In this, the twelfth episode of A is for Architecture (https://open.spotify.com/show/1nkasZVHfyPp5ikJGshSfq?si=fcccc8fcf95841e2) , I speak with Hana Loftus, co-director of HAT Projects (https://www.hatprojects.com/about/) , architect and town planner and Engagement and Communications Lead at the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service (https://www.greatercambridgeplanning.org/) and Chair of Creative Colchester (https://creativecolchester.org.uk/) . HAT Projects are an Essex-based architecture, design and strategy practice. Hana’s role as planner-architect is rare and valuable, offering specific insights into a process often seen as opaque and arbitrary for design professionals. We speak about this, the whys and wherefores of planning as it intersects with the practice of architecture, and ways the discipline might (or should) open up to enable fairer and more just outcomes.
I met Hana many years ago, when we were both students (at rather different schools…) and have been ever impressed by the varied career in architecture, making, building, teaching, speaking, writing, theatre, and now planning she has carved out.
Hana’s writing can be read at virtualhana.blogspot (http://virtualhana.blogspot.com/) and her Twitter is here (https://twitter.com/hanaloftus) . Follow this (https://vimeo.com/110866908) , to hear Hana speak at the Glasgow School of Art in 2014, as part of the Mackintosh School of Architecture’s Friday Lecture series.
Happy listening!
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Music by Bruno Gillick (https://soundcloud.com/user-229193274) .
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Hello and welcome to episode 12 of a for architecture with me Ambrose gillick in this episode I’m speaking with Hannah Loftus an architect and town planner based in essics Hannah is co-director of had projects but it was her relatively new role in planning that I was Keen to speak about particularly its
Relationship to the practice and product of architecture its sensitivity to Community Voices and the pressures it endures from both commercial and political forces it is a negotiation and as planners we’re constantly having to say well what are the most important things which are the things that we really want
To push for in this scheme which are the things that we’re going to have to compromise on we’re not going to be able to get what we want out of this but which are the few things that are really important a for architecture a podcast about architecture buildings Urban culture and
Space hello I’m here this evening with Hannah lofas of hat project Hannah would you like to introduce yourself hi I’m Hannah uh I’m one of the two directors at hat projects we a very small architecture and uh related disciplines practice I suppose I might say based in
Essics in culta we do buildings we also do public realm we also do some policy and research work um and a lot of work around engagement and kind of community participation as well in all of those processes I’m also a chared planner um I have a role which I’ve had for the last
Three and a half years working with the greater Cambridge shared planning service so that’s the planning service for the whole of Cambridge City and South Cambridge um and I lead engagement and Communications for the service so that’s a really wide role where I get involved with policy plan making um
Consultation and engagement in various shapes and forms uh and helping the wider team get their heads around how they can best talk to communities um and get the best out of those relationships with the communities that we serve and with the organizations within them brilliant so can you explain I suppose what town
Planning what a town planner does that is distinct from um well yeah just sort of unpack that I suppose yeah it’s a really funny term isn’t it town planning we have the the the sort of Chartered body is the Royal Town plan Institute and it sounds like
Something out of the 1930s which it kind of really is um but planning as a discipline uh today at any rate um really has I suppose two sides to it firstly it is making policy about places so it is setting the rules the plans that shape what can be built where how
Much of it can be built how it should be built what sort of form and shape it might take uh and secondly it is then assessing all of the different applications and proposals that come in as planning applications against those rules so we sort of set the rules and then we’re
Also in charge of enforcing them which is a really unusual situation actually normally the people who are the lawmakers are not also judge and jury over over people who uh do or don’t break those laws um but in planning one of the paradoxes of planning is that we
Do do both uh certainly with in the public sector of the planning profession um and then within the private sector you planning Consultants are you know really a bit like lawyers I think one of the for me one of the most analogous uh disciplines to planning
These days is actually law in the way that law is practiced because so much of it is about shaping arguments using evidence uh testing uh theories uh whether they are uh theories about what should or shouldn’t happen whether it is the evidence to prove that a proposal does or doesn’t meet the
Requirements of set out in policy um and in in many ways it is like lawyers in court arguing with each other a lot of the time it becomes uh a question of whose evidence is better whose case is better and at the end of the day there’s
A really difficult judgment call to say well what what do we think in the end of the day what do we decide that’s really clear and and so the origins of town planning as a kind of Enterprise in the UK I was reading one of the uh papers you shared with me
Earlier um has its origins in the 1930s in the pre-war period is that right yeah it gradually becomes a discipline I mean I think as always these things never have a exact start date but one of the most formative moments in town planning um was in the
Late 1930s coming up to the uh War period um where before before the war there was an increasing amount of concern around uh unregulated Development Across the country so plots of agricultural land that were being bought up and subdivided into little plots and sold off to people
To build their own homes on for example the sort of plots phenomenon um what was seen as rather unregulated sprawl over the wonderful Countryside uh and and as a result many people started to think we needed some more rules we needed some more regulation around all of this we needed to control
Development uh and and I suppose the modern discipline of of planning certainly originates from then obviously there were previous things that are kind of like planning I mean you could go back to the the great far of London for instance and the rules that were brought into place about how wide Streets Could
Be and the materials that you could use on the outside of your buildings um as a way of stopping fire and you could see those is sort of either the antecedent of planning or the antecedent of building regulations depending on which side of the fence you might sit on um
But certainly there’s a spatial aspect to that um which I think has some analogies to planning so so no after you Hannah after you well the Town and Country planning act which is the sort of a original uh piece of planning leg legislation that still really shapes what we do today
Has its Origins out of the 1930s and came into being in the mid 1940s uh and has really shaped what we do ever since and that’s kind of interesting isn’t it that we have a kind of Heritage would you would you say that the the the the approach to planning has
Kept pace with the nature of sort of Life contemporary life or is is planning always playing catchup with reality I think the latter I I don’t think it has kept pace as a practice uh and it is difficult so planning is a long-term proposition by any means the plans that
