1. Wendell Cox, War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life, Lincoln, iUniverse Inc, 2006
2. Now!, Light Rail, posted on www.lightrailnow.org
3. Preface
4. p 122
5. p 123
6. p 141
7. p 141 and 151
8. p 180
9. p 199
10. Peter Hall, Ray Thomas, Harry Gracey, Roy Drewett, The Containment of Urban England, London, George Allen and Unwin, 1973, Volume One: Urban and Metropolitan Growth Processes or Megalopolis Denied, and Volume Two: The Planning System: Objectives, Operations, Impacts
11. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998, p 305
12. Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization: Culture, Innovation, and Urban Order, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, p 961
13. James Heartfield, Let's Build! - Why we need five million new homes in the next 10 years, London, audacity, 2006, p 242
Dispersal or densification, sprawl or splatter - Review of War on the Dream by Wendell Cox
The American Dream, of continuing economic growth providing everyone with a suburban house and car within easy reach of a choice of good jobs and shopping, is, according to Wendell Cox, what everyone wants. (1) The freedom to choose where you live and work is now a universal dream, he says. For asserting this Cox has attracted the increasing vitriol of sustainability obsessed planners and commentators across the United States. (2)
War on the Dream highlights the serious consequences of
current urban containment planning strategies and policies, in eroding housing
affordability and intensifying traffic congestion. Cox aims to expose the
anti-sprawl and anti-suburban arguments as based on a "blurry illusion" of
impressionistic and mistaken ideology. His dream is one of rational public
policies that are based on rigourous analysis and as free as possible from
ideological bias. (3)
To this end he has built up a series of web sites, known collectively as Demographia, in which he has collated a vast array of data and observations about world cities over 500,000 in population. Even with the help of research assistants, this is an ambitious work, but one that is well worth investigating, as it is developing into a detailed reference base for anyone researching or working in spatial planning.
Cox does not advocate suburbanization in itself. He sees the urban form as a means to, not an end that is principally about the quality of life and the "diffusion of affluence". This crucial assumption lends strength to his arguments, as politicians, architects and urban planners all too often see the shape and form of a settlement as an end in itself.
This is why London has much the same urban boundary as it had in 1939. Green belt and planning acts from that time have resulted in London's contiguous built-up area being collared and constrained, its growth leap-frogging its green belt to suburbs and towns that now spread across southern England. London's green belt is three times the built-up area it encircles and was the first example of what Cox calls "densification". (4) London's growth since WWII has been in market towns, villages and new towns spread across 5,000 square miles of the south-east of England.
It would not matter that London is the only world city not to have extended its boundaries if it did not have such serious effects on the way we all live our daily lives. Higher residential land prices, currently estimated at 500 times that of agricultural values, (5) have pushed property prices up and out of the reach of almost everyone without a property to sell. This has severely restricted the choice of many of us as to where to live.
Yet high prices and low affordability have not translated into greater value. The average new house size in the United Kingdom is less than a half that of new houses in the United States, New Zealand and Australia. (6) Britain is building the smallest, meanest houses in Western Europe, which as David Birkbeck recognises on the accommodation size comparison website www.swingacat.info, are on a par with Bulgaria and third world countries.
If London had been allowed to extend, like most other world cities, without a green belt, then the radius of the urban area would probably have expanded by about 4 miles, and those who now need to commute 25 to 45 miles, or further, would be within 20 miles of London's centre. (6) Commuting distances are much greater and those living beyond the green belt have considerably fewer employment opportunities.
London is also the only world city with a growing commercial city centre, with its eastward extension to Docklands and its forthcoming northwards extension at Kings Cross. The planning collar on London concentrated jobs in the centre, so we have to commute, most of us on long train or car journeys, much of which is through open countryside where land owners struggle to find alternative uses to former agricultural production, as less farm land is needed to maintain and increase food production.
