World Planning Day

So it’s World Town Planning Day, but where did it come from?

Town Planning has been around for as long as settlements have existed. For instance, Egyptian settlements were designed with two critical factors in mind - the proximity to water, both in terms of accessibility and to minimise flood risk and accessibility and using walls to control and limit access to a main street through the settlement.? Roman settlements were meticulously planned to accommodate the needs of residents and promote efficiency in governance and commerce, based on grid-based layouts and straight roads.

For modern day England, the early start was Ebenezer Howard, the father of the Garden City movement.? Being situated between Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities, a lot of the work Barker Parry sees will entail the Howard legacy of the scheme of management on top of the normal planning process and interacting with the legacy and interpretation of what is a Garden City.? Howard’s aspiration for the Garden City was to bring about real reform following the revolutionary movements in Britain and Continental Europe in 1848.?

The evolution of the Three Magnet theory and the formation of Letchworth and Welwyn as Garden Cities are well documented.? However, to further promote his ideas, Howard formed the Garden City Association.? This was the precursor organisation of the Town and Country Planning Association, which still operates as a charitable organisation today to promote ‘the creation of healthy, sustainable and resilient places that are fair for everyone’.

The inter-war years saw the need for housing to be delivered on a mass scale.? Using the garden city and garden suburb principles, many new housing estates were built along similar lines, but with the need to protect the countryside and restrict the growth of large cities Parliament considered it to be essential to introduce procedures to control urban sprawl.?

Two Acts were enacted in the 1940’s - the New Towns Act seeking to deliver large scale new settlements that created homes for millions of residents displaced as a result of the bombings, and the Town and Country Planning Act, which required all planning to be subject to a planning permission by local councils and in which every area of the country was to a have a ‘development plan’.

And there we have it…? the system has been pushed, prodded, tailored, “simplified”, localised and evolved, but the principles remain the same.? You need planning permission for development that does not benefit from permitted development rights and every area of the country needs to have a ‘development plan’. ?

The primary function of Town Planning always was and remains to promote development to meet the needs of the local communities in a sustainable manner.