Without public planning, managing a transition away from a fossil fuels-based economy and society will be near impossible. Decarbonisation of food, energy, production and transportation, not to mention the mitigation of the effects of climate breakdown which are already locked in will all require a reassertion of public values over the prerogatives of private capital.
The current planning system plainly will not deliver this. Within it, the impetus to act is weighted in favour of private actors, and so the role of the public element of our planning system is reduced to reactively responding to the propositions of private capital.
Any capacity on the part of the state to act in the broad interest of the public have been worn down both through decades of austerity, and a deliberate attack upon the planning system itself – both Thatcher-era reforms and the impact of the Localism Act 2011 led to the hollowing out of planning departments, resulting in private consultancies increasingly taking on the functions of public planners. You could look, for example, at the role of Deloitte within the production of Manchesters’ strategic regeneration frameworks as a clear example of the privatisation of planning.
The implications of this for fighting climate breakdown should be obvious. With the current setup – where the collapse of public planning has occurred in tandem with the neoliberalisation of governance more broadly – major societal decisions are left to the impulses of the market.
What’s more, these over-leveraged and financialised private actors are driven by an accelerating loop of short financial horizons. The long view that a public planner might have has been submerged beneath the desire for quick profits and rapid returns on capital. What else explains the tipping of incentives for capital towards the construction of rabbit-hutch purpose built student accommodation (PBSA) blocks in our cities?
The planning system is hierarchical – neighbourhood plans are subject to the Local Plan, which in turn is subordinate to the regional spatial framework, the national planning policy framework and so on. So, local action on its own is not going to be sufficient. Making the planning system more democratic is going to require national legislative change.
We need to undo the impact of over forty years of neoliberalism. Not only does the system need to be repaired after the damage of the Localism Act, but we must also look again at some of the Thatcher-era innovations such as Urban Development Corporations and Enterprise Zones, and undo them.
Both these frameworks, as I cover in The Rentier City, were essentially attempts to carve out territories where capital could act with fewer restrictions such as taxation and public planning frameworks. We should be attentive to how, as Quinn Slobodian argues in Crack up Capitalism, neoliberalism has led to a splintering of governance arrangements across society; and a proliferation of these ‘zones’ where capital is afforded greater leeway and impetus to act. Making the planning system more democratic would in part, therefore, be a process of stitching together these splits and frayed edges in the fabric of our society’s governance.
As will come as no great surprise to your readers, unfortunately the direction of travel at the moment in terms of planning policy is in precisely the opposite direction. Neoliberals have always wanted to overturn the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, which, although battered, remains the legislative basis for a democratic public planning system.
The proposed planning reforms pushed forward by the Tories in 2020 should be understood in this light – an attempt to strip away the final vestiges of this postwar moment. These plans fell apart, like much else, due to the contradictions and crises within the Tory Party, which now look set to culminate in the party’s annihilation in the upcoming election.As such, the special interests pushing these reforms – the network of rightwing think tanks, developer lobbyists and ‘yimby’ activists – have in the last few years turned their attention to the Labour Party, where they have had a great deal of success in capturing official policy. But anyone who has paid attention to what has happened in Manchester, or in other urban areas, particularly London, over the last few decades won’t be that surprised that Labour has found little difficulty in becoming the political wing of the real estate industry.
So what are we to do in the meantime? First, I would encourage any community to actively assert their democratic rights within the planning system.
What does this mean practically? Putting pressure on planning committees is a sensible move. But so many conversations, between planning officers, councillors on the planning committee, and the developers, happen before this stage, so that, at the very least, predispositions are formed long before they reach the committee stage. We have also seen in Manchester at least, evidence in the past that the leadership of the council have pressured the committee to vote in a particular way.
The cards seem stacked against communities. Therefore, research and monitoring of developer interests within neighbourhoods is needed, as well as deeper scrutiny of long-range planning documents.
We also, I think, shouldn’t be afraid of embracing a certain level of militancy when it comes to combatting controversial developments which serve to accelerate gentrification, displacement and social cleansing. Use the law! Use direct action, if needed. Ensnare them. The financial models of developers are sometimes fragile, they can’t tolerate significant delays. Remember: it takes only one pound of sugar to ruin a ton of concrete.
