Rationalities of Planning: Development Versus Environment in Planning for Housing by Jonathan Murdoch & Simone Abram

Author:Jonathan Murdoch & Simone Abram [Murdoch, Jonathan & Abram, Simone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Regional Planning, Public Policy, Political Science
ISBN: 9781351906739
Google: 8EErDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T13:09:19+00:00

Conclusion

We see here that planning for housing has traditionally been conducted via a hierarchical top-down structure in which the central state constructs forecasts of demand and then ensures that local planning authorities act within the framework that these demand considerations require. In the main, the alignment of agencies within this planning sector is achieved through the use of the housing projections. As a form of governmentality, the housing projections work effectively because they are freed from local contexts. They extract characteristics from complex situations, ‘combine’ them, ‘shuffle’ them and ‘aggregate’ them in new representations of the socio-spatial world and allow government to ‘act at a distance’ on a whole variety of local agencies (including local planning authorities and local plan participants) (Latour, 1987). The housing projections are complex. They use such abstract categories as population, household, migration, cohorts, vacancy rates, and conversions in order to build up a comprehensive picture of demographic and household change. These categories are then placed within trends and extrapolated into future scenarios of population and household growth. Not only do the categories run along the ‘smooth rails’ provided by government agencies with their elaborate statistical techniques, but they also act to reinforce the connections, obligations and responsibilities that tie the various parts of the planning hierarchy together. This process of transportation works to ensure that the actions of planners at the local level are shaped in accordance with the perceived need (at the centre) for new housing.

However, the very success of this system in delivering housing to the local level is beginning to undermine its efficacy. Because the figures are seen to work effectively, they are thought to ‘drive’ the system; thus, opposition to extensive new development tends to focus upon the forecasting techniques that bring housing demand into the decision making system. This opposition attempts to push the figures ‘off the rails’ so that other considerations (such as the environment) come into play. One strategy has been to attempt to undermine the figures themselves, highlighting the uncertainties and inconsistencies that lie within the categories (see, for instance, Bate, 1999). Yet, while the projections are deemed to be inherently uncertain, they are also widely assumed to be the best projections currently available. Thus, a challenge to the status of the figures as adequate representations of the future has largely foundered (see the discussion in Breheny, 1999).

An alternative strategy has attempted to spatialize the figures; that is, efforts have been made - by environmental organizations, local residents and amenity groups - to place the numbers within a set of robust regional and local contexts so that their ‘value’ can be assessed alongside a host of competing considerations, notably stemming from the environmental impact of housing development. This approach was nicely summarized by Tony Burton, when speaking for the CPRE in front of the House of Commons Environment Select Committee:

What we need to do is factor into the equation all those other demands that society has and those needs that society has, be they social needs or

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