The Geography of Suburban Space Session: RGS-IBG Annual Conference 2008

The Towards Successful Town Centres project hosted a session at this  year’s RGS-IBG conference (27-29th August), in affiliation with the Urban Geography Research Group (UGRG). On behalf of the project team I would like to thank everyone who attended the session and especially those who contributed their excellent and interesting presentations. The presentations can be viewed through the project website.

• Introduction to the Geography of Suburban Space session
• Paper 1: SSTC Project (UCL) – Towards an historical-geographical theory of suburban space
• Paper 2: N. Morton & P.J. Larkham (Birmingham City University)- Increasing density in mature suburbs: character, resistance, and quality?
• Paper 3: P. Watt (Birkbeck, University of London) – Living in an oasis: middle-class disaffiliation in the London suburbs
• Paper 4: F. Paynter (Queen Mary, University of London) – Adapting suburbs: the impacts of culture-led regeneration on English suburban towns
• Paper 5: D. Chen & L. Young (Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today, Think Tank) – Retrofitting Suburbia: navigating from generic to specific

Imagination and the suburb

Professor Laurie Taylor recently revisited the subject of suburbs on his BBC Radio 4 programme (click here to ‘listen again’). The programme focusses on the “mass dream” of a move to the suburb between the wars. Suburbs provided a “code of impersonality… English people rubbing along together [from different classes]“. Suburbs were a place of aspiration, once people arrived they would stay.

Alongside the well-trodden ideas of Metroland, suburbs are also discussed as a “zone of expulsion” where outsiders can escape too and even more extremely, where the mad are exported to! “The beauty of despised, patronised suburb” (Betjeman) is discussed; why were the suburbs patronised so much? The conclusion is that suburbs were all somewhere people had arrived to from somewhere else, so partly the contempt is because they are unvisited other than by car (so not understood either culturally or indeed spatially, which would not have been the case if they’d been walked as inner city areas are). A lot of contempt, it is concluded, is from architects, who had disdain for places that were unplanned and without any design intervention. It is also blamed on the concern with huge working-class estates, such as Dagenham (despite the fact that in reality these were found to work quite well: Willmott, P. (1963) The Evolution of a Community: A Study of Dagenham after Forty Years. London: Institute of Community Studies.)

Suburban neurosis is discussed as an invention in a highly contentious paper that has been often repeated (see a discussion of this in Clapson, M. (1999) Working-class Women’s Experiences of Moving to New Housing Estates in England since 1919. Twentieth Century British History 10, 345-365).

They emphasise the distinction between suburbia and edge-lands, the latter is where free-form culture emerges, where restrictions are lifted. This distinction is particularly important post WW2 and the creation of the green belt, where the edge of the suburbs was clearly defined and a distinction emerged between leafy suburbia of ‘The Good Life’ and the edge city described by J G Ballard’s in his reference to psychopathologies. The new patterns of commuting between suburbs is raised as a new direction suburbs are taking, which may lead to a different relation between ’suburb’ and ‘urb’, even resulting in the need for a new term for ’suburbia’.

Blears publishes new draft of PPS6

The recent RIBA best practice bulletin ( no 455, 17th July 2008 ) contains details of Community Secretary Hazel Blears’ draft for changes to Planning Policy Statement 6 (PPS6) for town centres. It makes the following points:

• The sequential test regime that protects town centres by requiring major retailers to show that their plans cannot either be accommodated within existing town centres or affect them adversely, will be maintained.
• An ‘impact test’ will provide more scope for planners seeking to protect the character and diversity of town centres. This is intended to replace the ‘need test’ based on an assessment of local demand in relation to retail floorspace. Since this test included out-of-town retail it tended to facilitate against retail investment in town centres.

The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) commented that “The proposed changes favour competitiveness and diversity in a way that should give planners greater freedom to make special places, avoiding the inadvertent development of “clone towns”. There is also scope for planners to test for design quality.

The important question of whether large supermarkets will be put to a ‘competition test’ – as called for by the Competition Commission – has not been addressed; the CLG says it a response will be forthcoming.

Back to the Future?

The current crisis of American suburbia (at least its most speculator driven and least socially embedded developments of the last decade or so) is remarkable in the image it offers of the effects of radical suburban decentralisation. It is also quite a disaster for many of the people caught up in it, some of whom will have been sold mortgages they can’t afford and are now facing eviction and debt.

In some respects it is redolent of the scene in Back to the Future II (Zemeckis & Spielberg 1989) where the main protagonist (Marty McFly played by Michael J. Fox) returns from the past to his ‘typical American small town suburb’ in 1985 only to find that he has travelled along a parallel timeline and is the wrong 1985. Rather than the reassuring image of the picket fence and his parents’ homity pie, he finds that his suburb has become a dystopian ghetto of gangland violence and community breakdown. The reason is that the villain of the film (Biff) was able to become a powerful figure in the town through a gambling fortune amassed because Marty had accidentally left a sports almanac behind in the past.

The moral is clear – the ‘good’ American Dream of self-sufficient family and community life is capable of being subverted by greed and power and needs to be saved by the good little guys who live there. However, the point I want to make is that, from the perspective of space, we should not make the mistake of just saying ‘decentralised suburbs = bad’ on the basis of what is now happening in the US. In many cases life is still going on in these suburbs though we may not recognise it as fitting pre-conceived notions of ’suburban’.