Finally, I think we on the Left ought to become more conversant with and interested in the technical process of planning and aware of its political implications. This stuff really matters. We have been fortunate in Manchester to have had reporters like Nick Prescott at The Meteor, who really understands the planning system, but otherwise I fear that planning is quite deliberately kept as a technical and rather boring process; rather than an essential function of the class-based transformation of urban space. Books like Sam Stein’s Real Estate State ought to be well-known across the Left, and I think more writing like Gareth Fearne’s excellent piece for Greater Manchester Housing Action should be commissioned and read.
There’s an urgent need for the city to move beyond the Bernstein and Leese-era personnel at the top of the city’s planning system. If Bev Craig is serious about her agenda of more social housing, as well as addressing the serious spatial inequalities in Manchester, then she must install a new leadership within the planning apparatus that is in line with her position. If the Roscoe’s replacements are cut from the same cloth, then little will change — the gentrification frontier will march steadily into the inner city. The recent announcement of Joanne Roney’s resignation also offers the leader the opportunity to install a chief executive more in line with her position. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Possibly – though I’d wonder how far this is something unique to Manchester, or rather just a feature of capitalism itself. Perhaps the story in Manchester over the last forty years is simply that global capitalism has returned to the city after a period of decoupling and hiatus.
Studying the history of the municipality, you can trace a certain confidence and entrepreneurialism within the civic culture of the local state that pre-dates the Labour Party’s ascent to power in the interwar, and then decisively in the postwar years. So I wonder if there is something within the ‘official mind’ of the council, and its sense of itself, that predisposed it to being a powerful actor within the local economy in its own right.
Peter Shapely in his indispensable book The Politics of Housing, which traces over a century of housing policy in our city, puts much store on the ‘civic culture’ of Manchester as a factor in its development. One can quite easily trace a sort of continuity between the gas and water municipalism and Corporation-funded Ship Canal of the nineteenth century, via the public housing projects and Manchester airport of the twentieth, right to the joint development vehicles of today. The wider context is dramatically different, but the local state as an indispensable actor within the city remains.
Situating Manchester Labour in this context allows us to start to disentangle ‘Manchester’ from the ‘Labour’ in our analyses. Across the nineteenth century the city was dominated politically by a Liberal hegemony, a breed of ‘hard nosed shopkeepers’ who were bound to the politics of free trade, capital and the laissez faire.
This gradually gave way to traditions of municipal labourism, rooted within the culture of political Catholicism, the networks of (very often Communist-party aligned) engineering shop stewards across the middle period of the twentieth century, and the cohort of radical liberals/ utopian socialists such as Ernest and Sheena Simon, who pushed through the building of Wythenshawe in the 1920s. Deindustrialisation and the growth of a white collar workforce in the post-war era were the crosscurrents which undercut this political settlement.
The big transition of the 1980s – via the ascendancy, and then political defeat of the ‘new urban left’ – was ultimately towards ‘new public management’ and an enhanced role of the professional middle classes: neoliberalism, or in Manchester’s own terms perhaps a reincarnated version of the ‘hard nosed shopkeepers’ that ruled in the 19th century.
There is something about the city’s local state that seems to integrate very well with its local bourgeois elites, particularly now the counterweight of an organised industrial working class presence has withered, which suggests that the culture of development is ingrained on a level deeper than merely the Labour party.
That said, undoubtedly the current real-estate development regime has been made possible by the political stability within Manchester, and Labour’s hegemonic position, whose ramparts in the social base seem more than anything designed to insulate the local state from popular pressure. Greater democratic contestation within the city would be positive, if only to break down some of the ossified political structures and common sense.We should be realistic though, right now there is no viable vehicle for a popular Left presence within the city’s formal political sphere. It would be more likely that the beneficiaries of collapsing Labour hegemony would be either the Liberals, or the Greens, who both tend towards hyper-localism and lack much of a political articulation of the core issues we have been discussing. Or the Workers Party, which is another strange and contradictory proposition entirely…
The contemporary tenants movement in Britain and Ireland – exemplified by organisations such as the London Renters Union, Living Rent, ACORN, CATU in Ireland, my own organization the Greater Manchester Tenants Union, as well as smaller groups in Peterborough, Southampton, Lancaster and elsewhere – should be understood as part of a wider organised pushback against housing unaffordability and urban crisis in the aftermath of the global financial crash of 2008. Since then, the macroeconomic picture has changed to make housing increasingly unaffordable, as the use value of land and housing (as somewhere to live) is increasingly put into conflict with its exchange value as a safe investment and steady source of income.