We put in place uh are realized over many decades often and certainly then their consequences continue to influence and become apparent for many decades after even what you might notionally call sort of completion of of of a plan over the development anticipated in a plan so it is a constantly ongoing thing
And we are certainly always playing catch up but I I definitely do feel that the processes of planning have become steadily more complicated and more involved in a way that isn’t uh conducive to keeping Pace with very rapid social change or very rapid change in methods of construction
Even methods of involvement of of how people lead their daily lives social research and so forth it’s um really amaz it’s a really interesting idea because as you were talking I was just thinking that and and again going back to this one of these texts that of of
Yours as you say you know you plan for 30 years down the line and and you make this very interesting point about the most normally the most engaged people are in their 60s CU they got the time Capital to get engaged and they’re not actually going to see the fruits of it
And and a number of the documents you sent me try and deal with the idea of getting younger people involved but it’s a it’s a process that’s intimately tied to political realities and yet has to somehow plan distinct from political realities and even the economic cycle it’s kind of got this
Strange quality about it yes and the interaction between politics and planning is really tricky because the political Cycles are very very short and that’s really where some of the ideas around how we use evidence come into play so at least in theory planning policy so the making of of
Planning policy at the various different levels at which it happens is meant to be evidence L it’s not meant to be politically LED it’s meant to be about Gathering the best available evidence uh and applying that to your area of sphere of influence and deriving uh what are meant to be sort of
Objectively the best policies plans sites and so forth out of that process of course you know we know that the idea of objectivity is is always a tricky one if we start saying that things are purely evidence-led there’s always a judgment call there isn’t there it never
Is just about the evidence and so the role of politics is very tricky but and many of the challenges that planning has are about negotiating that we have planning committees which decide on many of the most important planning applications and they’re made up of politically elected representatives
They’re meant to be working outside of their political roles when they sit on that committee they’re not meant to be making decisions based on their politics however I don’t think it’s really possible to ask a set of counselors to suddenly put their politics at the door and not worry about whether or not
They’re going to get voted in the next time around um you know if there’s a controversial application in in their area or in their ward of course they’re going to take a view on that and even at the policy level you know the final Arbiter on on planning policy as a
Secretary of state minister in government so you can develop all the evidence you want you can do the tens of thousands of pages of documentation to justify why you think we’re doing the right thing at the end of the day it will go to the Secretary of the State
And Secretary of State may take a different View and and come back and say you know we think you should be doing something else here so it is a very tricky one uh because those political realities do come and bite and we’ve seen that really recently with some of
The election results in byelections and so forth over the last year where suddenly issues of of Planning and Development have at least been blamed for or or they they’ve been ascribed as the causes for some some notable upsets and some byelections so the recent obviously the the the conservative government that we’ve got
They came up with this new approach to planning so which rhetorically at least foregrounds Community voice um I don’t know really what that means and I was Wonder and and it’s an extremely um ideological move based around conservative principles but it’s going to have if if what you are saying
Is you know you’ve got these very long-term visions that are acquired so things that were being planned at the beginning of the Millennium 20 years ago and now hitting this that reality but there’s the other reality of course which is in the last 20 years this emergence of this uh Consciousness about environmental
Sustainability so how do these plans these long-term plans which were seeded maybe a decade or two go how do they how do they negotiate that do they just get scrapped or do they get kind of reinterpreted yeah great question so um they don’t just get scrapped uh a local
Plan let’s just take a typical local plan for an area so every District Council in the country is meant to have one and sometimes as in Cambridge they team up with a neighboring one to to make a joint plan how often are they made it’s a pretty much a continuous
Process is it right you will get your plan made it will probably take you five years to get it from first uh first sort of consultations initial research through to uh being adopted um and then almost immediately you’ll be going back and starting either a local plan review
Or starting planning for your next plan so it it really does never stop however the the force the weight that is put on to the plans is the ones that are adopted so you’re absolutely right you could have a plan that was adopted 10 or 15 years ago and that still carries more
Weight than anything that’s emerging policy at this point in time so it is difficult and a site may be allocated in a plan from 10 or 15 years ago and that may be a strategic site of five or 10,000 homes and at house building rates which will only build out at a few
Hundred homes a year that will keep building and that may be at a density that by today’s standards we think is really low from a sustainability perspective that may have uh transport connections or access routes or green spaces that again with what we know now about biodiversity collapse and so forth
Don’t feel appropriate and and there are relatively few levers for us as planners to start influencing them and changing them along the way which is really problematic and this is where it becomes very legalistic because of course then you’ll get things like the forthcoming environment bill which which if it comes
Through uh Parliament this session is likely to say that we should be having 10% biodiversity net gain on every site and we have yet to know whether that will really come into force in a way that means it applies to let’s say an outline planning application that had been given permission before the
Environment bill when that comes through to detailed matters detailed design Reserve matters is it going to suddenly be required to meet that 10% and these are some of the really difficult things that’s why you end up with lots of very welled P paid planning barristers and planning lawyers and Consultants
Fighting this stuff out ultimately in appeal hearings and so forth and it is it is very much like a branch of the law where you have something that comes in the only way you really know how forceful it is or how what how impactful it can be is when it’s tested in the
Courts when you get those first cases that come through whether they were cases about you know sexual assault for instance when you know the first laws on those came through and the case law starts to make the the precedent um and that’s really important in planning as
Well we can’t just do what we want based on what we think at that moment in time we have to be constantly thinking about all the other appeal decisions all the decisions all over the country and what the risks are there to come to your other point about Community engagement in the planning
