A Disproportionate Response to Proportionality

LVIAs are vanity projects. Discuss.

Who are they intended for? 

Often not the reader.

Do they actually get the message across or are they so bogged down in process that they've missed their point?

I think so.

Overly lengthy, formulaic, impenetrable, jargony landscape assessments with no tables and no point to make. My pet hate.

Dull to write and worse to read with no point to make.

Is there a better solution? Do you even need an LVIA? Does setting out whether the magnitude is medium or medium-high actually help anyone understand what the issues are? 

I'm not saying that LVIA doesn't have value, of course it does. Sometimes you need that comparative distinction, particularly in EIA, but often you don't.  Often a simpler, more approachable and, importantly to the client, cheaper document will tell the story.

And your document needs to tell the story. Could you explain your argument to your mate in the pub? Does your report convey that point? And does it do it succinctly in a way that can be read by a non professional?

If not, then I'd argue that document has failed.

Make it purposeful, make it succinct, make it robust. 

More words = less message.

And with that last in mind, I'm signing off.

Local - But Not That Local! Labour's Plan to Power Up Britain

Swerving around the obvious sections about how the Tories have ruined the country, I found Labour's plan to get us all building again plausible in principle and, well, exciting, if a little shaky on the delivery. 

One of my greatest bug bears with planning is the lack of regional thinking for large scale planning policy. Cities, such as Oxford and Leicester for example, are in constant negotiation with the surrounding authorities to accommodate their housing needs. And don't get me started on Green Belt, I have other blogs for that.

Zoom in...zoom in...zoom in...too far!

Labour wants to introduce the awfully named 'Take Back Control Act' (MAGA anyone?) providing greater power to 'local' leaders (but how local?) who have "skin in the game". Local Growth Plans will be produced for city regions, based upon "sensible economic geographies" (my new favourite phrase), with the document containing numerous references to the successes of Labour mayors. This, they say, will give them the right balance of scale versus local knowledge, making policy on a scale that is not "so local that it does not reflect people's working, commuting and social patterns". Localism is dead, long live Localishism?

So far so plausible.

So how are they going to do this? Obviously planning reform, the obligatory prospective new Government buzz phrase. In the 'what exciting metaphor is the planning system this year' game, the planning system is now 'sclerotic' and Labour are telling us they are the much needed medicine to fix it all (spoiler alert, sclerosis isn't curable).

• First of all the 'Housing Recovery Plan', to be delivered in the 'first weeks and months'. Does this mean it will be drip fed or that it will take an awfully long time to read? 
• Reintroduction of mandatory housing targets, giving local leaders a say in the 'how' but not the 'if'.
• Passports for urban brownfield sites (presumably so they can go on holiday to Conservative seats).
• Building 1.5 million new homes in the next Parliament and in the 'right' places (Conservative seats again?).
• Employing 300 new planning officers to make it all happen.

1.5 million homes in 'the next Parliament', so five years? I don't need to point out to you the obvious flaw in this proposal. Even if we all magically had an application ready to go the day after the election (alright, I know you do), nobody is putting any of those houses on the ground for well over a year, probably two, that's 20-40% of the time gone. So, best case scenario, there are three years to build 1.5 million homes? Plus all the nice new R&D, industry and infrastructure that we'll also be building at the same time. We can do HS3 in the next five years right? And obviously the UK's housebuilders can build that many properties in that timeframe...

To make this happen, the new government will pull out of the ether 300 new planning officers. Presumably, these 300 officers, who have been sat around waiting for this opportunity, will each have 5000 houses in their pockets. And of course, these planning officers will single handedly manage the entire caseload of a scheme passing through planning, reviewing the ecology, the landscape, the transport, the heritage and so on. It's OK though, because the new Government will release its 'Skills England' programme "to identify skills needs in each area and work with education providers, local leaders and business to fill them". I assume the first chapter will be how to build the time machine to go back ten years to train the relevant candidates.

I may be being glib and scathing (where is that sarcasm font when one needs it?) but I very much like the principle of a more strategic and regional approach to planning, the potential to employ economies of scale within planning authorities and the 'city region' approach. I applaud this and am excited for its potential benefits.

