bottom drawer

AI and the built environment

2022-12-30T22:37:00.000+00:00

It's fair to say that most of us did not do terribly well at predictions for 2022. Few saw the Ukraine war coming and while I did think that China would relax their zero-covid policy, I thought it would be under far more controlled circumstances than has been the case. Closer to home it was a messy year for planning and the built environment disciplines. While we started and ended the year with the same minister in charge at DLUHC, the interregnum and lengthy hiatus for any kind of policy-making during the summer and autumn helped no-one.

I have little optimism that 2023 will bring clarity rather than chaos, but looking more broadly at the policy and political field, I wonder if this may be the year that AI and related technologies start to really impact the space. And whether this will be a net positive or negative for trying to create really good places that work for communities, are climate-adapted as well as emissions-neutral, and have the longevity and adaptability - measured in centuries not decades - that is increasingly the aspect of design that interests me the most.

The chatGPT model is broadly speaking about generating text, and code (which is broadly text-like). The AI 'art' programmes generate 2D visuals which may depict 3D scenes but do not reflect any underlying 3D model. Both these AI models use a machine learning process that is trained using huge quantities of pre-existing information - books, journal articles, transcripts for chatGPT, pictures and photographs for the AI art generators. Training an AI model on 3D information is harder, but it is already being done. Self-driving cars, for example, are trained on huge amounts of real-world data (camera footage, LIDAR, etc) but also in synthetic simulation environments that are quicker and cheaper to generate. Many of these environments themselves are being generated through AI using 2D-3D automation.

Design by algorithm is already here. There are hundreds of platforms offering to generate infinite numbers of floor plans for your house remodel. At the multi-residential scale, Architechtures is already on the market and Finch is gearing up with new funding announced last year. These are currently aimed at multistory residential development which is ideal for AI due to the complex and rigid rules that must be met (room sizes, furniture arrangements, fire escape distances) and the complexity of developing (and proving) compliant floor plans manually. But they also generate building forms and can easily be used to test multiple different design options with, for example, planners - without any of the time-consuming drafting that most projects still rely on. At the city scale, there's Cityplanner which, it has to be admitted, looks pretty basic currently, and for roads there's Site 3D, and no doubt there are a plethora of other tools out there in development.

Machine learning is fundamentally different from these rule-based platforms as it generates new things based on what it has deduced from old things that it has been trained on. As most of the old stuff that already exists isn't compliant with current requirements, it's going to be far harder to effectively use a machine learning approach for building design. But no doubt, the rules-based algorithmically driven tools are only going to get more common.

All this leaves me feeling distinctly out of date as I contemplate going back to an office powered by 2D and 3D CAD along with a lot of hand sketches and indeed physical models made of cardboard. It also feels a million miles away from the reality of construction as we currently experience it on the scale of projects we are involved with (up to £6-7m in construction value). This is still dirty, inefficient, powered by people, with a site cabin holding racks of printed drawings covered with notes in biro. (We are, however increasingly seeing subcontractor drawing submissions that are being generated by some kind of fairly bad algorithm, because they are ridden with errors and are hideously difficult to read due to their terrible graphic design and layout on the page. The art of creating a clear and well-ordered fabrication drawing, showing exactly what needs to be understood, no more and no less, is dying fast. I found a beautiful example of this craft in our Xmas office tidy-up. It dates from 1967.)

Are small practices like ours doomed to obsolescence as we are undercut by automatic plan generators? My prediction is that, if you want certainty, expertise in the heritage sector is going to be a good bet. But I also saw two amazing works of analog-digital fusion over the holiday period that makes me think there may be a more complex future, albeit one that only some will be willing to pay for. Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, and the RSC/Improbable's Totoro, swept us - and so many others - up on such waves of joy, in their very different ways. Pinocchio could have been a claymation, fully digitally produced film - it wasn't, but I suspect if a viewer didn't know this, they might not have been able to tell. Totoro, of course, being in the theatre, was undubitably physical and tangible. Totoro's round body shook and wobbled gloriously in all three dimensions, to the tip of every piece of stringy fur that made up his mop-like coat.