Bill I mean I think that the the planning white paper uh I would say did not forr around Community voice at all it actually its original proposals were a reduction in the amount of community participation in the planning process and that’s one of the things that many conservative MPS as well have become
Very angry about and I suspect that will be dropped but the original the original proposals in the planning white paper were actually that in a what they were going to call a growth Zone uh planning applications would be have a sort of slightly more automatic approval and
Members of the public would not be allowed to comment on those planning applications at all in those growth zones so I think one of the things that is important to kind of for me to understand when you’re talking about highly paid barristers planning barristers we’re not talking here
About um planning at the scale of the domestic extension we’re talking here about volume house building large scale industrial land uses and one of the things that struck me when I was working up in Glasgow was that planning seemed possibly because of these well-paid uh uh Legal
Eagles planning seemed to be able to operate with a very heavy Hammer against tiny things and almost have no power in relation to larger scale things and I I I I I’ve always struggled with this because it felt very you know trying to get domestic extensions built myself and
The amount of oversight was hilariously over the top and then watching just giant sves of of uh appalling housing being built with apparently just a sweep of somebody’s pens somewhere and I I just wondered a little bit about that like how does planning how how does planning deal with
That kind of that that problem of scale that is at its heart yeah I think you’re absolutely right I think that is the experience of planning for a lot of people is that on the scale of your extension you’ve got endless Hoops to jump through and it
Just feels like a complete Nightmare and yet as you say you know whole fields of houses can be built and it doesn’t look like there’s any sort of pain in that process behind the scenes I wouldn’t say that’s always the case with those big house builders and those sites there is
A lot of pain in the process there’s a lot of negotiation uh and there’s a lot of back and forth but yes fundamentally as in so many aspects of our our world our life uh money and and power and influence are interl aren’t they so if you’re Building
200 homes or you’re proposing to build 200 homes on a on a field somewhere or on a Brownfield site and the planning Authority is required to meet its uh housing delivery targets by government otherwise you get sort of put into special measures and um have your wrists slapped quite badly there is an
Incentive there for the planning Authority ultimately does really need to permit that it will try its best to get better quality out of it it will try its best to to negotiate uh and and squeeze some more value for the public out of it but ultimately if you if you hold your
Standards up um above your delivery you can end up in a very very sticky situation and the house builders know that so you know it is it is a negotiation and as planners we conly having to say well what are the most important things which are the things that we
Really want to push for in this scheme which are the things that we’re going to have to compromise on we’re not going to be able to get what we want out of this but which are the few things that are really important uh that might be a new
Cycle route that might be a better walking connection to the Town Center or it might be something around sustainability or design uh but you’re unlikely to be able to get all of it well whilst we’d all love to have it all the reality is that um we are in quite a
Weak position because when we’re required to meet targets we’re required to meet our the the housing delivery targets that are set um and those do bind our hands to a degree but what’s changed between say for example the post-war Suburban expansions of cities like Liverpool and Manchester and well
Everywhere really where when you go to places like withen Shore or birkenhead the old the you know 1950s parts of it what you now see is yeah rather UND but really really high quality actually and you know the homes fit for Heroes thing is one of them but but even the kind of
Yeah pretty much any suburban area of the postwar period is actually now um sort of unimaginable that that volume house builders would produce that what what what is the significant thing is it the is it the lack of a role of architect in in there or is there a lack of capacity
At the level of design because I think so speaking from the perspective of an architect nearly an architect uh just I just want to emphasize that no false advertising um that that um whilst all these things like uh cycle lanes and and biodiversity are sort of nice ultimately they’re badly
Designed a lot of these settlements and how has that happened I mean you can’t answer that but I mean what what what do you think what is the main I think there’s a few different factors at play um we obviously had a huge deregulation um that happened in the
1980s and and through to early 1990s uh and and at the same time we’ve also had a massive decline in local authorities or the public sector as a as a whole building housing and being more directly involved with delivery of homes so you know if you look at the postwar
Period vast majority of the kind of housing that was being built after that period was being built by the government in different forms local government and central government and you know and those weren’t just the sort of 1960s Estates of that people love to knock down now if you’re a conservative
Minister but there are also the Suburban dwellings that of urban Estates on SS of Beck and tree for instance in London you know massive massive huge development or har all of those new towns that are have many different typologies in them from an architectural perspective uh and I think that when the
Public sector gets involved with delivering homes there is a different emphasis on quality of design because there’s a longevity that they’re interested in they’re interested in whether that is going to be a place that is going to actually last you know if they if they were imagining they were
Going to own and manage manage the homes they wanted to have home own home that they could own and manage successfully that weren’t going to start falling apart on them very very quickly and of course they didn’t always manage that you know you know some of the prefab
Blocks and so forth that went up were really badly built using new technology that wasn’t well tested and so forth but at that scale if you like of some of those more Cottage Estates or Suburban Estates that did swing up there is a certain quality there I’m I know the
Architects love to say it’s all about the lack of an architect and I think there’s something in that but I don’t think it is all of the story we’ve had very very poor standards for housing for for a number of years and actually I think this is actually starting to improve I
Mean it’s it’s only a few years since we’ve had mandatory space standards back again so we actually have a minimum size for the inside of a house and minimum floor to ceiling Heights and most local authorities will now have a policy on outdoor space and you know minimum sizes
For Gardens or balconies if you’re in Flats and so forth all of those things are really important drivers to Quality and in the the the more ambitious local authorities you can see that bearing fruit yeah you can see the quality of housing is actually improving it isn’t that widespread it is
It comes out from you know some of the bigger and more confident planning teams and local authorities and of course it comes out from the areas where there are higher values to be made because you’re less likely be beaten down on viability but that viability question is
