THE UPSIDE DOWN THINKER: How an astute politician helped solve a national housing crisis.

'Always consider a brick in a wall, a wall in a room, a room in a house, a house in a street, a street in a neighbourhood, and a neighbourhood in a city.' [after Eliel Saarinen]

Another day goes by and the housing crisis deepens. It is talked of as the UK’s biggest policy failure. One new announcement follows another. The government has a new solution. The speechwriter works from the familiar template: ‘we have a tech fix/a design fix/a financial fix/a policy fix’ (delete as applicable). Those in charge, despite having been part of the problem for so long, are promoted to even higher levels of incompetence. Another industry body/think tank/policy forum launches a new research paper/initiative/manifesto with a catchy title that tells us that the problem lies with planning/integration/ fragmentation. Another expert tells us about the sheer scale of the problem, without providing any answers. Another complex funding concept from the 'niche' developer of the moment keeps us in a state of suspended animation. Another modern method promises to save the housing industry, though the industry does not see the need for change. Another conference wafts on, its speakers’ interests deeply vested in the status quo. The crisis is not just in housing. It is in thinking.

The poisoned chalice

Cecilia, a Member of Parliament, has recently been appointed as housing minister. Some see this as a poisoned chalice: many of the seven previous housing ministers, all men, lasted for no more than six months in the job. Every top-down initiative failed. Targets were set and never met. Policies were repackaged but proved ineffective. Reorganisation followed reorganisation. The last minister tried to speed up the process by allowing ‘brownfield sites’ (ones that have been previously built on) to be developed without the need for planning permission. He missed the point: deregulation does not get housing built. All new developments were branded 'garden towns'. People weren't fooled. The government pledged in a state of panic that it would scale up its housebuilding efforts by throwing money at desperate sites. Flip follows flop, and back again.

Cecilia knows she has to act differently, but her special advisors and think-tanks trot out the same old concepts. They say:

1. The private sector can solve the housing problem.
2. Stop the government from interfering.
3. Sell as much public land as possible to the biggest bidder.
4. Deregulate, cut red tape and bash the planners.
5. Build in far-flung places where relatively few people will object. Say you are building eco-towns or garden cities: no one will know the difference.
6. Say you are encouraging self-build, even if you suspect that few such schemes will ever get off the ground.
7. Focus on the funding mechanisms, even though you know that the housing crisis has driven the price of homes well beyond many people’s ability to pay.
8. Look for another technical fix. Learn from the Scandinavians, perhaps. Surely there must be new methods of construction that can solve the problem, even if all such initiatives so far have failed?
9. Ask the architects. Surely it’s just a design problem?

Cecilia realises that her special advisors and think-tanks are part of the problem. They have missed the point, probably because so few of them have real world experience. Among other things, she is presiding over a housing agency whose job is to parcel up land and sell it to one of the big 10 housebuilders, who promise much, but fail to deliver. She calls it her Homes and Communities ‘Prevention’ Agency.

The housebuilders see their job as being to keep their shareholders happy (the housing shortage is sending their share prices soaring); they don’t see it as their job to solve the housing crisis. They are just as happy to sit on the land watching the prices go up. And they would prefer not to build on previously-used brownfield sites, which are more trouble than they are worth. They want to keep it simple.

Cecilia realises why the system is doomed to failure:

1. The system treats housing as a numbers game, not as a matter of building neighbourhoods. The focus is too much on the technical aspects of housing rather than the social dynamics of neighbourhoods.
2. The government looks to the housebuilders to solve the problem. But the housebuilders are a big part of the problem and government gets its answers from the very people who are creating the problem. It is a self-perpetuating cycle.
3. After the second world war big government was prepared to implement utopian visions. Today the government still puts its faith in big visions but it has no intention implementing them. More than that, it has stopped the normal evolutionary processes that drove the best forms of neighbourhood development in the past.
4. The problem must be self-inflicted: urban society did not have these problems three generations ago. What did we do differently then?
5. The system breeds adversarial positions between communities and government. This will continue as long as people see large amounts of housing dumped on their doorsteps without any regard to social cohesion. Communities see housing development as a threat, not an opportunity.

