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.