Housing has a wider bandwidth where it plays a much greater role in contributing to dealing with wider issues, such as mental health, social care, youth, crime, and social development
More medium density/high family solutions in central areas/periphery with form driven by inclusivity (open and connected) using plot-based/ fine-grain approaches
Socially diverse/mixed use market with the focus on collective benefits
The ‘neighbourhood’ determines brand identity with change driven by many small progressive changes.
We need to keep housing supply (private and social) steady and rely on the current system to at least deliver what is being delivered today, whilst we work on improving some of the formal delivery mechanisms that are in place today.
We must rapidly implement the NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL and bring together other programmes in a single coherent strategy to deliver the ambitions of this approach. That is why we run both systems in parallel at the start and that they come together later in a single coherent strategy as the systems evolve.
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No, Minister! We need new models for tomorrow’s urbanism.
BRIEFING NOTE #1.7: THE MILLENNIAL CHALLENGE
One of the key drivers of developing new urban models is promoting diversity of choice in our cities, towns and neighbourhoods today. Diversity does not happen by chance but is a result of the nature of housebuilding, entrepreneurship and competition, and of the environments in which they exist. The diversity of provision gives benefits to urban dwellers in a wider range of choice across the full spectrum by offering different routes to solving their housing needs.
Yolanda Barnes, Chair of Bartlett Real Estate Institute, University College London, has undertaken new research into different types of housing provision. In her paper ‘New Business Models for Tomorrow’s Urbanism’, she shows how the market is being shifted by changing demographics. The rising economic group of millennials, characterised as also being members of the new precariat or gig economy, will by 2025 form half the world population and 75 per cent of its workforce. These millennials do not want to live in suburban housing, work in business parks and play out their lives in shopping malls. They are looking for fine-grained, ‘varied and messy’ neighbourhoods that have authentic, diverse, connected communities, with all the opportunities that come with them. If this is so, why are we still building the unwanted models? As Barnes says, ‘Housebuilders are market-takers not market-makers’. The established models of risk and reward are so buried in the banking, public sector procurement and construction industries that, in the absence of being shown any viable alternatives, they will plough on until they fail.
Barnes’s research also demonstrates how the top-down ‘big capital’ concentration model of development is far less successful than the bottom-up landownership and management model. Case studies internationally show the latter achieving up to 30 per cent greater property values. This makes a convincing case for fine-grained neighbourhood formation which is ‘varied and messy’. The Berlin townhouse projects, which have their roots in the concepts of Kristien Ring’s ‘Self-made City: Self-Initiated Urban Living and Architectural Interventions’ and are based on the disposal of narrow-fronted plots in the city for multi-occupancy buildings, show an alternative land management model. By cutting out the middleman, it is reputed that housing is being delivered much quicker and at a much lower cost than the traditional developer model. On top of this, it has had far greater social outcomes, better space standards and higher property values. Because of this success, private developers are increasingly using this model as successful low-risk solutions in places like Mitte in central Berlin. These are the types models that Barnes’s report says we need to scale up and invest in. They build neighbourhoods that people want.
We need our NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL to embrace a wide range of development approaches, including the land management model. There is no doubt that a greater focus on urban growth and change based on bottom-up landownership will deliver the kind of places that our new and emerging market demands.
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No, Minister! We have to define our new purpose
BRIEFING NOTE #1.8: A NEW VISION
Nothing will be served by writing yet another policy, adding to the stockpile of failed policies that have constipated the system. The temptation may be to try again, yet most of what we’ve tried in recent decades, has just given rise to more complex rules and regulations. In reality, the conditions that gave rise to the establishment of the planning, design and development system have so fundamentally changed, that it is best to take a fresh new look at where we may be going.
We need a vision that initiates a NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL, that aims to unlock the potential of many bottom-up ideas and actions by many people and scale these up to build great urban neighbourhoods. The first draft vision for the new initiative need not be perfect - in fact, it should have room for others to help shape it. Here is a potential starting point for defining a simple purpose:
LET’S BUILD THE URBAN SOCIETY WE ALL WANT.
