Krier: build 500 towns in UK

Architect and town planner Leon Krier, the foremost European influence on the New Urbanism, weighs in on the future of growth in England. Krier suggests that England needs to loosen its restrictive planning laws and should release several million lots of various sizes and uses for development. However, Krier says, the release must come with the stipulation that development is grouped in about 500 hamlets, villages, urban neighborhoods, and small cities. Such a regulated opening of the market would lower the cost of land and satisfy the development wishes of a majority of the population, Krier says. His remarks were made on the British on-line discussion forum OpenDemocracy, which hosts an informed debate following the release of reports by the government-appointed Urban Task Force. The task force’s so-called white papers chart a direction for the future of urban and rural growth in England. According to architect Richard Rogers, who heads the Urban Task Force, England faces a crisis of eroding countryside and fragmenting cities. In principle, his solution to these problems sounds similar to the New Urbanism. He stresses the centrality of the neighborhood as a building block and argues for concentrating new development on infill and brownfield sites in the form of compact, mixed-use communities. Krier argues that Roger’s version of the New Urbanism is based on ideology rather than practice and thus continues the authoritarian tradition of English planning. For the past 50 years, development in England has been shaped by the restrictive Town and Country Planning Act adopted in 1947. This legislation created a sharp divide between cities and rural areas — a feature of English planning that new urbanists in the US often envy — but it also let government planning agencies decide when and where to open land for development. According to Krier, the current scarcity of developable land is “an artificially fabricated condition” that has taken land prices to excessive heights. Krier strikes a middle ground between tight government regulation and the complete dismantling of planning laws that other participants in the debate argue for. He maintains that the New Urbanism as it has evolved in the US is a “versatile technique for settling land,” which can be applied in Europe as well. But, he adds, “what limits the spread of new urbanist principles in Europe is the stultifying ignorance of its principles in architectural and planning schools and professional bodies, and hence the absence of capable experts.”