The Future of Planning
How we can rewire the planning system for the digital age / Part 1
As we look ahead to the challenges of the next decade — a housing affordability crisis, economic stagnation, an ageing society, deep regional inequality, climate volatility, food insecurity, ageing infrastructure and overstretched public services — one thing is clear: spatial planning has never been more important. All these crises ultimately manifest themselves in places, and it is at the scale of places — homes, neighbourhoods, cities and rural landscapes, that they will be met.
Whether it’s about unlocking economic growth, building more affordable homes, meeting our carbon targets, retrofitting homes, reducing the burden on the NHS, supporting farmers, restoring nature, creating resilient communities, or building entire new towns — all roads lead through the planning system.
Planning is also powerful. With a single decision it can make someone into a millionaire overnight, or shape the failure or success of a neighbourhood for a hundred years. So not surprisingly, it is also deeply political. Planning used to be considered ‘boring’. It’s not anymore.
And yet, for all the debates and disagreements that surround planning, there is one thing that almost everyone agrees on: the planning system today isn’t working, for anyone. You will routinely hear it described as slow, opaque, bureaucratic, expensive, labyrinthine, inconsistent, politically short-termist and corruptible. A tangle of ‘red tape’, navigable only by those with a lot of time, knowledge or money. Rachel Reeves, the new chancellor recently went as far as to describe it as “the single biggest obstacle to our economic success”.
Most people would also agree that neither is it working in terms of the places that we end up creating. Despite the UK being a rich country, with a wealth of design talent, many of the homes and neighbourhoods that we create today are ugly, unaffordable, ungenerous, cramped and car-dependent, bereft of community infrastructure. As you travel around the UK, you see more and more of the same thing: dim, cookie-cutter homes, swimming in treeless seas of tarmac, producing tonnes of carbon emissions. Many of them will need to be retrofitted almost immediately after they’re built. They are unhealthy, unpopular, expensive, and socially-isolating places to live, and they are storing up costs for the future.
And that’s if we build at all. In many cases, development is blocked entirely.
So who is to blame for all this? Well, it depends who you ask. Applicants will blame planners, or ‘NIMBY’ (not-in-my-backyard) communities for resisting new development. Communities will blame private developers, and local planners for failing to hold those developers to account. Just 2% of people trust developers — and only 7% trust planners. It’s a strange triangle of blame and mistrust.
All of these ‘rival simplifications’ contain some element of truth, but they only give part of the picture. In truth, I would argue that it’s not really anyone’s fault. It is a function of the system itself, and the costs, incentives and conflicts that it creates.
So let’s take a step back, and begin with the most basic question: why do we even have a planning system?
At the core of planning is a basic democratic principle that most people would probably agree with. It is that the environment, our shared infrastructure, and the way we use our finite land are, by definition, common concerns. What you do affects your neighbours, and what your neighbour does affects you. And at some scale, we are all each other’s neighbours. Therefore development and use should be to some degree coordinated and shaped by what’s fair, and what’s in the common, long-term strategic interest, whilst giving people as much freedom as possible.
That basic principle is arguably more relevant today than ever.
But while the principles that underpin the planning system may be timeless, its processes are embarrassingly obsolete. The planning system we use today was designed for a different world than the one in which we now find ourselves — a world with different challenges, different economic pressures and, above all, different tools. It was created for the paper-age; an era of centralised bureaucracy. Today those tools — and the ways of working that came with them — feel hopelessly out of date, and are creaking under the impossible burden that we are putting on them, and the people who have to use them.
Most debates about planning reform tend to focus on the ‘what’ of planning: changes to planning policy (questions like ‘should we build on greenbelt or shouldn’t we?’, ‘should we have mandatory housing targets?’ ‘what density should neighbourhoods be?’ and so on). And it’s right that they should. These are incredibly important questions.
But the big idea I’d like to put forward here is that if we want to change what we plan, first we have to change how we plan. Not planning policy, but planning process.
A big part of the transformation is about technology — but it also goes beyond technology. It is about the new ways of working that digital technology makes possible.
At the same time, neither is it really about party politics. It goes beyond that too. It’s about rewiring the system itself. Redesigning how planning works. It’s like re-modelling a building by changing the plumbing. But plumbing can be powerful. Never underestimate the importance of plumbing. Changing the ‘how’ of planning will shift the constraints that politics has to work within. It will reframe some of the impossible choices that elected leaders have to make today.
In this mini-series of posts, I am going to explore six ideas about the future of planning. These are six ways that, in the age of digital technology and the web, we can fix and improve how our planning system works, and prepare it for the future.
Some of these paradigm changes are easy to imagine because they’re already happening, or have already happened in other sectors. Some of them we (Open Systems Lab) are already working on with local planning authorities. Others might seem further off — they may take a decade or more to become fully normal. But they are all common sense things that can be done with existing underlying technologies, and in most cases within existing legislation.
The six concepts are neither exclusive nor exhaustive. There are gaps and overlaps. Neither do they claim to be new. They are drawn from the work and ideas of many brilliant people. But each is a useful tool for understanding the planning system as it could be.
But before we can think clearly about the future of planning, it’s always helpful to look back at its past. Where did it come from, and what does it actually do?
This post is the first in a series about the Future of Planning. The other parts are linked below:
Part 2 / Planning is the answer, but what was the question?
Part 6 / Community-led planning
