Planning - Still in 16-Bit

Planning is a game now reflective of the later stages of Sonic The Hedgehog on the Sega Mega drive…wild, unruly difficult, you collect spurious amounts of coin in the process if all prevails, and random henchman to fight with every chance that Eggman (Doctor Robotnik to you) lasers your blue face off, ousts you of your sparkly coins, and you die. This resulting in the drudgery of going back to the very start having spent too many hours, too many thumb bleeding hours, too much painful anxiety fretting over every step you have to move in navigating the inconsistent fecklessness of it all. This all in the utter hope you won’t get pulled out on some random challenge inconsequential to the ultimate goal, that ends up being the demise of the whole campaign. What’s worse still, you see some cheeky gits smashing in a disturbingly bang average attempt to complete it using a cheat code they picked up in the monthly mag and get a nailed on green light to get cracking.

The seismic waste of time that now imbues the planning process is one that tickles in the not so pleasant way, that little area between your rectum and hope. What has been a piece of legislation in the build environment to democratise, to regulate, to make sense of, and give order to, and give credence to, and give the voiceless a voice to, give a sense of rhyme, reason, spectre, collective value to, has become an unmitigated, unfathomable, undeterminable shit show beyond the spectrum of any sort of reasonable tangibility.

The process of planning is both political and economic, and its position in the public orifice has moved from the tasty goodness to swirl in the mouth, to the smelly entrails of the darkness a few feet lower. What has been so greatly achieved with ambition, collective spirit, collective engagement from the visually wonderful to the socially ambitious has been, in sweepingly generic terms, done with goodness and gusto at its base. The ridiculous ideas have been quashed with unnerving ease, with some getting the chop instead of getting the rub….others have survived the system and have been delivered, from the Barbican Centre to the Shard, the Garden Cities to my neighbours shitty extension…but its HIS shitty extension, and I’m proud of him for believing that that shitty rear extension is worth inhabiting and only my eyeballs have gotta suffer it in the full spirit of De Maupassant.?

The labouring of the process has only been extradited to the highest echelons of bat-shit shittery with the complete dissociation of the expenditure needed to run the process and the full roster of consultants and beyond needed to service an application. This is fused with the utter lack of accountability that the process, in its semi-self-governing effect, seems to blindly own in its current guise. It is a frustration in the market felt, at a guess, at every level. From Jimmy down the road proposing a side extension for his little gaffe, to Jimmy the DM from a global fund asking for a side extension to the sizeable office building in the city centre…it's by coincidence they’re bother called Jimmy and both engaged in side extensions.

The governance on planning is to provide fair, clear, and objective rules for policy, for what is and isn’t acceptable, should and shouldn’t be approved, both at national level and local level. This would be dreamy if the applications fit into a determinable grid of varied but ultimately consistent parameters and challenges. Planning would be delicious and furiously fast if as structured as Tetris. A game that has variation, has determinable and unrelenting order…but most importantly is done to a backdrop outrageous beats based on the Russian notes of Korobeiniki. Notable that the Tetris tune is derived from a poem about haggling.

As planning policy has become more nuanced, the expectations and requirements to achieve planning have also rightly become higher. More advocating for better design, better environmental standards, better not having a building that allows you to easily and lazily peep into a resident’s bedroom. However, with councils understaffed, under financed, under the cosh at every corner, these heightened standards pushed for have not been met with improved process… (and now it’s time to slip in another game metaphor…Streets or Rage, specifically Streets of Rage II). The process remains platform based, yes you have some wiggle room to pivot up and down a bit to navigate the challenges, and you can bring a few more geezers with you to kick some shins along the way, and every now and then you can press A,B,C at once an properly hammer your point home to clear the path…but ultimately its inflexible, combative, and non sensical…how can you fire missiles from the street when you are fighting on a lift?!

Over the past 35 years we’ve moved from 16-Bit Sega Megadrive, to the PS5. From the platform pixelated dreams of Flashback, Earthworm Jim, Micro Machines, to the hyper dynamic worlds of Fortnite, COD, Grand Theft Auto. Even the pixelated worlds are back with madness beyond with Minecraft the most popular game of a generation.

Planning on the other hand, no so much...at least it can claim to be retro.