Successful cities require holistic vision and planning, they require thinking beyond the space individual buildings occupy. They require entities with and able to deliver a holistic vision.
There are few private landowners who have enough of a landholding to have a holistic vision for an entire place, region or city. The only ones who do are the big developers who deliver whole new or regenerated places, the same ones who are often hated by activists. Yet the better of these developers have often realised that great places tend to be places of great value, thus they have a commercial incentive to deliver great places, which admittedly are often also places not everyone can afford.
The public sector, particularly in the form of a council or special purpose development entity, has wide ranging interests and objectives focused on making things better for the people who live in the area of its concern. The public sector has a desire to achieve great places for a variety of reasons, not all of which are commercial. A public sector organisation is often the only entity that can form and implement a holistic vision for an urban place, particularly when that place is split into multiple different ownerships. For that reason the UK’s public sector holds many legal powers that private developers lack.
Public bodies can shape cities in a number of ways: As a planning authority they can set out a vision for the place and write this into planning policy to ensure that only development which accords with that vision may be approved. The problem with vision is that it has little point unless it is achievable. Therefore the pragmatic public authority will develop a vision which essentially represents a compromise of all relevant factors to promote a deliverable solution which meets as many objectives as possible, whilst balancing the good and the bad. For in most cases the concept of having one’s cake and eating it does not happen, meaning that an undeliverable vision will never be realised. Or worst of all such vision may well prevent achievable positive change.
The pragmatic public authority will also develop delivery strategies to ensure implementation of its vision and achievement of its objectives. It will have and actively use special legal powers to implement this vision and may actually build stuff itself. The nature of the delivery strategy required to deliver such vision in any context will vary depending on the nature and complexity of the problems. There are a number of steps which a public authority can take to deliver a vision:
Masterplan and identify opportunities for change and set these in planning policy
Encourage the private sector to deliver change
Facilitate the private sector to deliver change by combining the private sector delivery experience with the council’s statutory powers such as the ability to assemble sites by compulsion.
Public sector delivery of infrastructure or development- building stuff!
The modern concept of the interventionist city wide vision emerged after the second Great War when public authorities were given planning powers to control building, and compulsory purchase powers to enable development and infrastructure. Many public authorities proceeded to use these powers in the 1950, 60’s and 70’s to rip out vast swathes of the pre-war city to make space for modernist developments and the car.
Many of these post war interventions cataclysmically failed and gave such interventionist approaches a bad name. When such schemes were built, the designers claimed to be experts and adopted many of the delivery strategies set out above. However, the design of the schemes they implemented were fundamentally flawed, for those “experts” actually knew very little about how successful cities work.
Therefore anyone delivering successful change in the city has to understand the structural characteristics of successful urban places. So lets look at that next by moving to section 6.
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