Planning needs an idea bigger than Green Belt

Martin Pawley challenges the notion that because Britain is a small island we should plan for ever smaller cultural and environmental distinctions. The devolving of twenty-first century life into smaller units shows a lack of imagination, as manifested in the growth of Green Belt. This article first appeared in the Architects' Journal on 22 January 2004.

Whenever I hear anyone say; ‘On no account must we build in the Green Belt.’ Or, ‘Above all we must preserve the Green Belt intact,’ I am reminded of an Oscar Niemeyer story that was doing the rounds at the time of the completion of the Museum of Contemporary Art at Niteroi. Apparently, after their first visit to the site chosen for this celebrated building, Niemeyer, the mayor of Niteroi, and their colleagues went to a nearby restaurant for lunch. During the meal Niemeyer described his initial concept of the museum -- 'rising upward, like a flower, or a bird.' This explanation satisfied everyone except the mayor, who said he needed a clearer picture in the shape of a drawing before he could understand it. At this someone asked a waiter to bring Niemeyer some paper at the table. This the waiter went off to do, but on his way back, carrying a small message pad, he was intercepted by a colleague who had been listening to the conversation. 'Boy,' he said. 'This is the man who built Brasilia, take that back and bring something bigger.’ And so he did, which is why the first sketches of the Niteroi Museum of Contemporary Art were made on a paper tablecloth.

In order to see how this anecdote can be applied to the blind protection of the Green Belt that is so fashionable these days is simple to explain. We have only to imagine the same luncheon taking place in England.

Everything would be different.

First, instead of Oscar Niemeyer, we would have Lord Rogers of Riverside, a man who has demanded of the Deputy Prime Minister that he refuse to sanction any more construction on Greenfield land. Instead of the Mayor of Niteroi we would have John Prescott the Deputy Prime Minister himself, a man in thrall to the Prince Charles Foundation style of car-less retro-urbanism. Finally, instead of the forward-looking waiter who urges his witless colleague to take back the pitiful note pad and bring a sizeable tablecloth instead, we would have a cry of ‘Boy, this is the man who built the Lloyds building. Go and get something smaller!’

It is part of the psychology of a small country to believe that it is smaller than it is.

Thus in the United Kingdom (land area 94,000 square miles, population 65 million) we labour under the burden of enormous and ever changing telephone numbers, while in the continental United States (land area 3.5 million square miles, population 260 million) everybody can be reached with just ten digits, and most with seven.

British distance are distorted similarly. As the crow flies no journey in the United Kingdom can be much longer than 500 miles, a distance Americans and Australians would routinely drive in a day. Yet politically we devote immense energies to trying to ‘regionalise’ this little island by devolving its administration down to smaller local units.

This process is taken to fanatical extremes with regional dialects promoted by the BBC, and exhortations to ‘use local materials’ and ‘copy vernacular details’ issued by planning officers.

This is the context of the Green Belt, an innovation first proposed for London which was later enlarged to encompass nearly all our towns and cities as a recreational amenity for urban dwellers. However, with the increase of population and the collapse of agriculture it has effectively become the opposite – an obstacle to any broader and deeper connection between town and country that would contribute massively to the supply of development sites so necessary in the South East and elsewhere.

Today the Green Belt exists more in planning mythology than reality. Like Niemeyer we need something bigger. Martin Pawley 1 February 2004

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