I don’t endorse this article but it is a thought-provoking take. Personally, I think instead of “densifying” cities we should be doing the opposite - incentivize building new homes and business investment in lower-populated areas of the country.
Personally, I think instead of “densifying” cities we should be doing the opposite - incentivize building new homes and business investment in lower-populated areas of the country.
Why? More low density development means more car dependency and less green space.
Perhaps OP means densify lower population towns, i.e. build them upward, not outward.
Build up, create new green focused mixed-use dense town centres with street votes to involve the local community in the planning stages, particularly with the aesthetics and amenities.
I’d be in favour of both because we need another mega city/cities in the north to redress the power imbalance that skews heavily towards London and it’s commuter belt.
The two finest innovations of postwar British planning were green belts and urban conservation areas.
Lol. There’s no hope for rational discourse, if this is the starting point of your opponent.
Green belts (and restrictive planning policy more generally) have been a disaster for the country. They are directly responsible for our crushing housing costs, poor housing quality, terrible urban design, and the stranglehold over our built environment that is held by a handful of gigantic, pointless building companies.
Remember the game Lemmings?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Labour wants to release developers into green belts and revive the Tory policy of forcing new housing estates on local people through central targets.
Back then, as Reeves and Keir Starmer are seen doing now, politicians often wore hard hats and hi-vis jackets and hugged concrete mixers on television.
When Octavia Hill promoted the human value of nature and Clement Attlee’s government formed green belts around polluted cities, they never thought it was just for locals.
The first have guarded hundreds of miles of nature from the sprawl that would have covered land-starved south-eastern England, incidentally enticing millions more northerners to migrate south.
In London alone, the City has defaced supposedly protected Fleet Street and Westminster council has done likewise to Paddington – without central government lifting a finger to intervene.
But bribing local people to despoil their environs rather than spending that money burying cables or generating offshore wind implies that the beauty of landscape has no value to others.
The original article contains 631 words, the summary contains 161 words. Saved 74%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
