Читать книгу Commodification and Its Discontents - Nicholas Abercrombie - Страница 15

So far, I have discussed the regulation of the use of land which constitutes a restriction on the full exercise of property rights. I now turn to an examination of why and how that regulation and its practical application arose and how a set of moral convictions, an ideology, is formed which can have that effect.

Earlier in this chapter I stressed the way in which town planning in Britain was formed in a reaction to the horrors of the Victorian city. But another reaction – and a different horror – was also involved. Those whose interests lay in commentary on the state of the country, especially its towns and cities, were not only impressed by the conditions in which their fellow citizens lived, they were also moved by a sense of the disorder apparently created by urban life. The two themes – social justice and order – ran through public debate about cities in the Long Century from 1850 to 1970. Sometimes one of these themes predominated, sometimes the other. For example, for the intellectuals writing, talking and lobbying about the state of towns, the social justice strand was probably more important towards the beginning of the period, while a concern with order was prominent in the later part. My argument in this case study is that what I shall call a disposition, a set of beliefs and professional practices, is created by a group of intellectuals, some involved in the actual practice of planning and some not, in interaction with an audience drawn from a wider social group but one with the same social affiliations. That disposition resulted in a set of regulations and practices, collectively called town planning, introduced by the state and which constrain the market in land by controlling the uses to which it can be put. In sum, the key feature of the ideological formation of town planning is the combination of two apparently very different elements in an alliance. Order-planning sees town planning as oriented to the restoration of social order, while for justice-planning the activity is geared to solving problems of the distribution of resources between different sections of society.

Ebenezer Howard, the founder of the Garden Cities movement, wrote in the late nineteenth century of the disordered life of cities of the time, especially London. He quotes Lord Rosebery in 1891, then Chairman of the London County Council: ‘I am always haunted by the awfulness of London: by the great appalling fact of these millions cast down … without regard or knowledge of each other, without heeding each other, without having the slightest idea how the other lives’ (Howard, 1965 (originally 1902): 42). Howard himself was preoccupied with the overcrowding of London, its expansion and the disordering of the countryside that it produced. Raymond Unwin, one of the most influential of early town planners, begins his major work on the subject by noting ‘the rapid and disorderly increase in the size of towns and their populations’. The countryside is being covered in rows and rows of houses put up ‘without any consideration for the common interests of the people’ (Unwin, 1909: 1, emphasis added). Thirty years later, the architect Clough Williams-Ellis lamented ‘the discomfort of living in a land where disorder, ugliness, and inefficiency are generally accepted and tolerated’ (Williams-Ellis, 1937a: xv). At the end of the 1930s, Anthony Bertram, a writer on architectural and design matters, is more forceful still: ‘But what the town-planner wants, and what indeed everybody wants who has any feeling for urbanity, for the design of cities and towns, is order. That is not at all the same thing as uniformity. No, we want variety, but ordered variety, not everybody following their own sweet will, which seems nowadays to be not at all sweet’ (Bertram, 1939: 23, author’s emphasis). What is required is a plan.

What is the root of disorder? Town planning is the deliberate shaping and organizing of the physical environment. According to Patrick Abercrombie, a town planner of the twentieth century, if there were no such organization and human habitation were allowed to grow ‘naturally’, the result would be ‘complete muddle’ as in the nineteenth-century towns of the UK. And one form of this muddle is ‘laissez-faire’. Ideologies require the identification of enemies. For Abercrombie, the enemy is clear enough here; it is the Smithian ‘muddler who will talk about the Law of Supply and Demand and the Liberty of the Individual’ (Abercrombie, 1943: 26, 27). G. D. H. Cole, who also had quite a lot to say about the virtues of planning, suggested in 1945 that ‘reliance on the free play of economic forces … has been largely responsible for many of our worst and most intractable social and economic problems’ (Cole, 1945: 21). A similar proposition is advanced by J. M. Keynes, who argues that a utilitarian, economic and financial ideal has become the guiding light of the community as a whole. This, the ‘most dreadful heresy … which has ever gained the ear of civilized people’, has meant that the state does not intervene to ensure the ‘preservation of the countryside from exploitation’ (Keynes, 1937: 2).