Is fundamental you know we do have a very flawed system of valuing land and in my view in this country um essentially the price that someone paid for that land is is never really questioned it’s just put into the equation um and then you know then the
Developer will say well you know I can only spend this much on the house I can only spend this much on uh the materials the quality the detail and so forth and that’s a pretty difficult conversation in a lot of places yeah yeah that’s really interesting I I want
To other than design there is this word and it brings me out in hives and you used it in one of your one of your texts that you sent uh I think it was in the one public practice which um uh I’ll link to in in the description
But it’s this word placemaking I want to know what placemaking is because my my my gut feeling is a bit it’s a bit like saying Christopher Columbus discovered America you know other than the 2 million native indigenous people that were there um yeah sure he did um
It’s a bit like feels to me a bit like that that you know you’re saying you’re going to make a place of somewhere that probably is a place already to somebody so I kind of want to and but my my my my feeling my gut feeling is that this
Relates to the idea of the generation of some form of cultural social capital and value within new development or within regeneration am I right actually I I probably use that term it is an absolutely horrible term and I lots of us across the whole of the built environment sectors are constantly
Trying to find a different word or a different different verb to be able to use to describe the variety of disciplines um I suppose on one level you might say that we use placemaking as as a term because the word planning has become sort of purly understood well
Probably always was purly understood but is purly understood and maybe the two things are quite analogous to me it is actually just a way of bringing together all of the different disciplines that contribute to making really the physical environment actually um more than more than perhaps those intangibles around uh
What makes a community and you’re absolutely right all the places they are they do already exist we don’t actually make places from scratch it’s a bit like you know land the land was always there the land will always be there um however I think there is some value in
Trying to think holistically across architecture landscape transport infrastructure uh nature agriculture even uh and and trying to see all of those as contributing to uh shaping maybe might be a better verb than making uh the places that we live and inhabit and I think there has been
A a lot of difficulty in the kind of siloed way of thinking and and that’s really I think what the term why people use the term Place sh placemaking is to to try and break down that kind of siloed mentality whereby a highways engineer is just a highways engineer and
An architect just an architect and everybody sticks within their little their little box and their little boundary and all of the stuff that is at the friction points between them is the stuff that gets done really badly and actually to me you know you come back to
This question about why is so many places you know these sort of housing fields of houses on the outskirts of kind of middle size Midlands towns or whatever really awful to me a lot of that is because nobody is has been joining the dots between all of the different factors there and nobody’s
Been saying well actually how does this add up the house may be kind of okay but the layout of those those houses is terrible and the way it meets the neighboring development or the Lial Junction to the existing Community is really awful and just has some close boarded fences and you know
There’s there’s no one’s actually looking carefully at the boundaries and and trying to transgress them and and make them more permeable so that you get something that has a degree of of integration a degree of to a holistic kind of character holistic distinctiveness really as a place yeah
Rather than just an assemblage of bits that have just landed I suppose this comes back to this this issue of the the the um de um dere regulation of housing so when when councils were doing it there could be this this joined up quality and you go to these Suburban
Estates as you say you know that they’re kind of remarkable for for the fact that they do seem to have um though they can they can be quite uniform they do seem to have a sense of place about them and uh you know places like har and as you
Say Beck Tre and place uh with and Shore in in in Manchester they really are quite they’re actually quite lovely places to be in um so so it must be a very complex job of actually I suppose the question I’m looking at is how do you get Buy in do
You get Buy in from commercial developers is is the is the commercial developer in interested in placemaking that is to say is the lack of place about the places they developed not intentional and would they rather that their places the the housing Estates that they build would
They rather that they were full of a sense of place I mean I I guess again it’s not a question that you personally can answer but when one you know and I think we need to be careful because you look at uh parlo or Beck andry or all of
These places when they were built and they were deced for all of the same reasons as we decry our new build States today you know monotonous and soulless and you’ve got to go miles to go to a shop and it’s all really terrible um um and you know I think there there have
Been a number of really interesting sort of studies and looking at how these places have grown up and evolved over time and the reality is it takes time it takes a lot of time to know whether a place is really successful or not uh and so there’s a little bit of me that
Whilst you know I I also drive you know drive around and look at these things in a half the time think God I can’t believe this has been allowed to happen I’m mindful of not having too much snobbery about it so just a small story
On this so I went to um cambour which is a uh new well it was originally sort of conceived as a new Village it’s really more of a town now in fact it’s just graduated from having a parish council to having a Town Council and and it’s a
Few miles outside Cambridge and it’s been built from the kind of late 80s through and it’s still being built and it’s going to see a lot more development kind of happen over the coming decades and I went and did a session with um some young young people in the youth
Club there last week because this point about well they’re the people who all has Chang is going to really it’s going to really affect them like what do they think about Campbell and what do they think works and doesn’t work and is nice and isn’t nice and you know it was
Actually really interesting how much they liked it there was stuff they didn’t like you know not enough shops not enough stuff to do in their spare time but there was also stuff that they really liked about what maybe a lot of AR might see as quite a kind of generic
Sort of Housing Development with lots of semi- detached and detached houses and car parking and you know sort of slightly dull Neo vernacular styling but you know a lot of these kids actually really liked the community that had grown there and as somewhere that is now got you know there was one actually
One of the youth workers had grown up in Camp was one of the first hundred families to move there um and she went to way University and did a couple of things and is now back working as a youth worker there so she’s seen like the whole of Korn’s trajectory if you
Like over time and it was just really interesting so I think we need to be a little bit careful about being too daming too early in the day having said that I think that the big issues to me come back to this question around climate and sustainability