However, like many of you, I am sceptical of the ability to deliver those ambitious targets. If all else fails, they can always revert to the Conservative hospitals tactic of counting extensions as new houses and properties that have already been built.

Landscape Horses for Assessment Courses

A question I often come across is "what type of landscape document is needed when"? Do you need an LVIA or an LVA? What is the difference and when are they most (cost) effective?

Its not unusual to meet clients who have been sold an LVIA too early in the design process when they have no scheme to assess, when a technical note or other initial due diligence advice would have sufficed, and been cheaper, so here is your handy guide to finding the right landscape horse for your course.

What is It?	When Do you Need It?	What Does it Do?	Benefits	Cons
LVIA Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment	Planning applications EIA development Complicated / sensitive sites with numerous receptor groups	Uses defined sensitivity, magnitude and significance criteria to define the comparative importance of identified likely effects	Clearly defined criteria that can be compared	Expensive Jargony Inaccessible Can be unnecessarily lengthy
LVA Landscape and Visual Appraisal	Planning applications Non EIA development Less complicated / sensitive sites	Less clearly defined. Similar to LVIA but simpler and doesn’t need to use assessment criteria although this varies by provider	Simpler, cheaper, easier to understand and more accessible	No defined criteria to make comparisons
Technical Note	Pre app discussions Representations on more complicated sites where vision document alone isn’t ‘enough’	Identifies risks and opportunities Makes recommendations to masterplan design Helps define developable area Tells the story	Cheaper than LVA 'Does the job'	Generally needs to be ‘upgraded’ for an application
Scribbles and Emails	Development of masterplan proposals When you need to understand potential developable area	Identifies opportunities and constraints Helps give realistic idea of developable area Identifies red flags	Very cheap 'Does the job'	No formal outputs

 

Helping You Avoid Making Faberge Omelettes

I am a Landscape Planner and I can save you money.

Isn't that what every client wants to hear? Well, I mean it, and all it will cost you is... Actually, it will cost you, but it will be comparative peanuts, and it will save you a lot of money, time (i.e. more money) and keep your landowners and investors happy (i.e. less stress).

When you undertake your initial due diligence, before your capacity assessments, we can help you. Before you’ve pitched the investors or made an offer to the landowner, we can help you identify the risks and opportunities that will affect your developable area.

“You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs”. The idea of balancing risk and reward is not new. But that balancing act is an art and a science, where one is not rewarded for blindly taking risk. So how do you decide which is a risk worth taking, an egg to be broken? Or when that egg is actually a Fabergé egg that needs to be preserved. Armed with that advice, you can negotiate with greater confidence on the potential value of the development, share out the risk and prepare your partners for the obstacles to bringing the project to fruition.

Our clients understand this, and they get us onboard early, sometimes sending us the particulars of a site and asking for an opinion before they bid. We can give an initial steer on red flags and, very rarely, will identify a site that is so high risk we'd recommend avoiding it entirely. Isn't that what you need to know as a developer?

Here is a real scenario: a Green Belt site with a ridge running down the centre, well enclosed by strong defensible boundaries and well related to the existing built form. It looked fantastic on paper. On the site visit, it was possible to see that half of the site was visible from the nearby AONB and, more importantly, development in that half of the site would introduce development into views where there was currently none. Half of that site suddenly became high risk and was heavily recommended to be excluded from the developable area. I was on site for an hour and helped the client make a better informed decision about the value of that land.

We understand that the Masterplanner's job is to balance all of the different, and often conflicting, requirements of the consultant team, to come up with a solution that will satisfy the council and, most importantly for the client, be financially viable. As consultants, we have to be pragmatic, and to understand that if the finances don't add up, the whole exercise is academic. Our job as consultants is to identify risk and help the Masterplanner and the client reach that solution, and then to help them bring the council on board.

This doesn't need to be an expensive process either. We understand that, at the initial stages of a project's planning journey, there is little budget to play with and that you don't necessarily need a formatted report and a CAD rendered plan.  Instead, you need distilled advice, risks and opportunities of the site from external views to give you a better handle for your initial capacity assets – the key points set out on a sketch plan and a call to talk it through. If all goes well, you can come back for the polished, public report for early pre-app discussions or representations to the development plan.