Order-planning’s contribution to the ideology of town planning had a number of elements. Howard’s was the idea of the Garden City conceived as a third alternative to town life and country life. That would ‘restore the people to the land’ which is the ‘very embodiment of Divine love for man’ and would cure ‘the problems of intemperance, of excessive toil, of restless anxiety, of grinding poverty’ (Howard, 1965: 44). Garden cities combined the virtues of both town and country and would therefore act as magnets for the population. They would provide employment and amusement and, at the same time, good housing and green space, all in an attractive layout. Howard did succeed in constructing two garden cities at Letchworth and Welwyn, as we have seen, although all did not entirely go to plan, but his major legacy lies in the foundation by others of New Towns after the Second World War and, secondarily, in the layout of suburban areas in the interwar period. New Towns have been constructed all over the country although mostly within striking distance of London. The terms of reference of the New Towns Committee, which reported just after the end of the Second World War, argued that New Towns should be ‘self-contained and balanced communities for working and living’, an ambition which comes straight from Howard (New Towns Committee, 1946: Howard, 1965: 119, 121). These are revealing phrases. The towns were to be self-contained in that they provided everything – employment, amusement, transport, health and social care – and inhabitants hardly had any compelling reason to cross their boundaries. And they were to be balanced communities representing all social classes, giving a cooperative order to the settlement. F. J. Osborn, who worked with Howard and became a major force in the development of town planning in the UK, argued for the extensive development of New Towns because their size could be contained and their inhabitants could therefore enjoy ‘the inalienable advantages of comfort in their houses, beauty and grace in their surroundings, sunlight, fresh air, health and a share of civic powers’ (quoted in Whittick, 1987: 25).

Garden Cities and New Towns were one order-planning response to the disorderly city. Others were the doctrine of green belts, the often visceral antipathy to suburban development, together with associated moves to preserve the countryside and coastline. These were all symptoms of the same condition. As much as anything else, green belts, constraints on ribbon development, prohibitions on rural building and New Towns were effectively designed to contain cities and towns, to stop the spread of contagion. If uncontrolled, buildings would appear in every pretty country village, despoil beauty spots and corrupt the coastline. The County of London Plan (Forshaw and Abercrombie, 1943) sought to develop the already existing green belt around London which, in addition to forming ‘the main place of week-end walking, bicycling, picnics, etc.’, served to restrict the outward growth of the city and prevent the agglomeration of urban units. Similar ideas of extending existing green belts generally introduced in the interwar period informed other city plans. A 1941 plan for Birmingham, for example, proposed green belts to prevent separate towns from growing together to create ‘huge urban areas’ (Birmingham Bournville Village Trust, 1941).

The invasion of the countryside by the suburbs of towns was of particular concern in the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the interwar period when there were few restrictions on building at low density along roads. This ribbon development excited often furious resentment widely and not just in the planning profession. (For a literary survey see Carey, 1992: ch. 2. Poets could be particularly scathing.) Disease imagery abounded. Clough Williams-Ellis, the founder of Portmeirion, for instance, declared: ‘The disfiguring little buildings grow up and multiply like nettles along a drain, like lice upon a tape-worm’ (Williams-Ellis, 1928: 162); or Abercrombie again: ‘The aesthetic fault of the ribbon is simple: it is an urban formation purely, but it is thrust into the comparative naturalness of the country. It is like a cancer – a growth of apparently healthy cells but proceeding without check or relation to the whole body’ (Abercrombie, 1943: 120–1). H. Chessell invokes a different kind of horror in ‘the ribbon development of housing along the new arterial roads, and the stretching of the city’s tentacles far out into the countryside, with all that implies’ (n.d.: 20).

It is when confronted by the despoliation of the countryside that the language of commentators reaches its most strident. So, for them, country is country and town is town. They each have their virtues but they should not be allowed to mix. The countryside is quiet, slow, old and the province of nature. The town is noisy, fast-moving, brash, new and the product of human dominion over nature. This distinction between the two ways of life is, of course, a familiar one. The arguments of Thomas Sharp, a planner and academic writing in the 1930s and 1940s, is characteristic of the tendency. He is vehement that town and country must not be mixed for that would be to destroy both; the countryside must be ‘defended against the suburban flood which during the last two decades has threatened to overwhelm it, which has, indeed, already overwhelmed great tracts of it’ (Sharp, 1945: 145). Howard Marshall is even more apocalyptic about the destruction of the countryside which is spreading like a ‘prairie fire’. ‘The jerry-built bijou residences creep out along the roads. Beauty is sacrificed on the altar of the speeding motorist. Advertisements and petrol stations and shanties ruin our villages. A gimcrack civilization crawls like a gigantic slug over the country, leaving a foul trail of slime behind it’ (Marshall, 1937: 164). And it is not simply a question of intrusive, ugly buildings in the countryside. It is as much the kind of people that will come to live in the buildings or visit the places that causes trouble. Trippers, motorists or even simple visitors to the seaside all come in for a share of abuse. A. G. Street, for example, declares that; ‘The charges of destroying and shabbying the countryside then can definitely be laid at the door of the townsman – by his town encroachment for building and other needs, and by his bad manners during his visits to rural England’ (Street, 1937: 124). Bad manners evidently encompass the dropping of litter, driving too fast, talking loudly late at night, leaving gates open and trespassing on private property.

