Ideology, places and the WHite Paper on planning

Occasionally I need to write about the issues that arise from my studies, but also from my work and from my more general reading. It’s part of a practice of using journalling as a tool to practice engaged scholarship. At the moment I’m thinking a lot about issues of the goals and purposes of spatial planning, development control, and their relationship to place management.

A good starting point is recognising that one of the challenges of place management is both understanding the limits upon it at the same time as imagining a different world that would change those limits.

Let’s start with some of the basics of management. It’s a practice built around objectives. Even if you’re as humanistic as W Edwards Deming, the dispute is not about whether you should have objectives, but how best you reach them.

That’s not a criticism of place management, just a reflection on what happens when, as appears to be happening now, a paradigm shift is taking place. In this case the paradigm shifting is around our understanding of how town and city centres are used and developed, but the effect is not to refute place management as a practice, but to challenge it to change its objectives.

In many ways that process is already happening; the interaction between IPM academics and community activists in places like Withington or Manchester’s district centres is evidence of the discipline responding to its context.

I’d argue though that there are deeper routes into the idea of place making as ideological in the work of people like Gregor Mattsson’s writing about the different kinds of gentrification that can affect gay spaces (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0042098014555630) The idea that some gay place making is ideologically focussed on homonormative ideas, and privileged by that, whilst other non homonormative or queer places are gentrified out of existence is explicitly ideological.

The links between homonormativity and place branding projects are not new. Bell and Binnie wrote about it in 2004 (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0042098042000243165) explicitly identifying how homonormativity could be represented as a signal of tolerance within broader and explicitly neo-liberal brands.

Why am I writing about this? Earlier today I saw a Twitter link (by @MrBenSellers ) to this article on the Tribune website. It’s a good article, but, humbly, I’d suggest it has the same problem as much Labour left thinking. It’s fundamentally unfocussed, with no explanation of how a future government will define and shape the objectives that enable the kind of active place management and curation that these new town centres require.

In the same week that the government issues a new White Paper on the topic of development control and the planning system these sorts of musings aren’t merely academic.

Now I don’t want to be unkind about the government White Paper, but it does read rather like the kind of paper a SPAD would produce after talking to MPs who have limited experience of the planning system, about the bits they see of the planning system.

MPs don’t see the planning system in all its tedious glory. They get to see the controversial applications, or the ones where their disillusioned or angry constituents write to them often at great length citing cliches (like a right to light) that haven’t existed for decades.

I’ve had an unusual career in some ways. Ten years ago this summer I spent a week in a converted chapel in the grounds of a secure childrens’ home, helping planners design and deliver the kind of digital, easy to access system the White Paper says we should all aspire to. I’ll leave that there for a moment. One of the big ticket headline moments of this White Paper is a promise of an accessible, digital planning system, and ten years ago, in a room where the childrens’ home staff practiced self defence and restraint moves, in Northumberland, we were developing exactly that kind of system.

One of the key statistics we bandied round that week was about the number of cases that didn;t go anywhere near a politician or a committee for a decision. It was, of course, the vast majority of cases, and my role was to help the planners use Lean techniques to ensure that those applications were dealt with as swiftly and smoothly as possible. Having read through the White Paper I’m not convinced its author had any interest in those process issues, or in the kind of interventions government could make to smooth the processes further.

Instead what we have is a heteronormative White Paper, focussed on delivering homes for nuclear families, for households that respect and aspire to the heteronormative or homonormative standards that are incredibly profitable for major housebuilders. The purpose of development management is reduced to three definitions — local authorities will have to bring forward stripped back local plans zoning all land in their areas for “growth”, “renewal” or “protection”.

There’s an astonishing lack of detail in the White Paper about the degree of nuance permitted in what constitutes renewal or protection. The ideological base is tucked away out of sight, but the lack of space in that ideology for anything approaching community regeneration of town centres or distressed urban spaces is painfully apparent.

There’s a hierarchy of developers. At the top are the major housebuilders, whose land banks account for the hundreds of thousands of new dwelling permissions granted but not delivered in the last decade. Like luxury car makers, major house builders are acutely aware of the elasticity of price for commodities like dwellings, and restrict the supply to restrict that elasticity.

Below those major developers are the renewal developers, the builders who specialize in sires that are regeneration opportunities, the sites that aren;t in the land banks of the bif companies, but which can be found by negotiating with the remnants of the National Coal Board or British Rail. Don’t believe me? WIthin a mile of my home are one development of 30 houses on a former colliery site and another of a row of terraces and semis on a former colliery railway line, filled in and buried under thousands of tons of hardcore.

At local level there are the developers who specialise on conservation schemes, on infill developments and on sites where only a local might appreciate the potential of that former warehouse or that abandoned garage.

The WHite Paper accommodates all those people, all those businesses, but it doesn’t obviously accommodate communities that want a future for their places that is about more than profit. That requires a hegemonic struggle that starts with ideas, not outputs, and which starts ideologically, not with a wishlist of outputs that might be delivered. Once the ideological argument is won, managers can deliver places, but asking place managers to fix regeneration problems in the current environment may be a challenge too far. The debate about the White Paper needs to focus both on the realities it overlooks about how the current process actually works, but also on the ideology that shapes the White Paper.

I can’t hide the side I’d take in that debate. The Labour Party’s weakness in this debate is that it’s focus on municipalism, even dress dup in the jargon of modern mayors, has put it front and centre in the delivery of homonormative and hetero normative spaces in England and Wales, to the extent that it could be argued that the queering of space is seen as antithetical to many of these projects. Community spaces, if they are to be diverse and inclusive, have to be spaces that can be queered or which can accommodate queer ideas and practices. I’ve written before about how Labour has a problem with ideas of place; it’s hardly surprising if that I argue that starting from such a bad palace, Labour is a long way from having an ideological base for the possibilities that arise from queering palace and places.

That felt like a good closing paragraph, but I’ll go one paragraph further. Labour has, arguably, an unhealthy and unpleasant tradition of addressing inequality and the worst effects of normativity by developing client relationships with the self appointed bureaucrats who press forward asserting their right to be gatekeepers of their communities. Queer places have to be open access places that challenge gatekeeping at every opportunity. Community based urban centres won’t be delivered in any other way.