In other words, these places (and the people in them) should not become invisible just because they are perceived to have failed. We do not want to sound some triumphalist ‘mixed-use’ fanfare. All suburbs, all centres can be ’successes or failures; most are a combination of both – the point is to understand the relationship between society and space and the factors affecting this relationship at any given time (and over time). If the cost of credit and transport were to fall again (for whatever reasons) these dystopian images of suburbia that are so prevalent at the moment may give way to revitalised images of the suburban American Dream – though, one would hope, a less gas guzzling version…

In Back to the Future II Marty goes back in time and prevents Biff from getting hold of the almanac – unfortunately we can’t go back in time to implement sustainability best practice and educate financial elites in social responsibility. However, we can ask whether these sprawling suburban developments are capable of sustainable development according to some model, rather than be complicit in writing them off as sinks of social problems (as some commentators have predicted – see references elsewhere in this blog).

The question is: are we travelling along a parallel timeline (i.e. experiencing a blip) where solutions will become available to preserve something of what people value in suburban living and allowing us to return to the ’suburban mainstream’, or are we really going ‘back to the future’ in the sense of returning to denser, centralised urban environments with the socially excluded pressed tight up against the city walls? What role if any, can our existing suburban (post suburban etc.) built environments play our urban visions of the future? In terms of the SSTC project formlating a response to this question involves an emphasis on the importance of smaller, distributed centres of activity in urban regions.

London’s outer suburbs focus of Boris Johnson’s plan

I note from the press that the new plan for London will have a focus on London’s outer suburbs and that the mayor intends to create an Outer London Commission for this purpose. It is interesting in particular to note about the intention to invest in better transport links and more affordable housing.

The mayor’s office should be aware of our research that suggests that with the right investment – we believe in local jobs as well as housing and transport – the outer London suburbs have the potential for providing greater sustainable growth for London

American suburbia on the wane?

A two-part series in the Telegraph magazine reviews the crisis in some US suburbs, with Great Depression like homelessness and entire neighbourhoods being deserted. It is important to note that the blame for the rapid growth of suburbia is placed on “planning laws, designed to eliminate urban overcrowding, that made it illegal to build mixed-use projects of high density – the characteristic of an old-fashioned Main Street – and dictated that development should instead spread ever outwards.”

Retail-led regeneration and Town Centres

An interesting radio documentary ‘File on 4′ programme was dedicated to the problems that developers are facing in retail-led regeneration. The programme details are on BBC Radio 4 website, but it is valuable to notice some of the citations that are included in it:

“There’s far more capacity out there than ever before and demand is relatively flat,” says retail sector analyst Richard Hyman of Deloitte, a consultancy, warning that retail-led urban regeneration may be over for good.

The programme argues that the number of projects that are focusing on retail and are in trouble is now in two digits.

As we are starting to see in the detailed case studies and also in the general cases that we are looking at in this research, it is not only the retail that influence how town centres operate and survive. The multiplicity of activities – from light industry to local magistrate court are the things that make these places alive. Maybe the downturn in retail and the oversupply of retail space will help to wake up all those involved to a broader view of these places?

How GIS can change our view of design

In this month’s RIBA Journal, Anne Kemp, Head of Atkins Geospatial makes an interesting comment about the ability of the latest technology to integrate CAD (Computer Aided Design – the conventional design tool for architects, normally used at the building and small urban design scale) with GIS (Geographic Information Systems, normally used for viewing, manipulating and mapping spatial data to analyse relationships between data in the larger scales). Dr Kemp suggests that integrating the geospatial with Building Information Modelling (BIM) allows the users to model “seamlessly between the building and the outside environment”. This development has clear relevance to our discussions about designing within an aging built environment and integrating new sustainable solutions into urban infrastructure. She states that “geospatial technologies can provide the framework for sustainable masterplanning to enable evidence-based decision making in relation to all aspects of sustainabilty, including energy, water and material use, and socio-economic impacts…” (page 62).

Industry in the suburbs

Evidence of the tensions between pressures for more housing and the need for local work has come to light in this week’s Borehamwood Times, which reports that Borehamwood’s “oldest industrial estate” will be replaced by new flats. Although the council claims it will consider relocating the workshops, this news suggests a lack of foresight regarding the need to provide local jobs – and particularly – the need to provide locally accessible training for people with low skills.

The Sustainable Suburban High Street

The review of Suburban High Streets has been published in Geography Compass today. The paper, titled ‘The Sustainable Suburban High Street: A Review of Themes and Approaches’ written by the project team and the writing was led by Sam Griffiths.

‘Whether suburbs are regarded as a distinctive feature of the contemporary urban landscape or as symptomatic of ‘sprawl’ the recent upsurge of scholarly interest in suburbia has done little to displace the dominant image of the suburb as a primarily residential phenomenon. In a wide ranging survey of the academic literature, taking account of current developments in the policy debate relating to suburban regeneration and also drawing on research conducted by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Towards Successful Suburban Town Centres project at University College London, this article argues for an approach to the suburbs that emphasises their importance as historical centres of diverse social and economic activity. The focus is on the ‘typical’ British suburban high street, regarded as a complex and dynamic socio-spatial entity facing particular challenges to its vitality and viability in the light of ongoing socio-economic change. It is suggested that an improved understanding of the relation between suburban society and the built form of suburban centres over time would lead to a fuller appreciation of the actual and potential contribution of the local high street to achieving sustainable built environments.’

The paper can be accessed on the Geography Compass website.