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.
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.
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.
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