Читать книгу Commodification and Its Discontents - Nicholas Abercrombie - Страница 16

The ideology of town planning, precisely because it was composed of two intertwined but apparently somewhat discordant elements, was very forceful in creating a disposition in the Long Century in which regulation of the market became possible in the collective interest. It also helped to form a collection of movements which proved influential, such as the Town and Country Planning Association, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, the Civic Trust, the Town Planning Institute and, at some remove, the National Trust. These movements proved to be politically effective. In 1962, the Town and Country Planning Association boasted revealingly that: ‘The strategy of the Association has always been to get to influential people. We have not been so interested in an across-the-board approach to the public’ (interview quoted in Foley, 1962).

Nonetheless, as time passed, interventions in the market for land became less radical. ln this change, the 1970s was something of a watershed. Town planning in the UK operates at two levels: the national level of overall planning and general principle and the local level of development control, conservation and building regulation. Within the last fifty years or so, planning has become attenuated at the national level, shorn of more radical ambitions, and has, instead, concentrated on the professionalized, technical activities of local control. In addition, towns and cities are not seen as wholes which can be transformed by the application of a set of principles. Especially from the first Thatcher government in 1979, the collectivist impulses of the town planning system have become very much attenuated. In particular, municipal ownership of housing has been greatly reduced, strategic national and regional planning has been downgraded and the New Towns programme largely abandoned; there has been a relaxation of the rules determining when planning permission is required, attempts have been made to create a presumption in favour of development, and active participation in large development schemes by commercial organizations has been encouraged. At the same time planners themselves started to lose confidence. For example, David Eversley, a planner himself, wrote in 1973 a book which is informed by a sense that the profession is under attack and requires a redefinition of its mission. ‘The planning profession has subjected itself to an incessant process of self-examination’ and the planner ‘is almost universally feared and disliked’ (Eversley, 1973: 3).

The most important change in the 1970s, however, is ideological. The utopian fervour of the early planners faded. The regulations of town planning were still applied but rather more in the spirit of bureaucratic routine. Planners themselves stopped seeing their work as the making of a better world. Beyond the planning profession there was no longer a sympathetic audience that saw a planned society as a worthwhile and achievable goal and wished to be part of a social movement of collective endeavour. The two halves of the earlier ideology of town planning – order and justice – no longer cohered effectively in a social and political environment that had greatly changed.

To a large extent this ideological change was produced by the forceful advocacy of an alternative view of town planning. This was based, like the previous one, on an unlikely alliance between two apparently different positions. From the left, planning practice and theory were attacked from a variety of viewpoints. Those influenced by new currents within Marxism argued that planners were effectively in league with commercial developers who were making extensive profits from large-scale projects (Broadbent, 1977; Kirk, 1980; Simmie, 1981). From a different but related perspective, planners came to be seen as faceless bureaucrats whose schemes destroyed vibrant, self-supporting communities (Jacobs, 1965; Dennis, 1970; Wates, 1976; Fishman, 1980). Fishman (1980: 245) points out the continuity of this viewpoint with the cultural upheaval of the 1960s – ‘the new concern of the 1960s for community and direct democracy and the corresponding mistrust of outside experts and impersonal bureaucracies’. This second viewpoint was closely related to a third with a longer history, that of the importance of the conservation of older buildings and of Nature (MacEwan, 1976; Esher, 1981).

The second position is much simpler and was based in a renascent neoliberal position which owed much of its theoretical stance to the anti-planning views of Friedrich Hayek (2001), who attacked the general social and economic planning adopted by post-war governments as repressive of freedom. Proponents of a free-market position in town planning specifically did not go as far as Hayek. Publications of the Institute for Economic Affairs, for instance, a free-market think tank then and now, tended to accept the need for town planning of a kind but advocated a minimalist version employing a much-restricted regulatory framework. Frederick Pennance, for instance, sees planning as a facilitator of the market in land: ‘the true economic role of land planning … should be to improve the market’s efficiency in allocating land resources, not to impede and frustrate it’ and not to engage in ‘unbelievably complicated, unwieldy, market-clogging’ attempts to regulate (1967: 62).

Peter Hall (1988: 11) puts the new ideological alliance well:

in half a century of bureaucratic practice, planning had degenerated into a negative regulatory machine, designed to stifle all initiative, all creativity. Here was yet another historical irony: left-wing thought returned to the anarchistic, voluntaristic, small-scale, bottom-up roots of planning; right-wing think-tanks began to call for an entrepreneurial style of development; and the two almost seemed in danger of embracing back-of-stage.

The two positions had a common enemy personified by the figure of the planner. But that enemy is, in reality, the state, which for one side, is effectively either the agent of capital or a bureaucratic force restraining the freedom and creativity of communities, while, for the other side, it represents autocratic power repressing entrepreneurial freedom. While for the planning mind of the Long Century the state was a largely beneficent promoter of order and justice, for the critics of the 1970s it had become a tyrant.

In the Long Century the state intervened significantly in the market for land. In large measure this was secured by the practices of town planning, which was organized and supported by the development of a particular disposition based on a mixture of ideas of social justice and a concern with order. The restriction of the property rights of landowners represented a degree of resistance to commodification. However, it did not go as far as many had wished; there was no nationalization of landed property and an experiment in taxing increases in land values brought about by planning decisions was not successful. At the same time, despite the assault on the theory and practice of town planning since the 1970s, much remains of the machinery of regulation so painfully assembled over the Long Century.