And actually are these places going to start to become very problematic as we enter into climate emergency because of their car dependency yeah I think there are places that can be relatively successful and actually quite happy if low density suburban and and sort of semi- rural communities in their own way
Um when everybody’s able to drive their two cars around and all the rest of it when you start to look forward decade or two and that just isn’t an option that’s going to be a really interesting one to see how they fare and the the other side I think is is is also
Very problematic is actually the the extremely Urban so you know all of those big apartment buildings have gone up in in London and Manchester and so forth which have been sold to Offshore buyers and if you look at the trajectory of of property values and the problems with
The cladding Scandal and so forth think there’s a huge risk around those I think they could be you know the slums of the future go go very quickly from being seen as a luxury product to be sold on the offshore Market to being somewhere that is you know it’s the Sinker state
Of the future it’s almost it’s unlivable unsellable people are trapped it’s it it could be a really really big issue that’s really interesting I I mean you’re not the first person to accuse me of having sort of snobbish uh uh attitudes about things so and you won’t
Be the last but uh but it’s but I I I think you’re right and and I and I say these things to provoke you in a way I do I mean my gut feeling is that they won’t even last long enough that that the syn state of these the the
Particularly stuff built from the 80s and ’90s onwards are very very cheaply made and that you know where where is those sort of postwar suburbs came through de-industrialization places of um uh lower income and uh various forms of impoverishment these ones won’t make that many years that the the the quality
Of the AR of the buildings is so low that they will have to be rebuilt within probably my lifetime that’s my guess oh that’s a really interesting one because of course I mean the Victorian Terraces are notoriously terribly built and they’re still with us I mean hideous if
You ever have to try and work with one the quality of the masonry work is terrible the bricks are really bad the timber is all minimally sized so that any kind of damage or or or issue things you want to do with them you’re going to
Kind of fall through and and yet they’re still with us because we have this privatized property Market whereby as soon as something’s owned by a person it’s almost indestructible when it’s owned by a corporation when it’s owned by Council like Council housing regeneration is kind of possible when
Stuff is owned by the individual and the most extreme example of this is actually in in in um some of the plot lands communities that still survive so we’re doing a lot of work in jaywick SS which is an extraordinary Community um and it didn’t exist two 100 years ago
Jck s just salt marsh there was nothing there now it’s a community of about 5,000 homes about 3,000 of which are on the flood plane and most of those were literally built as Beach huts and people are living in them and the cils over a number of years
Kind of in the well really from when it was built through to the kind of late 90s basically wanted to wipe it off the face of the planet they just did not want this place to exist but it’s almost it’s basically impossible for them to do that because
Those plots are owned by people and those people unless you’re going to compulsory purchase out 3,000 people don’t want to don’t want to go anywhere so despite the fact that I mean I I their houses are very Charming actually in many respects and are a kind of real
Architectural Marvel and you know worthy of dissertations being written about them from a kind of self-build perspective but from a safety perspective from a climate perspective from an Energy Efficiency perspective from a health perspective they’re appalling I mean that you know they are Beyond Salvage and in many cases but
It’s almost impossible for anyone to do anything about that so I I think that maybe you may be right that some of the houses that have been built over the last 20 years shouldn’t exist but I suspect they’re going to exist just because they’re owned by people I see
And those people have an asset that they need to cling on to oh we could talk about plot lands forever I I mean it’s just the most fascinating and um romantic I think it’s probably the most romantic thing of the last 100 years in architecture I I I
I uh have been visiting them up on the North Kent coast and I went on summer holidays um to see some uh ones up in on the Lincolnshire Coast called the fitties it’s a settlement called the fitties and uh it’s remarkable I mean yeah not only not only vernacular but
Also maintaining sort of what you might describe as sort of traditional Lifestyles within it um very very strange but anyway I wanted to get so this issue of placemaking really interesting and you talk about the idea of educating young people in placemaking and also you talk in another one of your
Documents about the idea of how do we connect it’s in fact on your on your beautifully written if I might say blog um virtual Hannah um this idea of how do we connect with young people so that they have a voice in the development of plans I suppose at a
Macro and a micro scale um so I yeah I would like to like you to I suppose talk about that a little bit like what what does education in placemaking look like how might it work does it only occur at University level does it only occur in a
Kind of for a professional class of people who are going to be involved in actually decision- making or how do we draw it down into less well voiced people I think that it’s is actually the opposite I think it needs to be in school from day one and I think there
Are lots of aspects to this um so uh children and and young people are educated almost not at all about their physical environment the physical environment that they will occupy for their lives because we do all occupy physical space and that’s on the level
Of you know how to hang a door or put up a shelf in your house um or what your boiler does and how your boiler works or your heat pump if we’re going down that route through to how you know a street is is made and put together and the
Agency that you as a citizen have over what happens in your neighborhood it’s seen as something that’s just done by other people it’s seen as something that happens to you um you buy a boiler in a box and you get a plumber to put it in
And that’s the end of it but actually you know and this comes to the climate question we need to be able to have that circular economy and that circular way of working with our physical environment that isn’t a consumer disposable culture and to me that starts with understanding
How to maintain your own home how to make sure that you actually understand you you know you take your car to the garage for itot every year no one takes their house for its mot no one even thinks about their asset they rent or that they invest in as something that
Requires maintenance and then the contribution that we make to The Wider physical environment beyond the front door you know even on a again on a climate level let’s just start really basic you know Paving over your front garden to make your parking spaces has an impact on the biodiversity of your
Area has an impact on the flooding of your area and in a downpour but no one’s really taught to think like that they’re not really looking at being environment that they’re inhabiting and saying well what is it that I do here that is impacting it and how do my actions make change
Positive change or or negative change in this situation and then kind of going to The Wider to The Wider perspective you know it is about um I think about democracy and about the fact that we are all citizens in the world and we should have
