AT Editor Isabel Allen questions whether the Federal government’s brand-new towns program, specified by targets and shipment mechanisms, dangers ignoring the vision, management and collective function needed to produce locations where communities can genuinely grow.
The Federal government has actually revealed its vision for 7 new towns. Or rather, it’s validated the locations, and released a great deal of assuring information about the legal, fiscal and bureaucratic automobiles designed to facilitate their delivery. It’s been up to the House of Lords to lead the call for a ‘galvanising vision’ to bring the strategies to life; a suggestion that elected federal governments, particularly the uber-cautious Starmer team, can’t afford to put their heads above the parapet. Safer to define advancement in numbers. To restate the scale of the housing crisis; the capacity of these new settlements. To paint an image so ambiguous and indistinct that no one is angered − but no one really cares.
Not that it makes much distinction. There’ll be no shortage of punters happy to use up the offer of a new-build home in a box-fresh town, if only because other alternatives are scarce. Why stress over the details of utopia, when you count on the old adage if we construct it, they will come?
They’ll come. However will they flourish? Neighborhoods coalesce around a typical function. A shared dream that’s repellent to lots of but catnip to some. Ebenezer Howard’s vision for Garden Cities, arguably the most influential tract in the history of new towns, was so compelling, that the settlements it generated served as a magnet for a particular demographic, pithily characterised by George Orwell as ‘every fruit juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer, sex-maniac, Quake, nature treatment quack, pacifist and feminist in England’.
New areas need strong leadership, and strong delivery plans, however for neighborhoods to get off the ground, they require a dash of anarchy too. Letchworth, now a byword for decent suburbia, was possibly the most crackpot of the Garden Cities of its day. It’s Masonic Hall, maybe the supreme embodiment of conservative worths, originated as an open-air school, a haven of alternative education where students studied theosophical meditation and slept on hammocks in their breaks.
Kinship is created, not by pragmatism, but by passion. By optimists and dreamers with the uneasy energy to trade ideas and stories; to understand their environments. Or, to use the stultifying parlance of professional discourse, to craft the local narrative and hone the local color. They require structures and masterplans and design codes. But they also require systems and incentives to attract self-builders, co-housing groups, community land trusts: the messy magnificent smorgasbord of leaders and players with an interest in fashioning not simply a neighborhood, however a whole brand-new way of living.