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Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com and Spoleto in parts of which cars are excluded. They are holistic and exemplify Herbert Girardet’s and Richard Rogers’ models. What we do not know intuitively. The places we live in must now have low ecological and carbon footprints. That is the huge challenge facing us. There is a limit to what individual citizens and citizen’s organisations like a Transition Town can do. Only government and councils can provide the infrastructure and services necessary to help our towns and communities adapt to climate change and peak oil: - better transport, more room for cyclists and pedestrians, ways of reducing congestion, better waste disposal for small businesses, better town planning, better design and building of sustainable developments including up to date heat and power and space for vegetable growing and wild life. Woking, Sutton, Bristol and Nottingham are shining examples. The destruction of our towns, cities and communities “Clone town Britain” has already been described. Beautiful, historic, homely small-scale areas in our towns and cities, with small shops, where people feel a sense of community and roots, are destroyed without our agreement. It is an outrage when, in order to meet imposed regional targets, the wishes of citizens are ignored and unsustainable, out-of-scale, poor quality developments are created, lacking proper infrastructure, or adequate consideration of the limits of the eco-system and the needs of people facing peak oil and climate change. Something similar to the Haussmannisation of Paris in the nineteenth century happened in UK after World War Two. But the results were not good. Post war redevelopment went too far and was a huge disappointment. “Slum clearance” and redevelopment destroyed more of Georgian and Victorian London than Hitler’s bombs. Swathes of potentially sustainable communities were levelled. “Clone Towns” were inflicted on almost every town and city by multinational chains, superstores, supermarkets- ugly roads too. New Labour planned to demolish 250,000 houses in the North of England, and build a million new homes in the North and South of England. Is this the right way to go? We have had an increasingly strong conservation movement since the Sixties, e.g. the Victorian Society and other pressure groups like the Homes Under Threat (HUT). The Sustainable Communities Act, if adopted by councils, and the coalition’s Big Society vision, giving more power to citizens, can help communities halt this damage and become more sustainable. Pressure works. What kind of world do we want to build? In Chapter 11, I argued that vast new developments, regeneration schemes, privately managed and policed, are a threat to democracy and civil liberties. I drew attention to the growing trend towards the gated communities in Britain with “hot spots” of affluence and “cold spots” of exclusion. These reflect a post industrial economy in which there are on the one hand increasingly wealthy, high earning, knowledge workers in globalised financial services industries and, on the other, rising numbers of “excluded” people on very low pay, of whom 2.7m are on sickness benefit or have dropped out of the system into the “black economy”. 178
Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only. www.brucenixon.com Worsening the gap between two societies Schemes like these worsen the gap between two societies making nonsense of government targets and expensive measures to reverse these trends and overcome poverty. This is another example of “system blindness”. We have seen vast new developments, regeneration schemes, "retail-led development", "malls without walls", described by New Labour as “urban renaissance”. Most vast retail projects create bland, characterless environments and drive out small businesses. Enabled through Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) introduced in the Local Government Act 2003, they were justified on the grounds of efficiency (i .e. shops of 3,000 sq metres are far more efficient than the average size of 500 sq metres). Is efficiency all that life is about? Is the nation’s life about shopping, spending and big business, rather than the well-being of all its citizens and small, local business people? Anna Minton, in her RICS report, commented: “This means a further boost for big retailers operating in sterile, privatised enclaves where several activities are banned - from rollerblading and skateboarding to handing out leaflets - while the spontaneous organic life of the city that encourages people to stroll and linger is squeezed out”. Lost opportunities to create exemplary sustainable cities and communities In encouraging schemes of this kind, Girardet’s and Rogers’ vision of sustainable cities and communities was set aside. The advice of respected sustainability advisers was ignored. Government was more influenced by McKinsey’s. We lost opportunities to create exemplary sustainable cities and communities comparable to those in other countries. New Labour was conned. It needed values based whole system thinking. Anna Minton quotes Jan Gehl, the architect credited with turning around the city of Copenhagen, she says: "If you asked people 20 years ago why they went to central Copenhagen, they would have said it was to shop. But if you asked them today, they would say it was because they wanted to go to town [to take in the atmosphere]." She says Gehl's focus on creating public space has been remarkable for the Danish capital, with four times as many people spending time in the city. Its thriving public life is widely acknowledged as something to emulate. Other Scandinavian cities, such as Stockholm and Gothenburg, offer a similarly appealing environment. Britons love the public squares and piazzas of cities in mainland Europe. While the rhetoric of government proclaimed a similar cafe-style urban renaissance in towns and cities, policy headed in the opposite direction towards "retail-led development", i.e. "shopping makes places", meaning shopping in large chain stores. Articles on Anna Minton’s website, in particular Political footfall and Can we banish fear and loathing from the city? From shopping malls to gated communities, our city centres are turning into secure enclaves that erode trust, reveal how the UK is failing to learn from mainland Europe how to make cities attractive for reasons other than chain-store shopping. In Paris, French policy makers became so concerned about the British experience, described as "la Londonisation" that they have introduced planning regulations specifically to prevent it. About half the shops in Paris will have restrictions placed on them to prevent changes of use. A food shop remains a food shop and a bookshop or a greengrocer cannot become part of a mobile phone chain. The French are in the vanguard against a trend predicted by the French sociologist, Henri Lefebvre, more than 30 years ago. He warned that treating a place simply as a product, with the aim of extracting the maximum return from it, 179
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