Cecilia knows that the old thinking will not solve the problems that it itself has created. That is what all her predecessors as housing minister found, too late. She needs to take a completely different approach.

Cecilia thinks upside down

It is coming up to six months since Cecilia was appointed housing minister. The system is as constipated as ever. Budgets have been slashed even further. Cecilia’s department is being told to do more with less. Cecilia’s new special adviser hears about a submission to the New Ideas for Housing competition called London FABRICation. This is something she should look at, he tells her. He has also heard about the London Popular Home Initiative through a colleague at City Hall. It seems that five London boroughs, working with five developers and five housing associations, have come up with a proposal for a radical change to the way in which housing is provided. The new approach has been piloted in one London borough, but the results have not been widely publicised.

She reads about two proposals by London-based architects for new ways of building in the some of the capital’s already developed suburbs. Superbia, proposed by the architectural practice HTA Design, is a strategy for intensifying the three quarters of a million privately owned semi-detached houses in outer London. It envisages the use of ‘plot passports’, documents that set out a list of redevelopment options available to the householders in a specific area, allowing them to extend or redevelop their property. Semi-permissive is a strategy for intensifying London’s suburbs proposed by the architects Pollard Thomas Edwards. It would be implemented by a reform of the planning system to allow new permitted development rights and to incentivise householders to become micro-developers. Cecilia finds the thinking behind both these proposals convincing.

HOUSING IS NOT A PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: IT IS A POTENTIAL TO BE REALISED.

She remembers hearing someone say that ‘housing is not a problem to be solved, it is a potential to be realised’. She sees it as her job to realise this potential. She is determined to tackle the large national housebuilders’ stranglehold on the industry. The market has to be opened up to much wider choice, allowing more people at every level to become involved in providing housing. This will include local contractors, small developers, self builders and sweat equity (people contributing to the value of their home by their own manual labour). The government’s role will be to facilitate this, allowing people freedoms that the present system stifles. The housing problem can not be fixed by a few new policies: the system must be reformed.

Lord Kerslake, former head of the UK home civil service and the Department of Communities and Local Government, captured the need for change. ‘The housing sector needed to find a common voice with a clear message to make best use of its high political status’, he said. ‘There is an appetite to see new and different models develop. The challenge is who is going to come forward with the ambitious, innovative ideas to make things happen in the housing environment… What we want is for people to come forward with ideas and say “We can do 80 per cent of this. What we need government to help us with is the 20 per cent”. It’s about that demonstration of ambition across the sector that we really need to look for.’

Cecilia’s team in the ministry prepares a plan of action. They recognize that the government can’t do everything, and nor should it. First, they need to break down the full process into stages and find out where the government should put in its 20 percent of effort in making the biggest impact at the earliest stages. To do this, they need to see the whole system as different levels of intervention, from the scale of a whole city and its neighbourhoods to the individual householder. This will identify where the government should lead and where others are more effective at doing so. A new agency will be set up: the Neighbourhood Enabling Agency (NEA). Its job will be to create the preconditions that will enable neighbourhoods to flourish from the bottom up. The agency will not be responsible for large scale building projects. Instead it will focus on ensuring that the multiple actions of many small actors in the system are released.

‘Focus on six’ is one of the agency’s slogans, encouraging people to do things in multiples of no more than six. Many sixes add up to big changes. The NEA draws up new, open, responsive and collaborative protocols to allow this to happen. Cecilia’s first instruction to the new agency is to stop selling public-sector land to the big housebuilders. Instead the agency works with all public bodies to create a land bank of small sites close to existing infrastructure. The priority is to create compact urbanism, so the agency will identify all remote brownfield sites and seek to trade them off for well-connected sites closer to existing settlements.

