Could we build a new New Town?

For the first time in decades, housing policy is shooting up the political agenda. Gordon Brown is planning ‘eco-towns’ - or Broon’s Toons, as they’d doubtless be known if the thought wasn’t so utterly depressing - with 100,000 new houses on surplus government land, and 250,000 more on top of the 2.75m target of houses to be built by 2020.

Brown’s announcement concentrated entirely on raw numbers. All that matters, in this great new push for development, this creation of entire new towns and huge new estates, is the number of units that can be thrown up, and the number of people - or sub-units, as they’re probably known - that can be inserted into them.

There is little mention of density, communications, and the practicalities of building ever more in the South East, let alone any kind of vision for how urban living to will evolve in the decades to come. 100,000 houses will be built, simply because housing’s expensive, it was something Tony didn’t do much about, and because it’s a nice round number that’ll sound good in the soundbites.

The Philistinism is astonishing. Yet another giant scheme of housing will be thrown up, with no consideration for anything except sheltering another clump of workers, as efficiently as possible. Each of these estates and towns will be a permanent fixture on the landscape, since unlike the ghastly council tower blocks that are currently being exploded up and down the country, there’s no single landlord that can get rid of the things.

One might be surprised that the country would is happy to cloak itself with architecture that is dreary at best, soul-destroying at worst, and entirely irremovable. We are no longer a nation that is happy shopping at C&A. We now buy more BMW 3-series than we do Ford Mondeos. We love cheap clothing, but it has to be stylish, cheap clothing. Even staid old Marks & Spencer was only truly revived when Myleene Klass didn’t look out of place bouncing around in its adverts.

Design is everything to Britain in the 21st century. Yet the man who wears nothing less than Hugo Boss and loves his Audi TT is quite happy to drive home to a house than could have been stamped out on a British Housing production line. Property is the one great exception to our design obsession.

What on earth could make us so willing to accept second best, in the one purchase that matters most? Why do we not even question the grotesquely utilitarian plans of housing ministers, given that the state has proved it can commission and build delicious buildings - though admittedly, only when they’re for the use of MPs or officials.

Partly, there’s a lingering fear that contemporary architecture is inevitably cold, unliveable, and inhuman; built according to the Le Corbusier fantasy that if one designs an inhumanly rational, planned city, one can expect their inhabitants to turn into Homo Rationalius, content to follow the architect’s plan for how they should live their lives. Some architects revelled in this Godlike position, but citizens bristle at being managed in this way. We might like to worship designers, but we’d rather have a say in the matter.

But mainly, I suspect, because we have grown used to the idea that modern building is inevitably boring and derivative, and that anyone who values style will either commission and build their own design, or buy something that was built a century or two ago. After a century that built houses of ever-increasing blandness, we haven’t the guts to reject a freshly built housing estate of brand-new wynds and lanes, a plague of modern suburban boxes built onto a streetscape from the Middle Ages. We no longer believe that we still can build something great if we want to.

Individual buildings we can do fine. It’s the art of designing cities, or districts at least, that we’ve lost. This is the hangover from those disastrous attempts of the Sixties and Seventies to invent bold new ways of living, rather than designing cities to suit the way people like to live.

Under the current system of planning, development has become the preserve of a handful of professional developers, who are the only ones with the muscle to confront the planning system and win. A virtual cartel of firms who build much the same kind of houses is not going to experiment, given that suburban boxes sell easily and profitably, and that they care about little else. The problem is that we have a planning system where no one can build on a large scale except these developers, and given the fluctuations of the market, these developers want the safest product they can build. In cities, development is a duopoly of councils and corporate developers.

We can’t and shouldn’t expect the state to step in, to attempt to raise the standard and the beauty of housing by developing themselves, since their record in this field - Millennium Dome, anyone? - is abysmal. Even if they were capable of it, the political incentives simply aren’t there. No one votes for housing unless they desperately need some, and if their need is that desperate, their priority will be for quantity, not beauty.

But there is another model to consider, a Third Way if you like. More than two centuries ago, the nation’s most beautiful housing estate started to go up, on a disused heath to the north of medieval Edinburgh. A young architect, James Craig, drew up the grand plan for the New Town, a geometrical grid of fine squares and broad streets, on the instructions of the town authority. Permission was granted to anyone who wanted to build a house or houses there, so long as they conformed to the overall plan and the new style.

Where necessary, the authorities offered a reward - the first, lonely house to be built on the far side of Edinburgh’s stinking loch earned a £20 bonus. Planning permission - the great headache of modern urban development - was not a problem, since the city itself had drawn up the plans. All a builder had to do was acquire a plot, a builder, and formal permission to build his house there, in accordance with the plan.

A modern version of this scheme could demolish the stranglehold that timid architecture has on this nation. Instead of restricting development to professional developers, a city wanting to build on wasteland or over the rubble of a decrepit estate could bulldoze their site, and invite submissions for a new plan, covering both the layout and the style of housing.

An open competition is an old device for commissioning architecture, and it would be an ideal way for a city to decide on a plan. And since those wanting to build to this plan would get their planning permission automatically, thus cutting out a hazardous and expensive part of building, the standards demanded in the scheme can afford to be high.

It is then up to individuals, developers, and housing associations to acquire a plot and design a house or a block that fits the grand design, to coin a phrase. By breaking the need for full, start-to-finish planning permission, you break the power of the developers, and allow individuals and groups to build their own houses again.

A district designed on these lines could afford to be adventurous and exciting. It has the chance to be a development that adds to the beauty and character of a city, rather than, as so many do, dragging it down further to suburban mediocrity. Unlike most developments, the city could afford to demand the kind of quality and beauty that few individuals would be able to build on their own. Instead of town and cities competing to have new housing dumped elsewhere, we can dream about a day when towns compete to build grander, more innovative, and more beautiful districts than the next town.

All it takes is the belief that we can still do things like this, and that it’s worth doing. The days when we could build mere housing that was stunning enough to stand as a monument to our civilisation doesn’t need to have died, quite yet.