Garden Cities - about flowers or land?

The latest Housebuilder magazine carries an article on the renewed interest in Garden Cities: 'The government want the industry to rediscover the joy of garden cities to help boost housing supply and create sustainable development'.  Nick Clegg, following the Coalition's line, says 'Garden Cities should be built across the heart of middle England'.

You can't help feeling that this interest comes from the appeal of the appearance of the Garden Cities, with the hope that Nimbyism will be less vigorous if 'high quality housing' is built.

Re-reading Howard's 'Garden Cities of Tomorrow' what is fascinating is that the physical vision can almost be condensed into Howard's short quote from Ruskin: '... clean and busy street within and the open country without, with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard around the walls, so that from any part of the city perfectly fresh aire and grass and sight of the horizon might be reachable in a few minutes walk'. But the essence of the ideas are not primarily about the city's physical appearance - certainly not its flowers - but how a new financial model could capture land value for the benefit of the community. In fact the bulk of the book is about the financial arrangements to make this work.

With our current crisis of housing with supply both inadequate and unaffordable, particularly for young people, this revolution in how land value is captured is arguably more pressing than it has ever been. We have have to get beyond the present system whereby land at low value is acquired by private companies to feed into the market at just the right rate to maximise profits for their shareholders, which bears no relation to real needs of the population.

Groups such as the  Community Land Trust movement are doing work to counteract the prevailing model. Interestingly, they are often local and small scale and the idea can work at any scale - they are certainly not imposed top-down to cover middle England. Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities were of course initiated as local enterprises.

Those who understand the economics of this model (such as Fred Harrsion who predicted our current crash and ensuing recession in 2005), argue that a complete overhaul of taxation system is needed, with a tax on the 'rents of land' replacing income and corporation tax altogether.

But that's another story ...

Rio Housing workshop

Last winter I found myself with 3 other London architects 'exporting' different aspects of UK design in the depths of the Belgrade snow.  This year I was one of six dropped by the British Embassy into a 2-day workshop in the humid warmth of Rio de Janiero. Both times I had the opportunity to discuss UK attitudes to sustainability as an essential part of good/great design.

Before he stood down, President Lula launched a programme, Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House My Life), to begin to address the massive popular housing shortage across Brazil http://www1.caixa.gov.br/gov/gov_social/municipal/programas_habitaca.  Having built 1 million homes last year and just as importantly having created 1.4m jobs, the Brazilian Ministry of Cities has much to be proud of as they move into the second wave of 1.4m homes.  But some questions were beginning to be asked about the long term impact of the programme; were the same mistakes being made in the drive for numbers as we have all made in the past. 

The workshop was a really brave initiative by Government inviting their critics from the academic world to review this programme and we were there to give some wider perspective.  We probably didn’t tell them much that they didn’t already know but by the end of the second day there was a general agreement about what might make a difference; on reflection such openness would be unthinkable in Whitehall. 

Following a meeting in November with the energetic programme leader Junia Santa Rosa at the AA, coordinated by Jorge Fiori, it seemed that we did have real expertise in areas that might be both new and helpful, especially Design Review.  So I was asked to make a presentation in the introductory session about the benefits offered by Design Council CABE Design Review, Building for Life 12 http://www.designcouncil.org.uk/Documents/Documents/OurWork/CABE/Building%20for%20Life/Building%20for%20Life%2012.pdf and the Cambridgeshire Quality Panel http://www.cambridgeshirehorizons.co.uk/qualitypanel/; I chair the latter with John Worthington and we review large housing schemes as (long-standing) critical friends under the four Cs - Community, Connectivity, Climate and Character.

Gilles Alvarenga of ZEDfactory and I spend two half-day sessions in the sustainability and technology group chaired by Junia Santa Rosa.  Our conclusions were not dissimilar from those of the other two groups in wanting better social and physical connectivity with the existing communities, proper social infrastructure, schools, health centres etc and accountable masterplanning.