Consult(ant)(ee)

2022-11-15T17:47:00.011+00:00

Increasingly I find myself not only acting as a consultant - working to try and understand communities, places, and come up with viable and relevant strategies to help them evolve - but also being a consultee. Sometimes this is as a 'valued' or high status consultee - for example, due to being chair of Creative Colchester, the creative industries partnership board for Colchester; being a local business owner and investor in the city centre of Colchester. Sometimes it is simply as a resident, observing and commenting on upcoming plans. And sometimes it is due to my industry networks - being asked to provide some insight or help shape propositions for professional teams looking to work in our local area.

I have spent many hours over the last few years participating and engaging at various levels - wanting to have my voice heard on behalf of our business; the cultural sector more broadly; because I want to speak up on issues that matter to me personally; or because I think I do have something valuable to offer. Online, offline, surveys, interviews, stakeholder forums, focus groups. This has not been paid work and I can see what the 'deal' is seen to be - I raise my profile as a thought leader locally; I make new contacts and increase my networks; I hopefully get to shape the direction of travel for these strategies. But I am giving a lot of time and insight for free and as a consultee the level of feedback I have got from the organisations behind these various initiatives has been extremely limited. Often I have felt that what I've said has been disregarded - either partially or fully - because it did not fit in with a narrative. I have pointed out inaccuracies in data and found those errors recur in final documents. Simple basic accuracy around placenames, terminology of organisations, roles and job titles, has been lacking.

As consultants, we try very hard to avoid these pitfalls and to act with more respect and humility in relation to the expertise and local knowledge that comes from those we 'engage' with. But we have limited amounts of ability to influence and sometimes our clients drive simplification, a partial reading, or are dismissive of views from certain quarters. We push to give good feedback to consultees - to take the time to explain how their insights and contributions have influenced the shape of the strategy, and if they haven't, why - but we are not always given the opportunity to do this as transparently as we would like, nor in a timely manner.

I know - as a consultant - that the way local community members, businesses, stakeholders see things is not always the answer. That ideas from outside - that new perspectives - can unlock tricky problems. That there's an important role for external experts in this. But as a consultee, I know that if those outside perspectives and ideas don't make sense to locals - whether 'high status' stakeholders or just regular residents - if your propositions can't be tested against their perceptions and their lived experience, and be found to be sound - then they are probably not sound at all. And if consultees feel they are constantly giving and not receiving anything back - even thanks or an answer to the questions they have raised - they quickly begin to distrust and resent being asked for more input.

As consultants, we are paid to talk to people, to listen, to analyse. Consultees give priceless expertise and insight for free. This must never be taken for granted.

Productivity, regulation and resources

2022-10-06T09:48:00.003+00:00

Oh, the bonfire of the red tape rears its head again. We are told that the problem to our dragging productivity - the sea anchor holding us back from boldly and swiftly 'growing the pie' - lies with excessive regulation.

At the risk of sounding like a definite greybeard, there is no doubt that - since I started out in work twenty-one years ago - the amount of regulation and due process we work under has increased. A planning application used to be a hand-filled form and a handful of drawings, not reports on everything from contaminated land to light pollution. To discharge planning conditions requires even more. To lay a sewage pipe or connect to the electricity grid requires a forest of forms and permits. There are licensing requirements for everything from A-boards to hanging baskets.

Red tape gone mad! Well, not so fast. It is in the public interest to control whether a new building - or even a house extension - will cause harmful impacts to the environment. A wheelchair user shouldn't have to navigate A-boards on a narrow pavement. There shouldn't be flooding as a result of inadequate drainage design. Outside of our sector, we want food, products, services to be safe.

But what we have today, are regulations without the resources available to service the process. Over the last ten years, the public sector teams charged with processing these approvals have been hollowed out to almost nothing. Not only has the headcount decreased while the amount of processes they are expected to manage has increased; the experience and expertise in the teams has also shrunk hugely. This has led to a death spiral where the staff that remain become anxious and unsure of their own expertise; they put in more checks and balances into the process as a result, putting the burden back on the applicant to prove everything to the minutest detail; and the process becomes even slower and more tortuous. Cue projects grinding to a halt and productivity dropping like a stone.