‘The Government is committed to radically transforming the way we shape our urban environments to deal with the challenges of a continuously changing and increasingly complex world. We cannot do this alone. We must work together with people to harness the collective power of many small ideas and actions to build a better urban society for all our citizens and scale these up over time.
True urban society only evolves where compact urbanism meets human and social capital, both set within an enabling environment. If we can use the inherent creativity and goodwill that lies in the people to build this compact urbanism, we will achieve even better outcomes.
We must focus on urban neighbourhoods as vital building blocks of socially diverse and mixed-use models of development for cities and towns. Appropriately intense development with vibrant, connected and resilient public spaces, infrastructure and built form that can adapt to change over time are essential to deal with unpredictable future needs.
Government is best placed to provide the essential starting conditions that will release the potential for good neighbourhoods to emerge over time. We do not have to do everything—we will facilitate putting in place the essential urban structure, the grain and the platforms to create truly open, collaborative and responsive environments. At a time when we need to do more with less, we must use the lightest touch. Given this support—and armed with effective ideas, tools and tactics—people can play a much more active role in helping to create viable urban neighbourhoods.
We believe that if we do this well, then, working together, we will create far better social, cultural and economic outcomes that we will ever achieve alone’.
– The Minister for Neighbourhoods
Every place needs its own way of initiating and delivering system change, but they can learn from the experience of other places. The NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL has some universal guiding principles we need to have at the back of our minds as we move forwards. They are a starting point and can be applied to most places—so they can be adopted in whole or part; adapted or even changed.
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No, Minister! The urban professions need a new direction.
BRIEFING NOTE #1.9: EMBRACING COMPLEXITY
‘Cities are victims of outdated thinking. Narrow reductionist thought processes linger under the influence of the pseudosciences, drawing from past philosophies that have little relevance today. We celebrate the good intentions of the two movements that in the twentieth century set about re-shaping urban life—garden cities and modernism. We mourn their faded dreams and regret the malign influence they exert from beyond the grave’.
So how did we think we could control something as complex as a city? In our developed world over the past three generations, we have arrested the process of urban evolution. We have forgotten how to do it for ourselves. So, we have lost the ability to build successful human habitats. Our current plans treat the city as an ordered, mechanical system where every variable must be entirely understood and managed, painstakingly controlled and legalistically prescribed for.
Both the planning and architecture professions are straight-jacketed by their origins. Planners can’t seem to shake off their Garden City roots, architects the Modern City ideals. Coincidentally, both are ‘anti-city’ in their intentions, treat the city like a machine, are highly reductionist, and this shows. Urban design professionals, in trying to ‘mind the gap’ between planners and architects, do not know which way to turn - so they play both sides. All are locked on a hamster wheel, pedalling blindly, demoralised and wanting. The thinking just goes round and round. Design alone will not solve our problems
Rob Cowan shows how the evolution of urban design theory in recent decades comes back to the same old thinking:
· GARDEN CITY + Rural Location = Social Utopia
· Social Utopia + Urban Location = Urban Village
· Urban Village + Urban Edge = Sustainable Urban Extension
· Sustainable Urban Extension + Remote Airfield = Eco-Town
· Eco-Town + Government Hype = Sustainable Community
· Sustainable Community + Least Contentious Location = GARDEN CITY
Radically different systems are impossible to achieve if the same people are asked to do the same things. Too often, strategies and practices are altered, but the underlying thinking is left unchanged. The problem is that there are no new urban theories out there to replace the teachings of Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier. You have to go back to the nineteen sixties to find any urban theorists who made sense. Many of these have died within the past five years. This is the time to relearn from some of these enlightened old masters who provided logical alternatives to the reductionist way we do things today, but weren’t listened to. There is so much to discover.
Rather than being scared of physical planning because of previous failures, we need to invest a new confidence in the process: this time, rooted in a clear understanding of how cities evolve. We need a new approach: a system that is both progressive and enabling—a system that embraces continuous feedback as a core operating principle. We need to embrace complexity and see the city in the context of a complex adaptive system and not in terms of utopian dreams that will never be realised. We need to think and act like gardeners, nurturing and curating urban change, not mechanics, continually looking to fix the problem. There’s no better time than now to have a serious debate about how we can free ourselves from the constraints that limit us.
