Urban Spaceman

  The Current System The Government is intent on speeding up the planning system to get more houses built and more business investment. The current system is simple enough in theory. In practice, it isn't. Every Local Authority in England with town planning powers should have a Local Plan that sets out land use and related policies on transport, utilities, drainage, environment, etc. This is based on an extensive process of research, analysis and consultation. In practice, not all areas have a Plan, and in others, it is out of date by the time it is completed and agreed.    In general, things in the real world move faster than the planning process. The policies themselves are often either opaque or overly specific, so a lot of detail needs to be negotiated at the scheme application stage. This can be very time-consuming, and it doesn't help that the planners usually  don't trust developers, with  good reason.  After all that, the final  decision is sti...

The pic is neurons under a microscope.  Towards the end of my career, I did quite a bit of coaching and teaching mainly focused on the financial hydraulics and art of getting things built and and aimed at environment professionals ranging from student architects and local authority planners to developers and the Planning Inspectorate I like to think they were engaged when I was writing this stuff.  The links here take you to my OneDrive account where there is a small selection of material on development economics and delivery strategies that I used. I still get asked for them sometimes and the downloads are safe.   Most of this is quite old and a lot of the hard data and references to regulations are out of date, but the general analysis is still mostly relevant and website analytics tell me that people still look for them. I hope you find it expressed here in rather more accessible terms than in the dreary text books.  Development Viability Appraisal s  An...

Full confession. For a long time, I had a professional involvement as well, on the sidelines of the housebuilding and regeneration business.  This is a country in which property ownership is an addiction. One result is that we have some of the world's highest land values, and more of the price you pay goes into paying for the site and less into the building itself. (Dry economics. I will unpack it in a postscript. A result is that most of the buildings are small and unattractive, so a dark art must be used to pe rsuade people that they are worth the price. I call it pyschotropicgeography. Psychogeography is about how places affect our emotions and behaviour. You will find my view of it here:  Psychogeography - Without Enthusiasm . It suggests that you build an image of a place to please yourself, with arcane and hidden histories, ley lines, ghosts or whatever.  Psychotropic drugs have the same aim.  Psychotropicgeography marries the two in the interest of sellin...

  Pieter Breugel : The Land of Cockaigne :1567 Our medieval forebears dreamed about a perfect land called Cockaigne, where there were no lords and bosses, abundance made toil unnecessary, and fat geese and milch cows, rather than fear and hunger, roamed the streets. It wasn’t an English invention. The Germans had Schlaraffenland, the Irish looked to Tír na Nóg, the Dutch knew Luilekkerland and the Americans dreamed of the Big Rock Candy Mountain. This is a two-part post looking at the ways people have imagined the cities of the future. In this first section, I want to look at the prophecies of dreamers, writers and filmmakers. But dreaming is easy. It is hard enough trying to change places by, say, lobbying against a library closure or building a new road, but changing things at city scale is challenging. So in the second part I want to survey the plans of the politicians, architects and planners, starting from the beginning, who aspire to bring the dreams to life and to ask whethe...