In the practice, we have a project where it has been over 18 months, and counting, to negotiate the necessary technical consents for a small public project. (This is not a project that even requires planning permission, by the way). We laugh about it, because that's all you can do, rather than cry. We have to bill our lovely and very patient client for all the extra hours we spend negotiating demands on every minute detail that change from month to month, and we feel bad to do so, but what choice do we have? Meanwhile the cost of delivering the project has gone up and up. Who is winning here?

The thing is, we want the project to be as good as it can be. We want someone to be checking through all our homework, but if we were as slow and as inconsistent as these bodies are, our clients would have sued us long ago.

Regulations without the resource to handle them, creates a completely unsustainable situation. If the resources aren't there, but we want growth (i.e. products and projects making it to reality) we - as a society - are going to have to accept less safety, and the statutory bodies that oversee these areas are going to have to prioritise only the applications with the highest risk of potential harm.

There is of course another solution. We could fund and recognise the vital work that statutory bodies do to keep us all safe. We could pay them better, head-hunting the best technical experts from across industry to staff and manage teams, making good, informed decisions that work sensibly with applicants rather than 'computer says no'. That would unleash productivity overnight. Speak to almost anyone who is trying to get a product, service, project through regulation and into production, and they would be glad to pay more, whether in tax or fees, to get good quality, quick and reliable processing.

Alas, not a solution that Truss and co will be considering any time soon.

Reflections on engagement and the proptech industry

2022-07-20T21:14:00.001+00:00

I sat in on a webinar today run by the DLUHC proptech team showcasing projects from round 1 of the Proptech Engagement Fund. The aim of which is to encourage local authorities to pilot potentially innovative and gamechanging methods for using digital tools to increase and streamline engagement with the planning process. When I was at GCSP my fantastic colleague Nissa won funding from the round but unfortunately we were too far along with the Local Plan consultation work I was doing for that to be eligible, which was a shame. But we had already been piloting a lot of really interesting digital and hybrid approaches over the previous two years so it was with interest that I tuned in to hear what I could learn from others.

There were great case studies and it was also good to hear the LPA officers involved being very frank about the downsides as well as the upsides. But one thing that was barely mentioned was what was actually done with the increased amount of feedback, the more streamlined data gathering, the clicks and comments. What tangible difference was it making to the way that planning policy or planning applications were made or assessed? It's really important - if anyone in the community is to retain trust in consultation and engagement in any way - to remember that the point of talking to people and getting them to feed back their thoughts, insights and data, is to actually do things differently as a result. I really wanted to hear more about whether officers (and local politicians) changed their minds, developed things differently, made different decisions as a result. Consultation should be about having impact, not having your say (my most loathed phrase).

The long-toothed old sceptic in me says that the reason we didn't hear about the impact of these new methods on actual decisions, was because there really wasn't any. As I've said before, when weighed up against all the other material planning considerations, there's rarely anything that in community comments that adds to the sum of already known considerations about that particular topic. And (it can't be said enough) consultation is not a referendum, so you can't make decisions just because hundreds or thousands of people preferred A over B. (It was also said quite honestly by a number of participants in the webinar that the digital tools didn't shift the demographic representation among respondents at all. Young people and those from economically underprivileged backgrounds still don't take part, for totally unsurprising reasons.)

The people who do participate, whether in simple online polls or more complex methods, do so because they want to have an impact. They want plans and policies to be changed as a result; they want applications to be understood differently in light of their comments. If we are really just wanting to communicate better - ensure it is easier to find out what is proposed in a planning application or what sites are being suggested in a Local Plan - but we don't believe that any comments from the public will really make any difference to outcomes - we'd better be more honest about this. There's nothing more likely to sow disappointment and anger among communities than being invited to spend time commenting on something, and to see nothing change as a result.

For sure it is a difficult message to give to communities- to say that there's little point in them leaving any comments. A more positive, but difficult, message would be to say that it's only worth commenting if you genuinely will be adding something new to the analysis of the problem. This kind of really useful insight is far easier to obtain through conversation rather than an online form. In person, you can steer a person from the perhaps obvious, or the materially irrelevant, points raised, to insights that only they, with their unique individual background and experiences, can provide. These deep insights are the ones that, in my work, have really turned assumptions on their head, challenged more conventionally gathered forms and sources of data, and had an impact.