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No, Minister! Don’t over-strategise.
BRIEFING NOTE #1.10: START BY STARTING
In our traditional top-down world, the instinct is to ‘get an expert’ and ‘develop a strategy’. This tradition starts with a protracted brief-making exercise, follows with a lengthy commissioning process, continues with a prolonged study period and ends with a big comprehensive report. The report becomes the truth until the next report comes along, but the likelihood is that the report is out of date the day it is completed. And so, it goes. We do not need a new big cumbersome and protracted change management strategy or more complex policies to make change happen.
Old thinking will not solve the problems that the system itself has created. That is what all previous housing ministers found, too late. The new government needs to take a completely different approach. It needs to stop listening to the big developers, and instead get a small group of people around the table to give their best shot at defining the new NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL as the best way of tackling the housing crisis. Have a draft out in a month; tweak it and evolve it within six months.
System change, however local can be difficult. The management of change across complex, multi-layered systems can be extremely challenging. Making sense of this complexity requires an in-depth understanding of the mechanics and routes of change. According to the Innovation Unit, an independent, not-for-profit social enterprise based in the United Kingdom, ‘This means that we need to design and facilitate change processes that build coalitions for change, create shared purpose and make systems work better for everyone, converting potentially controversial policy problems into projects of collaborative innovation.’ Transformation requires strong leadership partnerships, but these are draining but, governance that supports the right behaviours can sustain change projects through tough moments.
Learning by doing, also called experiential learning, is an established approach in economic theory by which transformational change, such as increased productivity in the building industry, for example, is achieved through practice, self-perfection and continuous minor innovations. This approach is distinctly different from theory-based approaches, which pose hypotheses and seek to prove them. It’s a far more straightforward and practical idea, but an incredibly complex process that’s different for every situation. To understand how new ways will work, we need to try new things. We need insights from observers and onlookers and ideas from talking things through. We need rapid and continuous feedback; we need to learn from our environment and context. This learning-by-doing approach needs, however, a well-structured framework to be effective. For example, projects require a conducive, enabling environment, where essential barriers are fluid, in order to get off the ground.
At the level of cities and neighbourhoods, system change necessarily happens with the public, in public. It brings challenges but has massive transformative potential. The NEIGHBOURHOOD ENABLING MODEL and its approach to creating open, responsive and collaborative environments is critical. They are set up as continuous learning mechanisms. So, in urban transformation, new things can be tried by people and, as they gain acceptance, they can be instilled as the new normal. People just need the freedom to try. Any new system must, therefore, allow and nurture this freedom.
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No, Minister! We need to widen housing’s role in society
BRIEFING NOTE #1. 11: RELEASING THE GENIE
The recent pandemic exposed the frailties in our social systems. People cooped up in small apartments in megablocks, experienced the full range of ills that plague our urban society today. Here, isolation, polarisation and addiction contributed to our recent surge in mental health problems that the NHS struggling with. Put this together with the social care crisis, an increase in youth crime and a decrease in educational attainment and we are faced with a tsunami of issues that the provision of a more balanced view of housing’s role in society can seek to resolve. it all starts with community, and best thing pandemic did was to release community genie from the bottle, despite all the factors that work against it.
The problem is that we tend to see housing as a limited range based on peoples projected needs in the beginning. An example of this is found in the planning system which interprets housing demand in a very narrow spectrum of one to 2 bedroom homes for people starting up in life. Another example of this can be found in planners obsession to limit the size of housing to that of other housing around them. This is such a narrow, static view that fails to recognise that housing needs to provide for a much wider spectrum of housing need across the life of the individual and the family. Things change, yet we refuse to allow the natural evolutionary processes to occur across the dweller’s lifetime. A lot of this goes back to the Parker Morris standards of the 1960s which saw the nuclear family as the model for determining space requirements. A lot has changed since then the modern family in its past form is in the minority. The fastest creation of households at the moment lies in single parent households, with children spending time between two homes. The other thing we fail to recognise is the growth of larger multigenerational families who wish to live in more urban conditions. We would find a difficult to identify the model family of today and if we did, it would change before we realised it.
