Читать книгу Commodification and Its Discontents - Nicholas Abercrombie - Страница 14

To answer that question, I now look at the history of what in the UK is called town and country planning. It is a commonplace of that history that town planning arose as part of a very strong reaction to the horrors of everyday life for many people in the nineteenth century, especially for those living in cities. This stemmed largely from a growing realization that the very rapid growth in urban settlements that occurred in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, together with an unconstrained market in industrial development, had generated a set of acute social problems of very poor housing, very long working hours, poverty, ill-health and, in the eyes of many, moral failings. It is difficult to overstate the moral outrage generated by this realization, which is expressed, over a long period, in novels (Dickens and Gaskell), journalism (Stead), government inquiries (Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes) and surveys of the poor (Booth and Rowntree). Philanthropic individuals and organizations and more enlightened entrepreneurs made attempts to solve, or at least moderate, these problems over the course of the nineteenth century. A very early venture was Robert Owen’s experiment in the construction of workers’ housing at New Lanark in Scotland in the early part of the nineteenth century, which combined the provision of housing with wider welfare schemes. Similar private, semi-philanthropic initiatives were undertaken by employers who effectively adopted Robert Owen’s model village idea. Amongst the biggest and best-known of these were Saltaire (1860), Bournville (begun in 1895) and Port Sunlight (1885) (Ashworth, 1954; Bell and Bell, 1972; Hall, 1988). However, crucially, these initiatives were private developments, often undertaken, moreover, by people with somewhat mixed motives, whether that was the moral improvement of the working class or the need to attract workers to a factory site by providing housing. It became more and more obvious as the century wore on that only a public agency operating at the required scale could undertake the necessary development.

Many of the elements of public policy and subsequent legislation introduced by the state, including restrictions on working hours, reform of the Poor Law, the slow enhancement of the powers and efficiency of local government, and improvements in sanitation, had implications for the management of land. In particular, local authorities became responsible for implementing legislation introduced by central government, and that was a major stimulus in making them more efficient and democratic. In the second half of the nineteenth century, measures for the improvement of drainage, provision of an adequate water supply, removal of refuse, control of street widths, structural safety and building heights, requirement for the submission of building plans before work began, use of powers to demolish, and then replace, insanitary houses following compulsory purchase, and the provision of open spaces and adequate roads all passed through local authorities. There was a steady flow of public health and housing legislation (Ashworth, 1954; Broadbent, 1977). Progress was slow, and resisted, but towards the end of the nineteenth century the basis for systematic town planning in the collective interest and as a function of an interventionist state at national and local levels had been constructed.

As concerns over housing and public health began to coalesce and legislation and action by local authorities began to affect larger and larger areas, there became obvious a need to recognize that the land use of whole towns and cities constituted a single problem. As a result, the first specifically town planning legislation was introduced in 1909. The Act made two important provisions. The first enabled local authorities to prepare town planning schemes for the development of new housing. Although the actual development was to be undertaken commercially, the scheme laid down the framework of roads, open spaces and utility supply and ensured the preservation of important buildings. Since this involved a substantial intervention in the market, the Act also introduced proposals for compensation and betterment. The former compensated landowners for any loss of value caused by the interventions, while the latter involved a tax on the gain in the value of land generated by the town planning schemes themselves. The proposals for a betterment levy essentially came out of a long history of arguments about the injustice of the private ownership of land (George, 1931) and those arguments have continued in the formulation of town planning policy ever since.

Between the closing years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the First World War, town planning as a movement gradually took shape (Tichelar, 2018b). The term ‘town planning’ was first employed in Britain in the 1909 Act and it was used not only for a set of statutory powers, but also to describe a professional activity with appropriate training. A professional body – the Town Planning Institute – was set up in 1914 and now describes itself as the largest town planning institute in Europe and the ‘UK’s leading planning body for spatial, sustainable and inclusive planning’ (Royal Town Planning Institute, n.d.). Schemes for the construction of entire towns abounded, the best known of which was Ebenezer Howard’s plan for garden cities, originally published in 1902 (Howard, 1965). Importantly, Howard’s proposal combined an aesthetic interest with the provision of healthful housing, and that same combination informed the building of two actual garden cities: Letchworth (begun in 1904) and Welwyn (begun in 1919). Despite the fact that only two were built, the Garden Cities movement remained influential in British town planning in the development after the Second World War of New Towns, mostly seen as a solution to London’s housing problem, and, probably more significantly, in the way in which suburban locations were favoured for new housing throughout the twentieth century.

Legislative activity continued in the interwar period between 1918 and 1939. The need to see the problems of town and country as linked led to a renaming of relevant legislation as town and country planning. The Acts of 1919, 1925 and 1932 covered such topics as provision of state-owned housing, improved building standards and an obligation on local authorities to provide systems of town planning. Helped by the improvement of public transport, the role of local authorities in housing provision was enhanced in this period. Many authorities, most notably the London County Council, took advantage of government subsidies to build extensive council estates, especially in suburban locations. This was significant not least because it marked the ownership of substantial areas of housing by local authorities, agencies of the state, as distinct from philanthropic or commercial ownership.