Adding in ecology and arboriculture to the mix can add further insight. As an example, we regularly work on large strategic greenfield sites. These sites are often crossed by a network of hedgerows and trees. These are valuable landscape features, but in the masterplanning process, something has to give. Which ones can go and which ones have to stay? The Arboriculturalists and Ecologists can provide a hierarchy of importance, identifying the defunct, species poor category C examples, rather than the species rich, tree laden category A, or, even more important: the veteran tree? That allows you and the masterplanner understand where those quality eggs are.

Early environmental due diligence may feel like a drain of scarce resources at the start of the project, when the available pot to spend is small, but it can pay back hugely down the line and help you avoid making a Fabergé omelette.

 

Having My Work Life Cake and Eating It

What I've Learned from Working Under Lockdown

A few weeks before lockdown, I found myself missing some of the elements of working for myself, primarily the ability to manage my time with more flexibility, less time lost to the commute and generally more time and energy to spend at home with my family and my community. I resolved myself that I needed to accept that lifestyle was gone, not compatible with the 9-5 of my employed status. Yet here I am, still fully employed (albeit on reduced hours), managing my time myself, spending more time with kids, talking to my neighbours and actually getting the garden sorted, all whilst working and communicating with my team more effectively than ever. Lockdown has forced me to work at home again, but it has shown me that I don’t need to sacrifice all of the pros of self-employment for all of the benefits of working for a practice.

The lockdown has stripped away the rituals and routines of office working, distilling it down to the core elements of the job, and forcing us into a new way of working, a way of working that can present opportunities for consultancies like mine. I feel passionately that, before we rush out forget our Zoom passwords, grab our first unicorn marshmallow frappuccino  and dive back into the rat race, we need to pause, take stock and take this opportunity to redefine what we want from office life.

 

Cost Efficient and Effective Communication

We have been forced to embrace communication technologies in a way we hadn’t until now. JP Morgan reports that Teams usage has quadrupled since the virus began. WhatsApp is reporting increases of up to 76% in Europe. I hadn’t even heard of Zoom before March and now it’s headline news.

I’ve spoken to my Dad in Dublin more times in the last week than I have in the preceding months and I‘ve seen his face more than I have in the last year. I get to talk to my boss and colleagues on a daily basis, allowing us to address the upcoming stresses before they happen, making us far more effective than ever, and probably learning more about each other in the meantime. We didn’t communicate this well when we were meant to be working from adjacent desks. And we’re breaking down the barriers. As one colleague from Birmingham commented, I’m no longer Wendy from London, I’m Wendy from the Landscape team. The geography is no longer important.

And while we’re on the subject of meetings, look at the savings and efficiencies for us and our clients. Last week I had a meeting with 15 people, including clients and professionals from across the country. Normally those meetings would run to a day of time for each person, at the cost of thousands to the client and potential unbillable hours for us. In contrast, the video meeting was quick and efficient, a couple of hours at most. Those who weren’t needed at any point could work on other things and we could call in additional people as we needed them: ‘I have a heritage question, quick get Heritage on the blower.’ We could refer to plans, even draw on them, on a screen 200 miles away. We could see each other’s faces and expressions. No phone call can give you that level of visual potential and no physical meeting can offer you that level of time and cost efficiency.

 

Lower Overheads and Better Quality Working

When I am working now, I’m more efficient, both in terms of how long my working day is but also how productive I am when I’m at my desk. I normally work a four-day week. I’d like the option to work five shorter days, not all at home, but it’s not been worth it in the past because every extra day means more commute time. The commute time then puts on pressure to maximise time in the office, working a longer day less effectively. Now I can stretch my hours across five days, working in bursts when I’m at my most productive, be available to team and clients five days a week and get more time to myself and my family. Isn’t that what consultancy is meant to look like?