These deep and insightful conversations are rarely reducible to an online form. It's not impossible - we are currently working on a set of questions to ask in a consultation about perhaps the most challenging place in the country - but it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of design, a lot of refining and rewriting and really careful consideration. It can look surprisingly simple in the end, but it involves a fundamental refocusing of the aims of consultation towards real social research that seeks insights that only real people with real lived experience can provide. And it certainly isn't just inviting people to have their say.

The proptech industry, so focused on selling its tools to the widest possible market, risks eroding and trivialising public engagement if it doesn't ask these hard questions of itself. Shiny tools are just tools, and if they aren't used well, they can do more harm than good.

Peter Brook and the Bouffes du Nord

2022-07-17T20:59:00.004+00:00

On a non-descript street round the back of the Gare du Nord, at first you might wonder how a theatre could sit behind this frontage which looks like any other residential Parisian building – tall windows with metalwork balconies, a café at ground floor. The café was typical Paris –dark bistro chairs, small tables, a traditional bar with a wooden panelled front and mirrored shelves, a menu of cassoulet and steak-frites and salade frisée. It was the front of house for the theatre, but nothing in it spoke of anything that could not be found on any Parisian street.

Going through into the theatre was like stepping through the looking glass. The theatre had been found by Brook in a near-derelict state, and he had done the bare minimum to make it work. It was once an incredibly ornate music-hall theatre, with arches and mouldings and balconies arranged in a perfect oval above which a domed ceiling was decorated with fine metalwork. But the gilt was long gone, the plaster falling down, the original red of the walls was patchy and faded. All of this was left with no repairs made, and only new padded benches – no individual seats – were added, along with lighting bars simply suspended in a practical, visible grid. Most radically of all, the floor was left flat from the stalls all the way to the back of the stage. No division, no looking down or up from audience to actor and no backdrop or wings, just the bare red of the back wall. This was where the company rehearsed, did yoga, sat in a circle to discuss and debate, and performed, standing on the flat floor in front of the simple benches with a minimum of props.

This way of treating a building– to resist tinkering or restoring, and to make the bare minimum of changes with absolute confidence – is something that has stayed with me, although we rarely get the opportunity to be as bold. Working with Brook showed how little needed to be done to make a setting for life to unfold and for people to make connections and tell stories. As architects and planners, that is all we seek to do - make settings for life in all its richness to take hold. Often the site you inherit - like the Bouffes with its plasterwork - is all the ornament and gloriousness you need, and you just need to add the padded benches and leave the floor flat.

I wrote this piece for Building Design magazine as one of two options I gave them for my 'Wonder' - they chose the other one and published my short piece on the Temple Mount / Haram Al-Sharif.

With the recent death of Peter Brook, I noted not much had been said about the building in which he worked. Before I had even considered studying architecture, I was lucky to work with Brook in Paris as a kind of runner, doing whatever needed to be done. I was a musician and had helped out on some small operas; Brook was directing his first opera in decades and he needed someone who could read scores; I had the unearned privilege of being at three degrees of separation through a friend of my mother. Along with his way of working – intensive improvisation for weeks - his theatre, the Bouffes du Nord, was a revelation.

So I thought I'd dig the piece out, rewrite it a little and publish it here as a small tribute to an extraordinary person, who has shaped my perspectives in so many ways.

On architectural academia

2022-07-17T20:30:00.000+00:00

I've got to be honest. I've never understood academic architecture or the culture of architecture schools. I've never understood the mysterious process by which some people end up as tutors and then heads of something and then professors, working often simultaneously at multiple universities, on the basis of a body of work which often seems slight, whimsical and irrelevant. I have occasionally taught in a guest capacity, I'm invited onto crit panels maybe once or twice a year, and I've been an external examiner (representing practice) and on a RIBA validation panel, but I've never felt inside the academic club and that club has rarely reached out to me either.

People have often asked if I or we teach, and while my usual answer is that we lack of time and want to focus on the practice, particularly of the truth is I don't know where I would start if I did want to teach or consider an academic post. There seems to be some magical process whereby appointments get made, and the qualifications required are unclear. I can answer the exam questions of a public tender or an application form but the smoke and mirrors around most of the academic world bring out all my insecurities, so better just not to go there.