We will only make housing affordable if we embrace a full spectrum of housing solutions – from the big to the small and seriously challenging what we mean by ‘affordable’. This means opening the market to the full range of players, from the individual to the collective and the corporate, all operating under the same rules. Demographics are changing and with this, our needs are more complex than ever. It means recognising housing not in the narrow way we see it today, but something that meets the needs of our aging population, our socially-mobile millennials, our rapidly changing households and our socially-diverse communities. This also means building long-life, loose-fit housing that meets people’s needs at different times in their lives or economic situations. It means exploring the widest range of tenure mixes, from co-owning to co-sharing, from part-owning to full owning, from short-term to long term renting. We would like to see a system where people are not trapped in any of these tenure conditions but are free to move when required. Housing associations must play a much far greater role in whole-life ‘staircasing’ where people can freely make these moves. We would like to see them providing whole-life housing advice to prospective homebuilders, supporting the small developer and taking on a greater role in neighbourhood curating and management
We want people to get on the lowest rung of the housing ladder and benefit from the climb. This includes our homeless, our struggling households and our migrant workers. Everyone should be able to start but at different starting points. Everyone should be able to find their own way but by different routes. Everyone should be able to reach their goals but at different times.
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No, Minister! Beware the Naysayers
BRIEFING NOTE #1.12: THE BIG CON
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System change is always difficult. For the consultancy industry, they have so much invested in the status quo that it seems impossible for them to change. Consultancy is big, big business and, as Euan Mills from Blocktype estimates, the total fees to deliver the UK government’s housing target of 1.5 million houses by 2029, will be in the order of £3 billion. No wonder these organisations believe the system works.
There is an entrenched relationship between the consulting industry and the way business and government are managed today that must change. Mariana Mazzucato and Rosie Collington in their book, ‘The Big Con’, show that increased reliance by government on the consultancy industry stunts innovation, obfuscates corporate and political accountability, and impedes our collective mission of building a healthy urban society. This process is possible because of the unique power that big consultancies wield through extensive contracts and networks—as advisors, legitimators, and outsourcers—and the illusion that they are objective sources of expertise and capacity. In the end, the Big Con weakens our businesses, infantilizes our governments, and warps our economies. Mazzucato and Collington argue for building a new system in which public and private sectors work innovatively for the common good.
This new system should not try to regulate the business of consultancy, but should rely on adopting a binding code of ethics to the work that is done, by either the public or the private sector. First, we need to break down the silo thinking that exists between the urban professions. All should now be bonded by common standards, practices and, beliefs – maybe, like the medical profession. But in our instance, these ethics should be based on a fundamental commitment to building a fully-functioning urban society. There’s no reason why the urban professions couldn’t have their own Hippocratic oath to reflect these ethical principles.
Unlocking the creative potential of urban professionals, particularly in local government, has long been recognised as a vital component of civic leadership and management. Whether generating novel ideas or coming up with innovative concepts for their cities, creative urban professionals can play a vital role in stimulating forward thinking and freshening up the urban outlook. But for that process to work, the system must provide the right platform for them to express their creativity..
Most urban professionals came into the profession to make the world a better place. Most have been stifled by the system. Endless compliance practices, relentless measurement against poorly aligned performance indicators, and responsibility given without authority (or vice versa) have killed initiative. Many urban professionals just do not feel valued anymore. For them, it is difficult to imagine how this change will happen and how it will affect them. Change relies on the innovators and then the early adopters. Once acceptance of change hits the tipping point, others will follow.
Radically different systems are impossible to achieve if the same people are asked to do the same things. Too often, strategies and practices are altered, but roles are left unchanged. Without changing the outcomes that a system is working towards, real change is tough. And by its very nature, qualitative change demands a new set of universally-adopted planning, design and, development principles to guide our efforts.