The conventional view is that, in the interwar period, not a great deal changed despite the profound effects of economic depression. In that view, a great deal of housing was built but attention was drawn away by interest in the preservation of the countryside and the vices of suburban development. However, the significant point is that the idea of town and country planning was sustained. In addition, many of the changes were rather quieter and perhaps not widely announced as town planning. Thus, a legal historian describes the legal changes affecting land between 1922 and 1925 as revolutionary. ‘But it was in the provision of national equipment and infrastructure, the successor to the nineteenth century works, that the power of the state was most evident’ (Jessel, 2011: 176). Furthermore, in the later 1930s there was a greater interest in the notion of planning in general as a response to what was seen as a society in peril from malign social, political and economic forces. ‘The inter-war history of planning, therefore, seems to reflect the wider changes taking place in economic and social thought, largely in response to the depression and to the inability of the unfettered market economy to overcome it. State intervention became respectable’ (Broadbent, 1977: 151; see also Renwick, 2018).

The coalition government of 1940 and, more emphatically, the Labour government of 1945 introduced a set of far-reaching changes in interventions in the market. Although this change in mood owed a great deal to the Second World War, which started in 1939, it had, as I have implied, also been prefigured in the late 1930s. Preparation for, and prosecution of, the war involved a very large extension of the powers of the state and the effects of this extension spread well beyond what might be seen as war-fighting activities. During the war, a set of government and other inquiries and reports paved the way for subsequent action, to some extent motivated by an obvious need for a programme of physical reconstruction. Particularly influential were plans for the redevelopment of British cities, especially the Greater London Plan 1944 (Abercrombie, 1945), which had at its centre proposals for the improvement of housing, the construction of new housing beyond the outer suburbs, the management of transport and the provision of more open space, especially in the development of a green belt around the city. A set of government reports appeared pitched at the national level. The Barlow report of 1940 proposed the further redevelopment of congested urban areas, the dispersal of industries and industrial population from congested areas and the encouragement of a balance of industrial development across regions, together with plans for diversification of industry in each region. The Uthwatt report of 1942 tried to provide solutions to the problems of compensation and betterment. A radical system of land planning entailed allocating land uses to the best outcome, and that implied a potential conflict with existing landowners, affecting the value of their holdings. Land use planning since the beginning of the twentieth century had struggled with the presumed need to compensate owners for taking control of their land and to tax gains in the value of land created by planning decisions. Uthwatt proposed the compulsory purchase of war-damaged land, together with the vesting in the state of development rights in land outside the boundaries of urban development and the creation of a periodic levy on rises in value. Rural planning was the subject of the Scott report of 1942 which dealt with the creation of national parks and green belts as well as improvements in rural services and housing. At the same time, in this period plans were developed for the design and construction of housing on the assumption that a great deal of it would be undertaken by the state in some form.

Legislation in 1943 and 1944 followed from this ferment of ideas which were, it should be remembered, produced by a coalition government. That is, there was a significant measure of consensus across the political parties. The later Act

provided sweeping powers to local authorities to engage in reconstruction and redevelopment. They were enabled to buy land, simply and expeditiously to deal with areas of extensive war damage and areas of ‘bad layout and obsolete development’ – blitzed and blighted land. This was the first occasion when a General Act permitted planned redevelopment on an extensive central area scale. (Cherry, 1996: 108)

A Labour government was elected at the end of the war in 1945. In many respects it inherited and enhanced the radicalism of its predecessor, putting into practice many coalition proposals, and extended it in its preference for wholesale planning. A set of New Towns was designated and construction quickly started. The preparation of local development plans was made compulsory and all development – with a few exceptions – required permission from the local authority. Most importantly, from the point of view of resistance to the commodification of land, there was an attempt to resolve the issue of compensation and betterment. The 1947 legislation provided for the imposition of a development charge on any increase in value that followed the grant of planning permission. This provision was indeed an important extension of state intervention in property rights in the public interest and has been widely described as the nationalization of development rights. Where the value of land was lowered by planning restrictions, compensation would be paid. It would not be paid, however, as a consequence of any refusal to develop.

With the exception of the compensation and betterment provisions, there was a remarkable degree of political agreement on a planning system which regulated what landowners could do with their land. This consensus lasted for thirty years from the early 1940s and has been described as the golden age of town planning. The basic outlines of the planning system were stable, the planning profession had increased both in numbers and in training and expertise and there had been substantial redevelopment of many towns and cities. The major disputes concerned a central issue: the financial provisions of compensation and betterment. In this respect, there was something of an oscillation throughout the period. Conservative administrations changed the provisions in favour of landowners and developers while Labour administrations introduced measures that increased state intervention, to the disadvantage of owners.

The history of town planning from the middle of the nineteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth – the Long Century – can be seen as resistance to commodification in the form of state intervention in the market for land via limitations on property rights. As Jessel notes in his legal history of the English landscape, state intervention through planning controls has ‘weakened the idea of ownership and the rights of property established in the seventeenth century’ (2011: 170). However, at the same time, it is important to note how relatively restricted these interventions were – and are. They amount to a partial control only, especially in the markets for housing and agricultural land. Proposals for the outright nationalization of land, which had some followers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, received very little support from any government, even the Labour one of 1945. Furthermore, the climate for interventions in the market for land changed a good deal in the 1970s and I come back to these developments at the end of this chapter.