A voice in it and kids you know our kids have um citizenship education where they’re talked about how to elect an MP and that kind of thing um but at the local level understanding how you can get involved with some of the processes that probably impact your life much more
On a day-to-day basis than which MP is in Parliament you’re not taught anything you’re not taught how to comment on a planning application let’s say or how to find out what the highways Authority is doing what your rights are in that situation you know if your neighbor is
Doing construction work at 10:00 on a Sunday morning do you even have the right to complain about that if the highways Authority is digging up your street and you can’t get your kids to school because you don’t have a car and you can’t go around you know what are
Your rights in that situation so there’s a sort of Rights perspective and then there’s an agency perspective to say Well they’re going to dig up the street do you even like what they’re going to be putting in there you know why aren’t they planting more trees how can we get
Some more trees on our street how can we get uh you know that that horrible Corner down the back of the alley and which is a sort of you know that classic space left over after planning you know the bit where everyone hangs out and leaves rubbish you know how can you do
Something about that how can you make that space better who do you need to talk to can you get ownership of it can you talk to the council whose job is it even to do that stuff so people just see this stuff and they they’ll complain
About it and they’ll hate the fact that you know there’s always garbage dumped at the corner there because it’s a piece of land that hasn’t got any real function or no one really looks after but no no one has really taught how to engage with that in a way that could
Make a positive impact so to me it’s quite practical on many levels it’s not about saying oh let’s get lots more people into careers and and this kind of thing it’s actually just how am I a good citizen in my own neighborhood and how do I exercise my rights as a citizen in
My own neighborhood uh and and ensure that I can kind of get the best from for my family my community out of the system yeah it’s a really good that’s a really good way of putting it and and mean for for me one of the clearest signs that
People don’t have any feeling of agency whether they do practically speaking is the state of Pavements in Britain which are kind of Comedy gold I mean you’ve got the utilities companies that are apparently can legitimately just dig it up and then patch over over and over again um without ever maintaining it and
You end up with environments that are incredibly um dangerous to walk on actually um wow we’re having a real wiiz through here sorry I’ve got to get to my charger because my laptop suddenly said it was going to die better do that before it runs out on
Me I will uh I will edit this bit out but um there so so this idea of participation yeah I I really been interested in it since since sort of first encountering the skeffington report 1969 isn’t it the skeffington report uh people and planning um and and it corresponded to
Sher arnstein’s brilliant paper the latter of citizen participation so there’s obviously this great and you know it’s one year after the student Revolutions in in Europe student riots in Europe and and we have this thing that happens where participation as a strategy becomes embedded within a system and defanged I would suggest by
It and you talk about the possibilities of participation how do we how do we I mean I’d quite like your Reflections on the idea of participation in that respect the way that participation has remained extremely manipulative I mean I was talking to Henry sanof the um Dien of kind of
Participatory planning in America who uh and and and he said you know we use this word design shet most people have no idea what the word shet even means my gut feeling is that they’re not supposed to my gut feeling is that the the languages and even the practices the spatial
Visual um orientation of these events is specifically designed to foreground a certain type of Engagement which preferences is a certain kind of epistemological framing of reality that is to say middle class um and my gut feeling is that no change in participation and participation in planning is ever going
To occur that changes that because that’s very advantageous to the type of people that um produce planning and then use planning am I am I being too cynical or is that fairly accurate I think you’re not being too cynical on the political level because and again this comes down to the
Exercise of one’s voice as a citizen democratically you know most of the people who who vote regularly and consistently come from a particular part of society however you know we obviously have notoriously seen a few elections and votes recently where other parts of society have had made their voice very very strongly
Heard uh I mean I think that those of us who who engaged in different forms of participation as a practice you know we would all say that that’s not the case that we’re not trying to privilege middle class voices in fact the opposite of that one’s constantly striving and
Struggling to try and privilege those other voices in that debate because the middle- class voices as you as you rightly say they will always come and talk and and Shout loudly regardless of whether we go out and make any effort to engage them at all they’ll come long um
And make sure that they’re heard um but I suppose there are two strands to participation aren’t there there’s a formal participation which is encoded in in in kind of policy and Regulation and processes that take place and then there is if you like the the informal the the more kind of
Encircling uh work around participation um and I think we aren’t very clear about the difference between those processes and what role they have uh because you know formal participation if you like it’s like sort of voting or whatever you know you can leave a formal comment on a planning application or you
Can leave a formal comment as part of a consultation on planning policy on things like that but that really is only one part of what participation means and in fact I would probably argue that those comments are the least influential way that you can get involved because at
That point in time you know when something’s got to a point where it’s a a kind of a finalized proposal if you like that’s gone in for for for this formal consultation it’s already gone through a lot of work to get to that point it’s already very well shaped we’ll have a
Lot of evidence behind it whether you agree with it or not but there will be a lot of work that’s gone to support that as an application or as a proposal um and any comment you leave is going to have to be weighed up on its planning
Merits against all of that other work and evidence and it’s highly unlikely that you as an individual will have better evidence or you know more knowledge on a subject that can somehow refute the evidence that’s already being put forward but the question is how do those proposals even get to the point where
They’re submitted like what is the process before that how do we get how did those proposals get shaped in the early stages and that’s the difficulty because at the moment we have no formal processes around that excuse me and only very vague uh guidance and and sort of
Suggestions really nice nudges to say well you know as a developer you really should engage with your community to help shape your proposals you know we might look on it more kindly if you heard evidence that you’ve you’ve talked to people about it um and and likewise
With planning policy you know again you know it’s it seem as favorable but there’s no structure around that um but that’s the important bit it’s actually the stuff that happens around us and I think you know there’s this is where the the the ethics and the uh philosophy is