We know from history that the only solution to these kinds of crises is working class organisation and mutual aid – and so, I would suggest to any tenant who finds themselves in such a situation, that they should join a collective organisation like a tenants union, and participate in democratic and associational life. It’s only through a rebuilding of that that we can ever hope to turn the tide on capitalism’s contemporary predations.
Hugely important. Research for the National Housing Federation has revealed that England’s homes are a greater source of Co2 emissions than its cars. So mass retrofitting of our homes is an obvious solution. We could start this easily in the social sector – taking a neighbourhood like Hulme where all the stock is of similar age and displaying similar problems of disrepair and poor insulation. It would be far better in terms of economies of scale to take the neighbourhood in one go, rather than piecemeal upgrades to individual houses and the stock of single providers.
In the private sector, I would also encourage that any mass retrofit also served to return poor quality stock – particularly if it is ex-council housing – to the public sector. If landlords are failing to maintain their properties, forcing tenants into unsanitary or unsafe conditions – they should have them compulsorily purchased, and moved into the public sector. At a stroke we would be expanding the stock of public housing, as well as addressing the issues of environmental standards and so on that you have mentioned. It’s an ongoing scandal that each year public budgets subsidise landlords to such a degree – through housing benefit, temporary accommodation budgets and so on – at the same time that there simply isn’t enough affordable stock for people to find somewhere to live. The case for intervention to redress the balance of ownership in our housing system towards the public couldn’t be clearer.
The architectural historian Manfedo Tafuri has made the argument that skyscrapers are “real live ‘bombs’ with chain effects, destined to explode the entire real estate market.” In The Rentier City I unpack the logics of this process, via the use of Neil Smith’s important concept of the ‘rent gap’. With these concepts we can begin to understand the negative rippling out effects of land value inflation that have proceeded from the city centre’s real estate boom.
It’s essential then that we bring into the picture the role of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority, and devolution more broadly. We should absolutely be raising serious questions about the allocation of the GMCA’s Housing Investment Fund towards unaffordable housing. The fund is £300m of central government backed loanstock, lent out cheaply to developers to plug liquidity gaps in their financial models. After being paid back, it is re-loaned. Research by the BBC published earlier this year showed that the total value of the loans thus far has been £942.5m, and of this, Renaker has recieved £508m – over half.
Renaker’s developments are way beyond being affordable to people in this city, and the company is possibly the single largest actor in terms of the high rise mania that has gripped Manchester. The role played by devolution in stoking this property boom is far from negligible, and so in part we can see the impact of the Combined Authority on the boom through this.
However, largely I continue to argue that Burnham remains a peripheral figure within this story. Aside from the fact that he only appeared on the scene in 2017, his office is also marked by a strikingly limited set of powers over these core issues of planning and development. These key functions are still held at the city or borough level, not at the level of the city-region. His powers in this regard are weaker than those held by the Greater London Authority, for instance. For us to unpack the boom it’s the dynamics within Manchester City Council itself that must be understood. The GMCA as it is currently constituted is also less powerful – not to mention less democratic – than that prior iteration of city-regional governance, the Greater Manchester County Council.
Here, one further striking trend should be noted, which is austerity. In a way, it is the mirror of devolution, both policies the cornerstones of George Osborne’s agenda, as well as both having major implications for the shape of the local state. On the one hand we see the expansion of a form of devolved power in the shape of the GMCA, but on the other we have witnessed over the last 14 years a deep assault on the Council, via the dramatic contraction in central government support for its budgets.
The loss of funds has hamstrung local government, particularly its capacity to act as actors outside the market – they are forced to slim down or end their social programmes; while at the same time coming to rely more and more on a property-led regeneration machine to maintain economic momentum and plug holes in their budgets.
What results is a development model that can’t seem to break from accelerated rentierism. I think we ought to be far, far more alert to the fact that for all the buzz around ‘devolution’, in many ways it appears as no more than a smokescreen to mask what Tom Crewe has termed ‘The strange death of municipal England’. Real power from local people and their democratic institutions has ebbed away. It ought to be rebuilt.
Isaac Rose works for the Greater Manchester Tenants Union and is author of The Rentier City.
The Rentier City is out with Repeater Books.
Feature image: Wikimedia Commons.
We’ve got big plans. We want to widen and increase our output. We want to produce good quality environmental journalism. And we want to expand our team. But running a media organisation costs money – and we’re run entirely by you. Head over to our Patreon page and consider donating today. Thank you.
Support Us