Of course, like all architects, I have experienced education as a student. It's going back a long way now, to the late 1990s, but I remember the shock of studio culture even in the relatively tame version present in Scroope Terrace in Cambridge. But everything was new to me and as I saw older students act like all this was normal, I just took on board that this was what architecture school was like and absorbed the hero-culture around all-nighters, the substances required to get through them, toughing out a harsh critic, tears and breakdowns with no support. I pretty much hated all of it. It felt like a system that was trying to toughen us up, where the people in it - nice though many were - didn't want to show too much kindness. University was also disorganised. Tutors would be late or not show up, dates and times would change at the last minute and arrangements were vague. The whole thing was confusing, exhausting and seriously undermining of one's sense of self, even at a school where the culture was far more mild than the stories we all heard from London faculties.

It was a huge relief to start working in practice and find regular working hours, professional and kind colleagues, practical real world briefs, a structure of regulations and physical requirements that felt like a reassuring framework in which design could be made purposeful as well as joyful. Having thought I was not at all cut out for architecture, in practice something clicked and I found confidence. After two years out, I then took an unconventional route through Part 2, going to the most practical and - to my mind- radical architecture programme there is, the Rural Studio, and then being kindly allowed by Robert Mull to enroll in his Free Unit for a year as a fairly token way of getting a Part 2 while holding down a fulltime job.

Since then I've reflected a great deal on what I learnt in my Part 1 - my only experience of conventional unit based education - and what those who come into our practice at Part 1 and Part 2 level learnt from their student experiences. I've also reflected on what I've heard from friends and colleagues over the years, and what I've seen, when a guest at architecture schools for crits and suchlike. There's no doubt that the culture exposed in the Bartlett report was, and is, real across almost all architecture schools to a greater or lesser extent.

We all need to ask what part we have played in burying our own painful experiences and just going with the system culture. I don't think I've been a horrible tutor or critic, but I've heard tutors be horribly dismissive and cruel about their students and I've offered too feeble a ripost. And we all got pretty inured to seeing students crying in hallways, myself included. It has been only over the last few years that mental health has been raised up the agenda, along with race and gender based issues, that we've all collectively been looking harder and deeper at our own entrenched behaviours and assumptions. I'm naturally shy and anxious about not fitting in, and I've had to learn, over the last 5 or 6 years, to question more confidently and speak up.

It's difficult indeed for the people who are at the top of these institutions to unravel the very structures that have put them there. Perhaps the academics themselves need a programme of therapy in order for them to understand themselves better and be able to put this change in place. Like alcoholics who surround themselves with other addicts, it is likely that they have no idea how far from the shores of reasonable behaviour they have drifted. Cut them loose, and we've seen already how bemusement is turning to resentment and revenge.

In all walks of life, those who are the greatest bullies are those who fear their own inadequacy. There are, and have been, too many tutors and professors who know they wouldn't survive in real world practice, so they have held tightly to a structure that can hide their failure and dress it up as success. I do recognise that being a good teacher is a skill in itself which is different from being a good practitioner. But most architectural tutors and academics haven’t studied educational theory or the psychology of learning, or thought long and hard about how to bring baby architects into being who are fit for the world as it exists. And too many have only been interested in preserving their own position in the hierarchy, ensuring their new clothes are never exposed as nakedness, and creating a network of dependency and mutual reinforcement that protects their mediocrity from view.

If the schools of architecture, and the universities that host them, want to root out the culture that we've all lived through, they need to recognise that teaching architecture is not some weird and mysterious process which is impervious to rigour, structure, professionalism and common sense. They need to recognise that creativity, experimentation and joy can thrive alongside healthy normal relationships, sleep, kindness and respect. And that the role models they put in front of students - in the form of their tutors - should include practitioners whose work makes a real positive impact in the real world out there and isn't just applauded within the closed subculture of paper architects. Architectural academia must stop being a closed shop.