Is important because it’s very difficult to put rules in place that say this is what good participation looks like you know once you start to put uh rules in place they’re very aifi they’re too General they don’t take account of the specificity of a particular Community particular environment particular
Proposal they lead to Lazy practices just Fox ticking um and no real value comes out of that yeah um but I think you know I think it I think it is an interesting moment because people have a lot more ways to share their voice now
So online you know of course is is a really big Forum whereby people lots of different sorts of people can start making clamors and do make clamors about all sorts of things and it’s quite revealing to see how I think that is starting to change the discourse and make that wider
Participation as an activity more urgent for developers and for for people involved with with the development industry on on the public and the private side because actually you can start getting yourself into pretty hot water and whilst I I I I’m always reluctant to argue for better participatory practices on an
Instrumental basis that somehow it will make your life easier you know we’ve got to that is a that is a reality that is a lever there to say well you know maybe you need to take this more seriously because if you don’t you might get a lot
Of Kickback a lot of problems arising down the line yeah yeah cuz you talk about it you you you you talked about I think for for a lot of folk the assumption is that when they participate their voice will be materially manifest in what is built that they will
See themselves or see their community’s identity expressed in what is built like that participation is a mechanism you put it here um it’s to influence how the plan is shaped or is it uh user testing or is it to gather evidence or is it more direct and I think most
People suspect it’s well I think the assumption is that it’s more direct and and that that I don’t think is the from my experience and from what I’ve seen I can’t believe that that that is the case so it’s it’s something more nuanced than that as you say but doesn’t
Participation doesn’t it sort of insulate people in positions of of decision making from the kind of terrible things that are about to be done to communities isn’t that kind of can do it definitely can do and you know there was a project that we were working on not long ago
We’re actually not working on it anymore we had a site parting of ways of the client on it but um the the client was actually local Authority um might be named um and um they ran some quote unquote engagement stuff and it’s a bit unusual actually because normally when
We do engagement we do the engagement in this situation we were being hired as The Architects for this particular project and the local Authority very clear they did the engagement we didn’t have any role in in kind of shaping what that might look like and they had a
Series of steps that they went through um which included you know a webinar and an online questionnaire and blah blah blah blah blah and Fact Two webinars and we went you know so we dutifully turn up to the two two two webinars online with an audience I think combined of maybe
Two people in the first one and literally nobody attending the second one but you know that would allow them to take the box and say well you know if they didn’t come they can’t care very much can they about it you know it’s all fine which of course you know we know is
Just not the case they didn’t come you didn’t know about it you didn’t Market it well enough you didn’t make it accessible enough you didn’t do you know do all of the things you could have done to make sure that people come because sure as hell when you start building
This thing they’re going to know about it and they’re going to say why did I not know this was happening and it’s not going to be enough for the local authority to say oh well you know we had some webinars on it and did you not see
The the thing we put out you know or the whatever the leaflet that came through your door and got mixed up with the pizza leaflets whatever it might be um so it can it can insulate and uh as you say and that that is a very
Dangerous uh thing to happen uh on on a political as well as just on a philosophical level so I want I want to finish I I did want to sort of touch on ideas of the rural urban divide but I think that’s another conversation perhaps we can have that one day um
Because I think your Reflections on that are particularly interesting but I did want to I sort of wanted to finish on a kind of what does the future look like for planning for architecture in these in these cases my my gut feeling I’m becoming kind of warm and fuzzy inside about things
Because uh if you don’t laugh you’ll cry no um because because I think my my my feeling is that there is an emerging sense and maybe it’s through digital I don’t know that’s um that people want to be more engaged in the production of healthy places uh With Better Lives possible within it
Um I don’t know do you have that feeling I mean with people like you involved that must be true but is that a general feeling and and if so kind of how do we get how do we get there I think people do really want to be involved um there’s a huge appetite
But it is really hard people have busy lives well I suppose actually I should backtrack a little bit are you saying when you say people do you mean like General people or do you mean sort of Architects and professionals well I mean that’s a very
That’s a very good question I I my my normal feeling is is to go with the people um because that’s that’s kind of an easy again that’s I I suspect that’s just me insulating myself from implicating myself in that but I think there’s yeah there’s the architect as
Well how do Architects become re-engaged that’s a really good question like how do Architects become re-engaged in something that they very frequently feel is against them and then how do how do the General Public shape it well I think Architects um do have a relatively poor understanding of the
Planning system and certainly it has been really insightful for me to train as a planner and you know halfway through my career kind of step onto the other side of of the fence if you like into local Authority planning team it’s just been incredibly interesting to see
It from the other side and to to to understand what those conversations look like um when you’re when you’re when you’re in an architect a team a develop a team across the table uh I guess I my my gut feeling is that it was um surprising and interesting but not
Not in a kind of unicorns and rainbows kind of way not in a unicorns and rainbows way but also you realize how um you know how many Architects come and present things to you and they don’t really they’re not really presenting what is helpful to you to see and and
From a from a from a perspective of a planner you know actually the way that they’re talking about their schemes their priorities are often really not developed with a good understanding of what priorities might look like for all the other partners who are involved including the planning Authority and
Often including the community they think they do understand it but actually their wider peripheral vision around how their proposal sits nested into so many other things that happening in the area um is often you know it’s often not that well understood and I think that Architects could do with a
Bit more um you know probably in University as well as in practice a little bit more of an awareness of of planning as a discipline but you know there is a huge energy and and appetite to get engaged um we’ve got to try and find processes that are Equitable for that engagement
To me that’s just really important important uh so and that you know that does take account of you know if we’re going on to the the the general uh We the People rather than we The Architects um the people who have the most to lose and probably the most gain through the
