Wasted cities

HOUSING NEIL WATES

Subsidised housing has been the political

panacea of the postwar decades. There is now increasing awareness amongst, both political parties --that –our_policies have ended in the economics of bedlam and tbai our housing legislation is nothing more than -a 'patchwork quilt of expedients designed to remedy the effects of earlier expedients.' But there are most encouraging signs of a return to sanity with an awareness that subsidies should be directed towards people and not houses and that the policy of ignoring the real cost of housing has helped to perpetuate unrealistic wage and employment levels in certain branches of the economy.

Unhappily, with the return to sanity on one front, a new form of madness seems about to rise on another—the cult of urban renewal.

The large-scale demolition and planned re-

building of city centres in the inner ring and/ or 'twilight areas' (a loose term which often relies on a superficial visual impression rather than a social economic analysis) is coming increas- ingly to be canvassed as a universal remedy for a wide range of ills—real or assumed— including traffic problems, the middle-class exodus from the towns and nearby suburbs, the decline or stagnation of small, and medium- sized towns and city centre blight. City centre renewal is presented as a means of attracting additional rate revenue, increasing commercial and., office employment and of improving the city's aesthetic appearance..

Large-scale demolition of low-cost housing

and its replacement by council flats has been defended in the past in the interests of 'slum clearance.' This concept originated in the pur- pose of destroying dwellings which were actually dangerous to health. It is being ex- tended by degrees to almost all older housing on the grounds that minimum standards must rise and that bad housing is responsible for many social evils,, including poor health, de- linquency, drunkenness and poverty amongst Others.

This simple relationship between physical en-

vironment and social behaviour is not, how- ever, borne out by either logic or evidence. Those studies which are available suggest that the demolition of 'slum areas' and the dispersal or rehousing of their occupants need not sub- stantially improve the social situation, but may frequently make things worse. Social patterns, however inadequate they may seem, are often disrupted. Family housing costs have increased while some types of anti-social behaviour de- scribed as aspects of slum life seemed in some cases to have become intensified in the anony- mity of the housing estate. Nevertheless, in addition to their own direct the_practice is increasingly spreading whereby local authorities eeizajeg large central sites by means of compulsory purchase, demolish the commercial and residential properties and make them available to de- velopers on the basis of valuation, either by

outright sale or in leases of one kind or

another or on a partnership basis. Where the cost of acquisition, including relocation and dis- turbance costs, exceeds site value, the council bears the loss and meets it by a rate subsidy. This system needs challenging. Apart from the obvious economic objection that to use public money in order _to destroy economic utilities without other overriding justi- fication represents a wasteful use of scarce re- sources, there are objections on the grounds of equity, too. The lavish and by now habitual use of the compulsory purchase order for urban renewal uses stands in need of regulating by clear criteria which will ensure that justice is both done and seen to be done. It must be understood that ceos entail great hardship to those affected. The price fixed by the dis- trict valuer, plus any compensation for dis- turbance, rarely matches the real cost to the owner-occupier. For one thing, valuation understates the market price in urban areas; secondly, compulsory demolition of owner- occupied houses in an area—to be replaced by council houses, commercial buildings, public buildings, car parks, almost anything but owner-occupied homes—means that the dis- placed owner-occupiers will either have to buy more expensive houses, bid up the prices of the remaining cheap homes or live farther afield. The problems of dispossessed shopkeepers are comparable.

The whole process Is so time-consuming that anyone travelling around the cities of this country can point to whole areas `blighted by redevelopment,' where people are living under a continual sense of insecurity; an English- man's home ceases to be his castle if it becomes expendable for the sake of development plans in the name of urban renewal.

The new cult of urban renewal overlooks the fact that the words have two distinct meanings. In one sense urban renewal is the name of a process as old as towns themselves. Historically the process of urban renewal has been a largely autonomous one. Towns over the years change their shape, size, fabric and func- tions in response to changing needs and cir- cumstances and wider environments.

Viewed from this standpoint towns and their constituent parts have a life cycle comparable to. that of nature with its stages of growth, decay and renewal. Villages become part of towns, towns are absorbed into larger towns, then into conurbations. Centres become sub- ordinate, residential districts are given over to commerce, life ebbs, flows and eddies. Though towns are man-made, their size and time scale make them an environment which men must come to terms with like external nature, en- deavouring to understand its laws in order to work with them to bring about desired changes, yet themselves remaining part of nature and its laws individually and collectively.

Within the process of urban renewal in this sense of the term man remains the measure rather than an abstract architectural criterion. Structures and districts may change their use, but they continue to meet needs. When they no longer do so, or no longer justify their occupation of a site which could be more profit- ably turned to other uses, they are demolished to make way and the new cycle begins.

This is the organic sense of urban renewal. The second meaning is diametrically opposed to it. Here it means organised purposeful ac- tivity imposed from without. The particular objective may vary widely, but in all cases the rationale of the intervention is a failure of the autonomous process to operate in a manner or at a rate desired by the agency concerned; in effect to accord with the plan. Thit in effect raises the whole question of town planning as currently practised.

Town planning in its present form lacks the means of responding to economic needs and public preferences. Though town and country planning is basically economic control over land use, it grew up under the guise of physical planning administered by professional and political circles which at best regarded the economic and commercial considerations with tolerance and at worst regarded them as simply obstacles to good planning.

I would contend that in concentrating ex- clusively on the physical environment and `housing problem' it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are shooting at the wrong target, and attacking the symptoms instead of the causes. The tenet that it is society's duty to provide all citizens, including internal migrants and immigrants, with housing at rents they can afford has stood the housing problem on its head and rendered it insoluble.

For it attempts to solve a whole range of economic and social questions, including the special problems of low-income groups, slum proletariat and regional imbalance, through housing measures, thereby overloading the mechanism. A realistic economic analysis sug- gests that among the prerequisites to satisfac- tory solutions of the housing problem are in- comes and employment patterns which ensure that people can afford to house themselves suit- ably at real cost; the view that housing policies cannot be used as a substitute for incomes policies is slowly gaining ground. Until housing is brought back into -economics —or economics into housing—and while hous- ing policy using random subsidies and con- trols is used as a blunt weapon to attack com- plex social and economic problems and symptoms, some of the most thorny aspects of urban renewal are likely to remain.