Politicians and planning - part 2

2022-05-05T21:35:00.003+00:00

Last week I set the cat among the pigeons by suggesting that local politicians should lose their role in determining the outcomes of planning applications. Just as you wouldn't expect local councillors to have a say on whether someone gets council housing, or a school place in their preferred school, it seems to me that they shouldn't get involved in deciding if an application is policy compliant. Once the policies are set they should be applied apolitically.

But, there is a vitally important role for politicians, and that's in setting those policies in the first place. In my world of (currently) intractable policy ideas, local politicians would be able to set out their stall with regard to the vision for their area, and to have the tools available to implement this.

How many campaign leaflets were delivered recently, containing a promise to stop development on this or that site in a Local Plan that is already halfway through the process, when the writers know full well that this won't be possible in practice? Politicians should have the power to actually carry through their ideas, quickly and effectively, within the timescales of a typical election cycle, and then to be accountable to the electorate who would be able to see directly what that administration had - or hadn't - delivered. (Authorities like my home one of Colchester, which have elections every single year, are insane anomalies which should be forced to move to a four- or five-yearly cycle.)

Currently we have a situation where Local Plan strategy and policy is meant to self-evidently derive from evidence, almost as if there is no subjectivity whatsoever. While evidence is important, having a distinctive vision for your area doesn't just derive from doing your homework. This leads to plan-making that is devoid of imagination; with no positive and distinctive aspiration for what a town, district or city might actually *be*. Read the 'vision statement' for any Local Plan, and they are virtually interchangeable. (I know, I have written them and tried my damndest to make this not so, with limited success). Anyplace plan-making breeds anyplace development and the erosion of local identity: socially, economically and spatially.

The requirement for 'soundness', as defined nationally, comes at the expense of vision and distinctiveness. While, at the time, people mocked the late Will Alsop for imagining Barnsley as a Tuscan hilltop town, we need spatial narratives for our towns and districts that capture the imagination and hold something precious and locally specific at their heart. The system at present makes it far too easy for land promoters and developers to hold local politicians hostage - in both high and low value areas. While it is important that housing is delivered and authorities can't just duck out of their responsibilities to the country as a whole, more flexibility to define local need differently, and to adopt different ways of meeting that needs, should be available to local leaders.

Local politicians should be able to put forward a radical and holistic vision for their area which can carry across all aspects of local policy, from planning and housing to transport, the natural environment, the economy and community relations. They should have the power to enact distinct local policies - for example on affordable housing or transport - without the straitjacket of compliance with the direction set by central government.

In transport planning recently there has been a shift - at least, in forward-looking authorities - to 'decide and provide' rather than 'predict and provide'. In essence this means that you decide what transport characteristics you want your place to have, and plan and design for that, rather than modelling what transport needs would be under a 'business as usual' scenario and providing exactly that. So, for example, if the aim is to have no net additional car journeys, you mandate trip budgets and the active and public transport infrastructure to achieve that, and make development conditional on demonstrating it will deliver that; rather than predicting an increase in car trips as a result of development and planning for the extra carriageway or bypass.

Plan-making should take a similar approach - decide what character you want your place to have, and plan for that. If that's stopping all greenfield development and providing for your needs solely on brownfield land, with the densities and use mix that can support it, then that should be a choice open to authorities, regardless of whether greenfield sites are more easily 'deliverable'. If that's proactively growing a village into a dense and vibrant town, that should be on the table. Powers to acquire land and put together the partnerships to develop it, should be far more easily available.

I know what you are thinking - what local politician will try to make the case for growth: isn't that electoral suicide? But many voters struggle to rent or buy affordably: their voices aren't activated because they aren't currently given an electoral choice that can deliver what they need. Local politicians can't put plans on the table that persuade communities that they will genuinely benefit because they are hamstrung by the national requirements for plan-making. Local politicians should be able to make the case for doubling the population of the town because they can make that development deliver a new train station, sports facilities, and a strict limit on traffic increases. Or, to limit new development, but bring in powers to repossess vacant homes and derelict sites, or policies that mean existing houses in the district can only be sold to people with a genuine reason for living in the area, and at affordable prices. Or to make developers provide one affordable rent home for every market home, no ifs and no buts. It's all about the trade-offs: the ability and the responsibility to be honest with the local electorate. Currently it's all too easy for local politicians to be slippery when it comes to planning, because ultimately the final say sits within the opaque system of examination, 'soundness' and appeals.