But the strongest area of concern was the lack of significant regional variation in response to the varying climates and cultures; we proposed that there should be a series of smaller pilot projects to demonstrate regional needs and responses. Further we argued that all the schemes needed to be audited using a transparent tool like Building for Life to provide feedback and learning.

Overall we challenged them to think about the legacy of the programme; while recognising that 'you cannot change the tyre while riding the bicycle' as one delegate put it, there really is a need for the programme to evolve into My House My Life My City.  Discussions are now under way to see how we can develop the relationships established with the continuing support of the British Embassy.

NHBC marches on

I have been privileged to sit on the Board of the National House Building Council www.nhbc.co.uk for some 5 years, as well as sitting on various committees and chairing NHBC Services Ltd.  Some architects may think of the NHBC as that body that says “no, you cannot do that!” but it really is an astonishing organisation.

Founded in 1936 to raise the standards of house-building, it is an independent non-profit distributing company limited by guarantee with no shareholders to feed; it provides 10-year warranties for new homes and invests in research and standards for the benefit of householders and the industry.  It is an FSA-regulated company providing insurance cover for 80% of new homes backed with accumulated assets of over £1.5bn. 

There is no doubt that standards have improved dramatically as has ‘customer satisfaction’ but for me the biggest challenge is how to gather the new knowledge to meet our carbon emission targets and translate that for and transmit that to the industry.  Targets are constantly changing but the work of the Zero Carbon Hub  www.zerocarbonhub.org, largely funded by NHBC, and the downloadable publications of the NHBC Foundation www.nhbcfoundation.org are a huge benefit – do read them.

We Non-Executive Board Members (NEDs) are a wide-ranging group with insurers and actuaries, the chief executive of one major house builder and the energetic Executive Chairman of the House Builders Federation, the Chairman of the Institute for European Environmental Policy, a consumer champion, a former Permanent Secretary and me the architect – and 4 of the ten are women.  The new Chair Isabel Hudson and very new Chief Executive Mike Quinton are encouraging us to consider the urgent challenges of the moment:

·         How to respond to the huge shortfall in new housing – we need 244,000 new homes a year but last year only registered 112,500 new homes

·         How to help the Government integrate the regulations affecting housing and not just binning them all.

·         How to meet the very real challenges of (low and) zero carbon homes

·         How to support the transformation of our existing housing stock – we have to reduce their emissions by 80% at the rate of 1,600 a day between now and 2050.

Today the housing industry is gathering in Covent Garden for the NHBC Annual Lunch and will be hoping (in vain?) for words of real policy change from the Deputy Prime Minister.  Either way and despite the dire triple dip economic situation the NHBC will respond to these challenges in the interest of the industry and the wider community.

Loddon lessons

At the weekend I made a long-intended detour to Loddon in Norfolk where Tayler and Green built hundreds of sympathetically designed council houses in the 1940s-70s, some now listed. John Seymour in his 1970 Companion Guide to East Anglia writes 'these architects have managed to design homes that blend in beautifully with their surroundings, which continue in the tradition of East Anglia without slavishing aping the past, which do not strive ridiculously into a space-age future, which have unity and yet diversity, which in every case are pleasing to the eye, and which are said by the inmates to be pleasant to live in. ... Every architect in the country should be made to go and look at them.' Being half aware of them, I was expecting a couple of clusters but a large proportion of the small town is from the same hands. There is none of the pretentiousness of the likes of Poundbury or the laboured variety of Harlow's New Hall: the strengths are in the pure pleasure of making decorative design with the process of building - patterned brickwork to otherwise blank gables, little roofs to the chimneys, simple elaboration of barge boards. A thoughtful eye too for devices to enable home-making, such as sheltered set backs by entrances with surface to sit on or put plants. This is top-end 'people's detailing' : 'every house has a porch' but these are delicately designed porches and not all the same. There is a debt to Asplund as well as the local Norfolk vernacular, sweet and pleasant rather than hard and raw. The layouts are hardly radical in terms of relation to fronts, backs, roads and gardens but the use of wide-fronted terraces was unconventional then and still relevant now for making a very liveable environment.

Definitely worth a detour.