LAND AS THE BASIS OF THE PLANNING SYSTEM

The two major themes outlined above, land as urban morphology and land as power, come
together to form a large part of the basis of town planning. In Britain and elsewhere, the planning
profession which began to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century was concerned with
many aspects of urban development, but new and more pleasing forms of urban layout and a
concern to protect the interests of the weaker groups in society were central. In both of these
endeavours, the use, disposition, ownership of and access to land were key factors. In short, town
planning was largely synonymous with land use planning.
As far as morphology was concerned, the central task was seen as overcoming the worst
aspects of the congested, and insanitary jumble of land uses which had typified the industrial city.
Attempts had been made by a few enlightened industrialists in nineteenth century Britain and
Germany, to build model settlements in which the needs of industry and its workers could be
satisfied harmoniously, for example, at Port Sunlight near Liverpool. Early planning documents
often proposed Utopian urban forms, some of which sought a return to more formal, pre-industrial
layouts, whilst others attempted to deny urbanity by incorporating large amounts of open space
and rural imagery. The interwar years were particularly influential, for they produced the
International Congresses for Modern Architecture (CIAM). These paved the way for Le Corbusier’s
ideas on the Ville Radieuse with its tall blocks of flats, wide areas of public open space and careful
segregation of motor vehicles and pedestrians.
Many of these ideas were taken up in practical form after the Second World War, notably by
the British new town movement, but whereas other\ European countries were emphasising
technical innovation, in Britain the focus was firmly upon the vernacular. The layout of the
American city too was influenced by the modern movement but here it was given a particular
character by Frank Lloyd Wright. This took development in a very different direction where the
preference for individual family homes and gardens was to be combined with the freedom of the
motor car in a virtually anti-urban form known as Broadacre City.
The impact of these elements of the modern movement upon the morphology and land use
of today’s cities has been considerable. Le Corbusier’s ideas have been used, albeit in a penny-
pinching form, in high density residential developments in cities throughout the world. The new
town movement culminated in Britain’s postwar development of more than thirty new towns, a
style of urban development widely copied elsewhere and even more extensively reproduced in
debased form through a multiplicity of suburban housing estates. Lloyd Wright’s ideas too shaped
the development in North America, and increasingly in Europe, of low density cities with outof-
town shopping centres, leisure complexes and dispersed luxury housing developments.
Following the land as power argument takes us also to the heart of the planning system. In
Britain especially, but also elsewhere, planning consists largely of the three elements identified by
Peter Hall (1980). A professional bureaucracy forms the centre, and this is surrounded by a number
of pressure groups and politicians. The first and third of these groups seek to balance and
accommodate the demands of the middle group. The system is thus inherently political and it is
significant that in seeking to analyse the politics of local planning, Blowers (1980) entitled his book
The Limits of Power.
A large part of the justification for a planning system is that it resolves competing claims
over the use of resources (especially land), attempts to balance an uneven distribution of power
and protects the interests of weaker groups. In a practical sense, this includes the provision of land
for community facilities and for housing poorer members of society and ensuring that some checks
are kept upon the dominant land using activities. Much of the development of postwar planning in
Britain, notably that in the new towns, placed great emphasis upon relatively egalitarian
approaches and the importance of community values. Lord Reith (New Towns Committee 1946)
was quite clear that these communities should be balanced, with a contribution from every type
and class of person. The success of the planning system in protecting the weak, particularly in the
provision of housing and community facilities, should not be discounted, but the ‘Robin Hood’ view
of planning taking from the rich to give to the poor is not always appropriate. In the field of urban
renewal, especially, there are abundant examples where relatively weak local communities have
been pushed aside by a collusion of local authority and property development interests. In recent
years, the prodevelopment policies adopted by a number of governments in order to combat urban
decline have tended to downgrade the power of local and community interests.
Many examples of this can be seen, especially where the rise of an office economy has
required a fundamental restructuring of urban land uses and a new economic infrastructure. In the
USA the needs of urban renewal in some cities have resulted in powerful corporations persuading
city governments to do much of the job of land assembly and provision of infrastructure (Friedland
1982). Following the 1949 Housing Act, city and federal governments began acting effectively as
brokers for private developers. In the process they biased the power struggle between the political
liberals and labour leaders who wanted low cost housing to replace slums and the corporate
interests who wanted commercial and high rent residential development. The situation heralded
what has happened in the London Dockland redevelopment in the 1980s. Such developments may
well be desirable in the interests of the overall urban economy, especially where they follow a long
period of decline or dereliction, but they lend weight to Cherry’s question of’Whose values are
being protected, and by whom?’ (1982:86).