Can Man plan?

“Can man plan?”  This was the response of one of my university lecturers in 1963 when I told him that I had decided on a career in town planning.  At the time I thought it was a silly question, but 56 years later I now think he had a point.

 

I had just been reading Peter Self’s “Cities in flood: The problems of urban growth”, which deals with the flow of population and jobs from the North, Scotland and South Wales to the South East and Midlands of England.  The Buchanan Report, “Traffic in Towns”, had just been published, and the increasing unemployment in the North East had led to a renewed interest in regional planning, resulting in the publication of the White Paper, the North East Study.  So a few months later it was with confidence and enthusiasm that I set out for my first “proper job” as a junior Planning Assistant in the Planning Department of Newcastle upon Tyne City Council at the beginning of 1964.

Over the years I am afraid that as age has crept up on me, I have lost my early enthusiasm for planning - for two main reasons:

• As I wrote in an article last year (see “The unmentionable subject: population”), I see no prospect that our political leaders will even acknowledge - let alone seriously tackle the overriding world problem of overpopulation and all the environmental damage and climate change that flows from it.  All planning reports and studies take Population as their starting point.  That is usually Chapter 1.  Yet on a world scale it is scarcely mentioned as an issue to be thought about.  Population is treated as a "given", for which we must "predict and provide", to pray in aid an old cliche.  Cultural and religious objections prevent serious discussion (at least in public) of how to firstly stabilise and then reduce population levels, and the problems that would flow from large scale population decline - funding pensions, retirement ages, geriatric health services, manpower planning for a changing population structure, perhaps the end of siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins and extended families.  What is the point of planning for new settlements or redeveloping the squalid shanty towns of Nairobi, Djakarta or Mumbai when the overriding need is to stop the exponential population growth that gives rise to them?

• My second reason is this.  Over the years I have collected old classic planning reports such as Edinburgh Civic Survey, Clyde Valley Plan, Conurbation, Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall etc) and more recent reports such as Beeching, Buchanan (I actually bought them when they were published).  They make fascinating reading for aficionados, but the most striking thing about them is how wrong they were.  Their assumptions about industrial structure, employment patterns, birth rates, migration, household formation, natural resources, everything - all completely wrong.  They all failed - and their successors still inevitably fail - to anticipate the technological developments and the changes in public opinion and political priorities that will falsify their predictions.  A particular example from my own experience when working in Dudley.  Inter alia I was charged with writing the "Shopping" chapter of the old Structure Plan (in 1973/4), and I duly came up with a policy of modest growth of the existing established shopping centres, which was endorsed by local politicians and the then DoE. Six years later, Geoffrey Howe (bless him) came up with a policy of "enterprise zones" (EZs) that were supposed to stimulate industrial investment and growth in areas of industrial decline.  Immediately, an EZ was declared for the area of the redundant Round Oak Steelworks in Brierley Hill, but instead of shiny new manufacturing industry it rapidly evolved into a ginormous out-of-town shopping centre (called Merry Hill) which sucked the life out of the smaller and medium-sized shopping centres that were supposed to grow modestly, and even came to rival Birmingham City Centre itself. It completely changed the urban structure of the Black Country and beyond.  And it was unplanned. My conclusion was that for a planning policy to succeed, there needs to be continuous political commitment, nationally and locally, for a period of several decades.  That almost never happens.  In any case more recently online shopping has completely undermined any attempt at retail planning.

However, although I have more or less given up on long or even medium term planning, I still think development control is a worthwhile activity, provided that it is based on rational policies, which themselves must adapt to trends in technology and changes in public and political priorities.  I quite enjoyed my time as Vice Chair of Birmingham's Planning Committee and I hope that I made a small difference to the outcome - albeit that most planning policy was controlled by central government.

So I now think my university lecturer was at least half right to pose that question.  Yes, of course man can plan, and the discipline of constantly looking ahead and trying to anticipate events and preparing possible responses is a worthwhile activity – as long as it is acknowledged that most actual plans will be overtaken by events and rendered obsolete within a very few years.

©   2020   Robin Paice