Those extra miles of commuting are '... the direct consequence of anti-suburban policies, which have produced far more dispersed suburbanization... the artificially long commutes that have been required by the planning-induced disfiguration of the London urban form'. (7)
Densification and urban design policies have tried to reduce travel times by getting people to live closer to where they work. Unfortunately, we choose where we live based upon many factors, of which employment is one. The crucial factor is affordability. If the only house you can afford is in Kings Lynn, then that is where you may end up, saddled with a two hour commute. Policies such as the post-war New Towns placed homes near industrial estates, but most of the homes went to those commuting to places outside of the town.
Cox rightly stresses how densification policies, particularly in the United States, resulted in worsening the housing and economic situation of ethnic minorities, by limiting their choices for where they live and work. Minorities, along with women, have tended to rely on mass transit systems, which, for women in particular, is less convenient than a car in having to deliver children to schools or day care centres, and then still get to work. (8)
Rather than planners telling us how to live our lives, Cox would prefer they copied their predecessors of the nineteenth century and facilitated the expected growth and the travel patterns preferred by growing communities. 'Good planning provides for the preferences of people, rather than attempting to steer them', he says. (9)
Higher housing costs relative to incomes, and congested, less productive urban areas, are the main outcomes of anti-suburban policies. Together this leads to the likelihood of lower wages, and fewer houses and jobs to choose from for middle and lower income households. We need urban forms that help us live and work where we choose.
This is where Cox stops, for War on the Dream and Demographia do not explore how, why, and the extent to which modern urban forms are, in fact, historically and politically distorted. Nor do they suggest the ways we can help develop forms fit for the future.
War on the Dream has little mention of the ways in which our choices over where we live and work have changed since the American Dream suburbs of the 1950s, and are changing again in response to almost universal car ownership, mobile communications, and new forms of social and economic networks.
Cox's conclusions, although well stated and backed up with data, are not new. Sir Peter Hall, the most eminent of British town planners, concluded, in his 1973 review of the British Town Planning system introduced in 1947, (10) that it had produced three main effects:
- containment
- suburbanization
- inflation of land and property values
All on a scale never previously witnessed - in 1973. (11) Even then British planning policies had been far less successful than American ones in accommodating to the demands of a more affluent, more space-using society. Hall has more recently explored how technological change will reshape the map with many activities dispersing, but with new activities requiring face to face contact, creating a polycentric pattern of development. (12)
The rapidly changing relationship between town and countryside is the key to understanding current urban forms, such as dispersal and polycentricity, and Cox largely misses out on this.
Densification in Britain has led to huge losses of public open space and green areas within cities, as school playing fields, incidental and informal open areas and former industrial areas get built over. The rural south-east is now where London's new functional areas are developing:
- Felixstowe-Harwich-Thamesport-Southampton are container ports
- Cambridge-Oxford are science/education parks
- Northampton-Bedford-Milton Keynes are transit-sheds
- Heathrow-Gatwick-Stansted-Luton are air travel centres
- Thurrock-Bluewater-Cribbs Causeway are retail parks
- The market towns of Norfolk, Suffolk, Dorset, Wiltshire and beyond are becoming a "work from home" city
The main trend is for increasing dispersal to suburbs and towns and villages over southern England. James Heartfield claims '... today there is no London, as such. The city has lost all definition, as its outer edges have blurred into the dormitory towns around it.' (13) London has gone beyond a sprawl and become splattered across southern England, losing shape and form.
To the extent that his aim is a maximum freedom to choose where and how we live, Cox makes numerous interesting observations, and is absolutely right to say that planners should help in every possible way.
Harking back, however, to an American Dream that no longer accords with current trends of development will also hold us back from identifying the best methods of facilitating and supporting the freedom to choose where and how we live.
Whether it is dispersal or densification, sprawl or splatter, let us dump all planning regulations that prevent us from building the homes people want to live in, where they want them built.
Tony Pierce 29.04.2007
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