Using the principles of the Popular Home Initiative, the NEA ensures that all sites are subdivided using the Universal Lot concept. The lot becomes the NEA’s unit of delivery. The agency can now release these to thousands of players, not just the few. The NEA establishes itself as the neighbourhood enabler in every local authority office in England and Wales. They draw up a Parameter Book of housing types, which are published on the government’s Planning Portal. People adapt the house types to their needs, within a clearly defined set of rules. The agency sets up a Choice Matrix that enables local NEA offices to work with people to create a framework of options. Using local development orders, anyone who applies any of these choices using the Parameter Book with the Universal Lot is guaranteed planning consent. They just need to notify their local authority.

The principle is rolled out to existing suburban development. Working with neighbourhood forums, the NEA identifies the potential for suburban neighbourhoods (those not in conservation areas) to be intensified. In the case of selected, well-connected suburbs, anyone can replace their single home with three new terraced homes without applying for planning permission. The development pressure in these suburbs has led to the building of ramshackle loft and kitchen extensions, followed by ugly back-garden sheds used as home offices and for storage. In many cases their streetscapes have been ruined by front gardens being concreted over. The new arrangements allow instead for a more considered approach to intensifying them. The design of the new development varies in quality as architects and other designers get to grips with housing design, and with issues such as parking and bin storage that the earlier builders did not have to face. But gradually design standards improve, and these suburbs begin to show the qualities that will lead to some of them becoming potential conservation areas of the future.

Cecilia achieves this within the framework of the current planning system for England and Wales. The Scottish government is braver. It launches a ‘root-and-branch’ review of its planning system and undertakes fundamental reforms to make the system work for big and small housebuilders. Successful urbanism now delivers the qualities of ‘organised complexity’ that Jane Jacobs (the urban writer and activist who championed new, community-based approaches to planning for over 40 years) so perfectly described.

Towns and cities are now seen as complex adaptive systems, not mechanistic models. Urban professionals now think and act differently. Citizens are actively engaged and civic leaders inspired. Housing flourishes and neighbourhoods thrive. Cecilia convinces her own government to think bolder. They are still talking about it. Notwithstanding this, Cecilia sees her scheme’s success as:

1. Breaking the system down into manageable levels means that her agency can create the preconditions for others to respond. The aim is not to get government out of the way but to make government effective again.
2. The housing market is flooded with opportunity, including many multiples of up to six. The opportunities are for many people, not just the few.
3. The small-scale, collaborative approach creates new opportunities to build social capital. Lively new neighbourhoods form. The tendency towards urban sprawl has slowed dramatically.
4. It is a scaleable solution that can be applied across the country. Innovation has returned to housing. People are learning by experimenting. The Parameter Book is evolving as new approaches are devised.
5. The approach has led to the government instituting an open building policy, resulting in an Open Standard for housing. This provides a common platform for construction across all sectors and scales. This is based on the government’s Open Standards Principles for IT interoperability and applied to housing. This has given her government a platform for starting to think differently.
6. A Common Building Code has been developed, based on open building standards and simple modular coordination for each housing type within the Parameter Book. British Standards Institute approval has been sought and the Common Building Code has been formally adopted as a common platform for all sectors.
7. The housebuilders have changed their purpose to become enabling developers, parcelling up land into Universal Lots and offering these to the wider market in the same way as government sites are offered.

‘If we are to release the potential for housing,’ Cecilia says, ‘we must challenge and reform the rigid command-and-control systems that inhibit people’s ability to adapt their place to their needs. This depends on new forms of leadership that can work where top-down and bottom-up systems meet.’ We do not need to start again – we just need to begin balancing the roles and responsibilities of all people, building on their strengths. In some instances this means a far greater involvement by governments. In others cases, it means some simplification and streamlining to allow people to take greater responsibility in the system. Above all, this must never justify unbridled laissez-faire approaches and unprincipled deregulation.’

This is just one of the stories from ‘The Radical Incrementalist: How to build urban society in 10 lessons’ by Kelvin Campbell and Rob Cowan (available at Amazon). The stories are fiction, based on reality. Woven into imaginary plots are the narratives of some real people with real projects in actual places. They could be anywhere.