We’re a people business and people are our greatest cost, as they should be. But what about the other overheads? How many of you have printed a document since you were working at home? Those emails that say, ‘think before you print’? When it’s my own ink and I have to race my toddler to the printer before she eats the conclusion of my report, I really do think, believe me. I’d be intrigued to see what the unclaimed printing cost is now, compared to a couple of months ago when it was oh so easy to hit print, walk ten yards and pick up a copy in seconds. The paperless office has become a reality. And that’s a drop in the ocean compared to the cost of renting an office in Central London.

If we’re working at home more often, could we reduce our rent costs by functioning with less space? Could we reduce our floor plate or could we use that space in a more innovative and stimulating way that provides benefits in the way we work and interact as a practice? Do we need ninety desks with, say, forty empty on any given day? Meeting rooms with coffee machines sat earning nothing? Do we all need our fixed desks with our fixed monitors and our favourite coaster? I always thought so before, but now? Not so much. Wouldn’t it be great if I could sit with the team of people I’m working with that day? Or perhaps I want to go and sit with one of the Architects because both of our toddlers had a bad night and we want to compare war stories. Or maybe I just want a reading nook to go over a report in peace. We have laptops, wifi and docking stations, there’s nothing to stop us sitting somewhere else because it suits us better that day, creating better communication across the different teams.

 

Quality of Life

And here is the crux of it for me. Aren’t we always going on about work-life balance? I don’t leave the house at 8 anymore to grab my very short by London standards commute. No, I grab my coffee, step into the spare room and log in, an hour ahead of myself and having slept longer. I know people who don’t even go home during the week but stay in London, away from their partners and kids. For some people in my office, that commute time might add up to 20 hours recovered a week. 20 hours. Just let that sink in.

What that work life balance looks like for you might be different but I can do a few hours’ work, have a leisurely lunch with the kids, maybe a bit of Joe Wickes (I ache everywhere), attack the garden, and then back for the afternoon. During my first three weeks of lockdown, I laid an astroturf lawn and built a playhouse. Last week we made pizzas. From scratch. All these things I don’t have the energy to do in a normal week, I’m doing now, and I’m doing them with my kids. So, my eldest wants to water the plants every five seconds and the youngest just wants to eat mud, but that’s proper quality time. I have colleagues and clients who are losing weight better than they ever have done before because they are getting the time to exercise or eat properly in a way they didn’t before.

  

And what is most striking, is that none of this technology is new. It’s been sat there, a forgotten and unloved icon on the computer screen. We’ve not made the move to use it before because we haven’t had to and perhaps because home working comes with a stigma, but now we’ve learned so much. Presenteeism doesn’t mean the same thing anymore and some of the stigma of working from home has gone.

Home working doesn’t bring all the answers, but it has brought me unforeseen benefits in terms of cost, efficiency and work-life balance. For me, it’s no longer an either/or situation. I can have my work-life cake and eat it. And what is more, if we can take those lessons forward into the future, to reshape what the office bit of office working looks like, I firmly believe that there are greater benefits to be had in terms of cost savings, staff happiness and productivity gains.

There’s an opportunity to work in a different way and I don’t want to lose it.

All views expressed are my own and not those of my colleagues, my practice or my profession

The Argument for Garden Cities

The government has really pushed its dedication to new garden cities as of late. this has been enforced by the Wolfson Prize which, this year, challenged people to design a new model for garden cities. My interest in the garden cities relates to my interest in Green Belt and whether we are taking the right approach in releasing Green Belt land (see previous post).

The NPPF (National Planning Policy Framework) states that, when designation or reviewing Green Belt boundaries, local authorities ‘should take in into account the need to promote sustainable patterns of development.’ One argument is that development within existing settlements is sustainable. However, in many settlements, development on the settlement edge is nowhere near within a ten minute walk (800m) of the local train station and possibly not within 400m of a bus stop. Are these suburban and urban edge locations truly sustainable or do people resort to their cars?

Green Belt sites which are located on the edges of settlements can contribute towards any of the first four purposes of the Green Belt. Development on an urban edge may constitute sprawl, may bring settlements closer to merging, may encroach into the countryside (both visually and physically) and may contribute to the preservation of historic towns. As mentioned above, development on the settlement edge may not be as ‘sustainable’ as otherwise though.