It is difficult to ignore a nostalgic tone in much of the town planning literature of the Long Century (see particularly Williams-Ellis, 1937). There is a harking back to a largely imaginary, ordered society, predominantly agricultural, characterized by ‘balanced’ communities of long standing where there were established social hierarchies in which everyone knew their place. As Hugh Massingham has it:

It was the land, the place, that made all the difference between then and now. The holdings varied in extent, but the holders, yeomen or cottagers, ate the same kind of food, spoke the same dialect and shared the same knowledge … because everything within the boundaries of the parish … was of intimate concern to their daily lives. (Massingham, 1937: 19)

There is one further characteristic of order-planning that is implicit in much of the foregoing. Although an emphasis that declined somewhat in the later years of the twentieth century, much of the planning literature is concerned with beauty, the aesthetic qualities of civic design. For Unwin, it does not matter if there is a good water supply and proper sanitation in these houses if the houses remain dreary. What is needed is the ‘vivifying touch of art’ so that ‘something of beauty may be restored to town life’ (Unwin, 1909: 4). George Scott-Moncrieff waxes still more lyrical: ‘The value of a W.C. is vastly overrated when it is set above that of the aesthetic. An ugly house with a bath is less of an asset than a beautiful house without one’ (1937: 270). Bertram offers a more systematic account. For him, beauty is a question of order and modern towns are disordered, being a ‘jumble of styles and no styles, of sizes and purposes and colours and materials’. We have forgotten how to build a street, which should be ‘designed right through like a poem or a symphony or a picture’ and be ‘an orderly civilised cohesive expression … of life and business’ but is instead ‘a miscellaneous collection of more or less rival bits’ (1939: 21, 23).

In the ideological alliance between order-planning and justice-planning the former is undoubtedly dominant. That does not mean that conceptions of justice are largely missing. Indeed, the authority of the configuration as a whole is dependent on the continued association of the two elements. In practice, an interest in justice in town planning means paying attention to three main points – housing, land value taxation and the protection of the collective rather than the individual interest – primarily through the notion of the ‘balanced community’.

Over the last two centuries, the provision of housing in the United Kingdom has been a major political issue. David Donnison (1967), in reviewing the government of housing in 1967, noted that a government circular of 1933, declaring that the ‘evil’ of poor housing should be urgently addressed, has been repeated many times since then. It is still an urgent issue in 2020. Throughout the Long Century, the periodic eruptions of political interest in housing have been framed in terms of justice. It is the working class and the relatively poor whose housing conditions are at issue. From Friedrich Engels’ critique of 1844, through the government reports of the sanitation reform movement of the middle years of the nineteenth century, to the recognition (partly by a Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes) of poor housing at the end of the century and into the next, to promises of reform – Homes for Heroes – at the end of the First World War and the need for the rebuilding of Britain after the Second, to the despair at the continuing slum conditions of the 1950s and 1960s, the language used has stayed remarkably constant. There was talk of damp, small, overcrowded, unhealthy, rotting, cold and expensive housing conditions, frequently summed up by the persistent use of the word ‘slum’. The history of town planning since the middle of the nineteenth century is, then, partly a history of attempts at solutions to the housing problem. For example, the Garden City and New Towns movements were brave attempts to solve both the justice-planning issue of good working-class housing and the order-planning imperative of control of urban expansion into the countryside.

