Planning policies could unlock business in the ’burbs
A blanket expansion of permitted development rights would destroy the suburbs, a new report has warned. But with care and some targeted planning policies, the ’burbs could become far more than the dormitories they were originally designed as.
The draft final report of the Suburban Taskforce, launched this week, contains six key recommendations aimed at revitalising the UK’s suburbs and ensuring they are able to adapt to suit the future of work and living.
These include a review of PDRs, measures to enhance employment opportunities, an acknowledgment that there are “five types of suburbia”, a review of planning guidance, an increase in public engagement and management of “tipping points” caused by increased development.
A blanket expansion of permitted development rights would destroy the suburbs, a new report has warned. But with care and some targeted planning policies, the ’burbs could become far more than the dormitories they were originally designed as.
The draft final report of the Suburban Taskforce, launched this week, contains six key recommendations aimed at revitalising the UK’s suburbs and ensuring they are able to adapt to suit the future of work and living.
These include a review of PDRs, measures to enhance employment opportunities, an acknowledgment that there are “five types of suburbia”, a review of planning guidance, an increase in public engagement and management of “tipping points” caused by increased development.
The taskforce was set up in 2020 by MPs from London’s Planning and the Built Environment All Party Parliamentary Group, alongside New London Architecture and the London Society, and is chaired by Rupa Huq, Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton.
PDRs, Huq said, have done little to deliver new homes but have eroded local government and community control over suburban development. Rather than using PDRs to reduce community engagement in the planning process, such engagement should be actively encouraged, with technology unlocking the process. Huq said planning authorities and developers needed to do far better than “a couple of boards in a shopping centre”.
Live-work communities
Meanwhile, an evolution in local employment, hastened by the Covid-19 pandemic, is transforming Britain’s suburbs. “This is happening whether we have the planning policies or not,” said RTPI policy head Richard Blyth, a contributor to the report.
The report said suburbia had evolved from Metroland dormitories with nice gardens – from which people would commute to urban workplaces – into more complex live-work communities, with an increasing number of residents working from home. As a result, more opportunities for employment are emerging in suburbia. That, it added, needs to be embraced.
The report went on to say that understanding the five different types of suburb, ranging from the almost-urban to the practically rural, should “provide the basis for informing future policy and decision-making”.
Although the final draft has now been completed and launched, the report will not be finalised until July. But for some this will provide one last opportunity to add some muscle to the report, which they argue “does not go far enough”.
“What is the policy problem that this report is actually grappling with?” asked Birkbeck urban studies professor Paul Watt, arguing that more attention needed to be paid to the issues of “identity, place and diversity” within the suburbs. “Suburbia is socially exclusive. It is precisely predicated on various social, class, race, ethnic and housing tenure exclusions. People essentially pull up the drawbridge.” He added that “the key issue of tipping points” had also not been adequately examined.
URBED founder Nicholas Falk said that the report was a “missed opportunity”, as not enough attention had been paid to the best practice of other city suburbs outside the UK, such as Copenhagen.
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