When talking about new settlements in the Green Belt, i.e. Garden Cities, the third purpose of the Green Belt is key (see previous blog). New planned settlements, by their definition, are planned and will therefore not contribute to sprawl (as long as defensible boundaries are identified), will not cause settlements to merge and will not impact upon the setting of historic towns. Therefore, only the third purpose is relevant. ‘Encroachment’ is defined as an intrusion or a gradual advance beyond usual or accepted limits. From a landscape architect’s perspective, encroachment can take two forms: physical, i.e. the development is physically extending into the landscape; and visual – the development is present in views of the landscape. Any greenfield development will encroach physically and visually into the landscape but the key question is: to what extent? The physical encroachment of the settlement is decided purely by its size whereas the visual encroachment is decided by its Zone of Visual Influence (ZVI) which will vary depending on a combination of the nature of the surrounding landscape, e.g. topography, vegetation etc and the nature of the design, e.g. height, roofline etc. This is unlikely to be any more of an encroachment than that of the combined urban edge sites that might otherwise be development. The physical extent of the development is the same.

An argument of the proposed Garden Cities is that they are unsustainable and would rely on car use to sustain them. I don’t see that this is necessarily the case. During my final year of university, we were tasked with locating 20,000 dwellings between Cheltenham, Gloucester and Tewkesbury. At the time I was living in a small Cotswold Village containing all of 25 houses. It seemed to me that the Cotswolds had been preserved in aspic, that development was limited and, when it had taken place in the 60s, it had been pretty awful. It occurred to me that the Cotswolds are pretty lumpy and that it wasn’t actually possible to see much of the settlement when you weren’t actually standing within it. It occurred to me that it would be possible to fit a fair amount of development into the Cotswolds without being visually intrusive. I asked my lecturers if I could run my project in the Cotswold AONB and they agreed.

At this same point, it occurred to me that we view development as a negative thing but here I was living in an area which people visited partly just to look at the development! The issue, it seemed to me, was in the quality of the development and the detailed design and layout. Alongside this was my fascination with old maps, particularly disused railway lines, of which there are many within the Cotswolds. It occurred to me that if you reinstated a railway line, you could building on existing settlements along that route and create new ones, creating a sustainable set of small settlements which were well connected to the nearest towns.

Years later, having started my own company writing LVIA and Green Belt Review, I found myself sharing an office with an Architect. He and I got chatting and it turned out that he had a pet project which he and a colleague had been working on for decades. The idea was to create new, walkable settlements along the railway line in areas of open countryside. We both considered the odds of that meeting. The key difference between his theory and the work for my fourth year design project (apart from decades of background research) was that these settlements should be grouped together in clusters so that they formed critical mass. He called this cluster principle 'Connected Cities.' Since he and his colleague started their journey, policy has turned full circle. It seems that the world is starting to see things his way.

Green Belt Policy is Not Fit for Purpose - Discuss

Someone once said to me that Green Belt was the one policy of which everyone was most aware but about which they knew the least. My conversations with both professionals and members of the public lead me to think that this hits the nail on the head. I think Green Belt is a much used and abused policy, especially by those who wish to use it to prevent new development. Now don’t get me wrong, despite the title, I’m not suggesting we get rid of Green Belt altogether or that we build on greenfield land before we build on brownfield sites. I have no intention of throwing that particular baby out with the bathwater. I don’t think that the principle of Green Belt (or similar) is irrelevant, I just think we need to review the details of the policy and how it is applied.

The following is my opinion. It is my professional opinion based on undertaking various Green Belt reviews for both private clients and other, larger, landscape practices and is born out of a concern about the way in which we develop and the way it impacts upon our crowded little island. There are two strands to this argument: a higher argument about the suitability of Green Belt as a whole and how we apply it; and the principles of the new Garden Cities supported by the coalition government and highlighted by such as the Wolfson Prize and how they impact upon the Green Belt.