Protests against the injustice of the private ownership of land – and large areas of land – clearly have a long history in the UK and all over the world (Linklater, 2015). I have already pointed to the nineteenth-century argument in the UK about land ownership and the possibilities of the nationalization of land or of taxing it in some way. Towards the end of that century, Henry George was creating a stir by advocating the taxation of land value in order to rectify the ‘glaring injustice of present social conditions’ and the manner in which the landed wealth of the Duke of Westminster was created not by the Duke, or even by his ancestors, but by ‘appropriation’ (George, 1931). Advocates of public ownership of all land could readily be found during the first half of the twentieth century. Ebenezer Howard, the originator of the Garden City idea, was a believer. Even in the late 1930s, several of the contributors to Clough Williams-Ellis’ Britain and the Beast (1937b) also argued for the nationalization of land, although rather more from an order-planning perspective – the control of development in the countryside – than from any conception of justice. However, the relatively extreme position of public ownership did not gain much political traction at any time in the twentieth century (Tichelar, 2018b). Perceptions of the injustice of the private ownership of land have less purchase as the importance of agriculture declines. In the Long Century, land becomes important for a different reason: the need to build on it. The injustice that that creates is two-fold. On the one hand, the sheer accident that somebody owns land that is wanted for development means that they benefit undeservedly from the increase in value. And, on the other, planning decisions themselves will increase (or decrease) the value of land, again giving an undeserved benefit to the landowner. I have earlier described the betterment and compensation interventions proposed and implemented to deal with this injustice, and which briefly formed the basis for the effective nationalization of development rights and their associated values in 1947. It has not been a happy history but one full of technical difficulties and unsurprising and successful political opposition from those involved in urban development. The injustice remains but would, in any case, be better met by more systematic taxation of wealth.

The doctrine of the ‘balanced community’ has a long history in town planning in the UK. It is the idea that new (and, if possible, old) housing developments should incorporate a balance of social groups distinguished by social class, ethnicity and age. At the end of the nineteenth century, the emphasis was chiefly on class. Bournville, for example, was explicitly constructed so that working- and middle-class people could live together in close proximity. The same was true of Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London, constructed in the years before the First World War. In this development, the ideal of a mixed community was to be the distinguishing characteristic. In the mind of its founder, a balanced community was to ‘provide a bridge between poverty and privilege and to overcome the ignorance which separated the Two Nations’ (Grafton Green, 1977: 5). The same assumption influenced New Towns policy after the Second World War. The idea was supported by a dislike of segregated housing. For instance, part of the distaste for suburban development that I have described earlier arose from beliefs about the undesirable consequences of an almost entirely middle-class population housed in that location. The same idea informs reactions to working-class housing estates constructed in the interwar period and, more recently, to the housing of immigrant families in Northern towns. The idea of balanced communities was not without its critics in the town planning community in the Long Century. It has also been pointed out very often that, despite its longevity, the policy remains unsupported by any evidence (Gans, 1961; Sarkissian, 1976). Furthermore, its aims seem to vary over time (Cole and Goodchild, 2000).

Nevertheless, it is not the rationality of the balanced community that is at issue here but, rather more, its ideological force, which comes from a belief in the importance of social harmony and a collective life. These two principles are related in their common assumption of an idealized community in the rural village. That assumption is widely invoked in the planning literature. Raymond Unwin, for example, writing in 1909, argued that past societies had manifested ‘the interdependence of different, clearly defined classes’ but ‘these uniting forces have been weakened or lost in modern times’.(1909: 383, 384). ‘In feudal days there existed a definite relationship between the different classes and individuals of society, which expressed itself in the character of the villages and towns in which dwelt those communities of interdependent people.’ What is now required is a restoration of the ‘spirit of association’ so that in ‘the planning of our towns in future there will be an opportunity for the common life and welfare to be considered first’ (1909: 375, 376). Writing thirty years later, Hugh Massingham still adheres to the romanticism of the village community of the Middle Ages. ‘The village community represented a fusion between the social, economic and domestic, and aesthetic life.’ The holders of land lived in an environment of ‘social equality and mutual aid’ (1937: 19). The housing programme of the radical Labour government of 1945 was informed by similar assumptions. As Cole and Goodchild write of Aneurin Bevan, the minister responsible: ‘he wished to build on council estates “the living tapestry of a mixed community” similar to the long-established English and Welsh village … Social balance, he felt, could be provided through a single, inclusive tenure. He thus sought to develop a universal basis for public housing provision, to parallel initiatives in state education, health and social insurance’ (2000: 353).

The idea of social balance thus fuses order-planning with justice-planning. In town planning as a whole, the alliance of order and justice themes did not, of course, remain unchanged over more than a century. Some elements were prominent at some times, only to disappear later. For example, the notion of planning as an aesthetic practice was central at the end of the nineteenth century and up to the Second World War but has given way to a more technical focus as planning has become professionalized and, perhaps, very much less dominated by architects. What remains is the rather watery notion of ‘amenity’. Attempts to tax development value directly preoccupied many writers on planning in the earlier part of the period but are not now so prominent. At the same time, other elements have a remarkable longevity. The ideas of New Towns and the provision of proper housing keep being raised as does the need to protect the countryside.