Process on a from from a perspective of equality um are the people who have the least capacity the least time the least ability to get involved you know when you’re busy juggling your three jobs and your children and your horrible landlord you know what energy have you got left
In the day to start shaping your neighborhood so it’s no coincidence that you know the areas that have the most neighborhood plans going on for instance tend to be really middle class areas because of course those people have plenty of time to go to lots of nice
Meetings in the evening and you know develop uh neighborhood plans and and take all of that time to do that so I I think that there is something around how we uh remunerate financially people for their engagement actually um how we make it a part of their lives in the way that
Jury service for instance is a part of people’s lives you do your jury service whether you are you know uh from whatever background in fact in jury service is almost the opposite isn’t it it’s middle class people tend to oped out of jury service because they tend to
Come up with great excuses why they can’t possibly take time out of their busy lives um you and I think we we should try and look at some of those processes to say well maybe we can learn from How The Justice you know coming back to where we started which is
Relationship between planning and the law how the justice system works with the participation of individuals within that and actually despite a lot of problems with the justice system definitely not perfect there’s still a relative amount of of trust actually in that as a process there’s a relative amount of
Trust and jury trial and also the role of magistrates I think is really interesting you know magistrates are fundamentally lay people who are trained to a certain level in the law but they’re not lawyers they’re not formally qualified in that way um and they have a really interesting Community role I
Think in how they Advocate um and and understand their community at that very kind of neighborhood level of the sort of relatively lowlevel but still impactful and and difficult and so forth that come in front of them so I’d quite like us to see more exploration and pilot programs about how
We can get people involved with these processes in a way that is paid and is seen as a part of their life that is it’s fine for them to take time out of their life to do that it’s okay there’s space that is carved out there’s child care that’s carved out there’s whatever
There needs to be kind of carved out and to see what difference that might make and we haven’t really done that in this country we really haven’t done very much at all to even try what that might look like and it might fail hideously it might might make no difference it might
Result in huge conflict uh you know big arguments big fights uh a lot of Mis expectations or or you know difficult things but I do think that if we don’t try we don’t know and I think also if we don’t try and I think this goes for a lot of public
Policy wider than planning you know I think it goes for benefits policy and immigration policy and all sorts of things we are very fragmented aren’t we politically there is there is very little trust in politicians experts professionals you know local Council officers civil servants and so forth we
Just don’t think that they have our interests at heart most of them do they really want to do a good job they’re not evil people they’re trying in difficult circumstances to balance a lot of things and I think that if we could get people more involved with that stuff a
Little bit under the hood then there might be the possibility that they understand how difficult it is to make those decisions and be a little bit less quick to polarize into the kind of extremes of what they think should or shouldn’t happen in the world so that might sound
Very rainbows and unicorns but I think that we have a bigger political question here about participation in policymaking um goes beyond planning and I think we may be in for some very sticky times if we don’t solve it and I think if you look at places like Ireland
You know they just recently had that really fascinating exercise around oh tricky subject with you but abortion law and so forth in the Republic and actually you know they reached some really interesting conclusions through just having normal people involved with that the um the that’s really interesting and it’s
Not it doesn’t sound too um unicorns and rainbows to me it’s um I’ve been struck by something and I’m going to put a word to it but I think there’s something we talk a lot about consent in certain areas of our life and we the law works and you’re right people
Generally speaking trust the law because they feel the law is consensual in fact law is mysteriously co-produced in so far as most people abide by the law all the time I I very rarely break the law um uh and only ever when I’m driving a bit too quick and that’s only
By generally speaking accident um so so law has this built-in consent process and we are the the legal process is consensual I would suggest that planning doesn’t feel consensual no and I suppose what your your um description points to is a is a way of gaining The public’s consent through actually genuinely Consulting
Them because that’s the way the law works it’s like the law generally speaking does what people think to be right but plan but planning doesn’t smack of that and I think that that’s so I think your your proposal is very intriguing yes and I I think you’re absolutely right about the co-production
Aspect and that works in those different ways as you say that works just through the practices people have in their daily lives and um you know we’re we’re quite aware of if you say a speed limit you know Simple Rules like that where we should or shouldn’t drive too fast or
You know talk on our phone when we’re driving or whatever and simple penalties well understood generally as you say we consent to them we don’t sort of object massively to them um but we’re going to start having a set of really difficult ones aren’t we around climate for instance and what is
It necessary for us to do as a society to address the climate crisis and consent is going to be so critical there because you can see some of those starting to become really difficult and I suppose just to end on on one thing which is to me that kind of
Participation engagement processes are not just about how you if you like co-produce the rules but they are also a process of how you explain and unpack clearly and communicate really clearly with communities what the challenges are that you’re even trying to address you know because you can’t come up with an answer
If you don’t really understand the question so uh to get me for participation I think we do need to get a lot better at just the simple communicating how do we talk to people and unpack this stuff in a way that they can relate to so you relate to mobile
Phones and driving because you know you’re told and it is fairly evident when you pass a smash on the motorway what the kind of cause and effect is there for some of these other things they are really difficult you there just isn’t that same cause and effect the
Cause and effect is is very sort of hidden it’s there but it’s itely not that evidence so yes so how do we get consent for things that are fundamentally very complex I guess is a a really interesting question and on that question I think we will finish thank you ever so much
Hannah I thought that was a really really fascinating insight into into planning so thank you thank you so much for having Me golly G that was good thanks to Hannah for a very enlightening discussion please see the podcast description for links to her website so social to some of her writing and of course please like follow subscribe and share as for architecture your grandma grandpa your dad your mom your brothers
And sisters your aunts and uncles this Christmas cheers