As part of this exploration, I want to explore the following questions/issues:

·         The purposes of Green Belt need to be clarified for the general public and possibly professionals too – apparently they don’t all read the NPPF on a regular basis;

·         Green Belt is not a quality designation;

·         Green Belt is a blanket policy and is not as effective in some areas as it is on others;

·         The usefulness of Green Belt on urban fringes is being eroded along with its boundaries so that it’s not achieving what is intended;

·         Many Green Belts either lack defensible boundaries or include land which is not required, due to the use of historic boundaries;

·         Unlike LVIA, there is no guidance on methodology for Green Belt Review and no recommendation as to who should undertake them;

·         People who write GBR are rarer than those who write LVIA who, in turn, are rarer than rocking horse poo.

All of this leads on to the following point:

If we’re going to remove land from the Green Belt, why not do it in a single planned way in an area where that land is making less of a contribution to the purposes of the Green Belt, rather than hacking away at the edge of towns and further separating people from the countryside?

Discussion

The NPPF devotes a whole chapter to Green Belt issues, stating ‘the fundamental aim of Green Belt policy is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open; the essential characteristics of Green Belts are their openness and their permanence.’ It should be noted that the ‘permanence’ bit is a new addition since PPG2 and is debatable; in fact we are having that debate right now.

Next is the crux of the whole thing: the purposes of the Green Belt.

‘Green Belt serves five purposes:

·         To check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;

·         To prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another;

·         To assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;

·         To preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and

·         To assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land.’

The last purpose is a key issue and links to the principle that brownfield land should be developed first before greenfield land. When comparing greenfield sites for potential development, this purpose is equally applicable to all and is usually scoped out of any assessment.

Although the NPPF states that, once Green Belts have been defined, local authorities should plan to enhance the beneficial use of the land through increased access, providing opportunities for recreation and to improve the landscape and biodiversity. There is no obligation for them to do so and no recourse if they don’t. Green Belt is not a quality designation. They may contain schools, allotments or even nurseries and areas of stabling for horses. Although these things sound green and pleasant, the reality is that they are often not. Schools contain a variety of buildings of varying quality and often other built structures which can form visual detractors. Many schools have little space which is ‘natural’ and may be limited to mown playing fields and a few lollipop trees. Allotments, whilst wonderful, can often contain visual detractors, albeit it on a smaller scale. Nurseries are no longer rows and rows of lovely green plants but may contain vast areas of polytunnels and greenhouses in varying states of repair. Stable areas are often scrappy and visually detracting with few landscape features and boundaries made up of post and wire or other materials. None of these areas will necessarily contribute to landscape character and may even detract. Green Belt is not necessarily pretty and is not necessarily publically accessible.

Green Belts, according to the NPPF, are not to include land ‘which it is unnecessary to keep open’ but, unless land is under pressure for development, no-one reviews these things. Areas of land are included within the Green Belt which are not necessary, unlikely to be a significant proportion, but they are there. In my experience, this has often stemmed from another key element of Green Belts: boundaries. Green Belt boundaries should be defined clearly, using physical features that are readily recognisable and likely to be permanent.’ Such boundaries are often referred to as being ‘defensible.’ The extents of many Green Belts were defined in the 1950s when many current defensible boundaries did not exist. I assessed an area of land where the railway line was the defensible boundary. Since the land was designated, someone built the M6, a fairly substantial defensible boundary. The land between the two transport routes is still allocated as Green Belt but performs none of the functions of the designation. In this case, it is the M6 which prevents sprawl and which protects the countryside from encroachment and not the railway line or the land in between. Now this isn’t to say that this land is not attractive and that it is suitable for development: that is a separate issue. What it does say is that it is not necessary for this land to be included within the Green Belt.

The Green Belt does bring people closer to the countryside, or at least that is the theory. By keeping development in check, the theory is that there will be open countryside close to people’s homes. However, if we keep eroding at the edges of the Green Belt with piecemeal (albeit considered) release, people will gradually become further distanced from the countryside. This is part of the argument behind Green Wedge theory, i.e. that ‘fingers’ of green belt should extend into settlements, ensuring that, however much a settlement extends, there will always be open space nearby. By continually nibbling at the edge of the Green Belt, we make it less effective and take it further away from communities.