A lot of this comes down to challenging the primacy of viability and the market would squeak. But buying land should be at the purchaser's risk - in no other market (well, almost none) is the 'right' to turn a profit so wonderfully protected, and that's just - in my view - plain wrong. While developers might try to tough it out and sit on their assets in order to force a council's hand, giving local politicians more powers for CPO and to control how housing is rented, bought and sold locally, would mitigate to a large degree. Just look at the radical measures that Switzerland brought in regarding second homes.

To achieve this would need a real overhaul of plan-making. Fewer stages in the process and less time spent hauling plans through endless committees and examinations. Politicians should be setting out manifestos which contain a vision - which could be either a plan relatively fully formed, or a plan for quick and effective consultation with a commitment on how the results are implemented. Then - post election - implement those promises. Within a four-year election cycle it would be possible to get a plan in place, and see development starting to be implemented on the ground.

Big change is possible if it comes with a democratic mandate. Outside the current Overton window it may be, but I wish that the newly elected local leaders had real power to make plans - quickly and decisively - and to be held accountable for them.

One intractable idea a week

2022-04-26T13:19:00.004+00:00

Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “one can’t believe impossible things.”

“I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

This well-known quote from Alice in Wonderland captures the importance of stretching one's idea of the possible. If you practice imagining impossible futures, they will become more possible. It's just like yoga.

The other day I was at a dinner with my old friend Ben Yeoh and he asked everyone an 'intractable' policy idea as a conversation starter. The idea of what is tractable and intractable in policy terms - the Overton window as policy geeks refer to it - and how to stretch or move the window - is much discussed. Most efforts are focused at the margins of the window - trying to stretch it ever so slightly - or in posing something that's deliberately so far beyond the window that it 'drags' the whole window ever so slightly in that direction.

As I have a backlog of somewhat intractable policy ideas, many languishing in draft posts, I thought I might have a go at posting one a week until I get through them (ha...you think you'll get through them! Good luck. Ed.) Some might stick and some might be really stupid, and I'd welcome anyone pointing out how flawed they are.

I'm starting with a pet bugbear of mine. Planning committees made up of elected councillors. Who thought that was a good idea? It's like making elected officials act as magistrates or jury members - obviously daft. Planning committee members may be meant to act apolitically, but it's impossible for councillors not to have one eye on the ballot box when making decisions. We've all been in committee meetings where decisions are split down party lines.

It is sheer madness - and a huge cost to the public purse - when a committee refuses an application that is policy compliant and recommended for approval, with the inevitable overturning at appeal. This is becoming ever more frequent, as committees are now getting in the habit of refusing outline applications on sites which are allocated in Local Plans, allowing councillors to claim they are standing up for their communities - a disingenous position when they know full well that the appeals will be successful. Officers are stuck between a rock and a hard place in making their recommendations.

But I don't think decision-making should be just down to officers. We do need a 'common sense test' on applications, a local perspective, and a judgement call whether they meet the spirit and not just the letter of the law. So I would institute neighbourhood panels, where randomly selected members of the local community, drawn from a pool that would be refreshed and trained on a regular basis, serve as the committee. This neighbourhood panel, like the jury in a trial, would have decision-making power over major schemes and those called in under a strictly applied, and nationally consistent, protocol - no more random schemes of delegation.

The success of citizen design review panels shows that members of the public can reach sensible and insightful conclusions on even difficult and controversial applications. Just as jury trials, by and large, reach verdicts that are found to be sound when appealed to higher courts, I think our fellow humans can make planning decisions that will be largely found sound at appeal. They would be assisted by officers, just as the judge in a jury trial directs jury members as to the points of law they are being asked to decide, and I'm confident they would manage just fine.

Taking politicians out of planning determination would lead to far greater trust in the system, from the community as a whole. Officers would have to explain their assessment in plain English and with clear, unambiguous logic. And local politicians would be free to soapbox all they liked. For all that councillors claim planning committee is a vital part of their powers, I think they'd secretly prefer to have nothing to do with it.

If the government is so keen on local democracy in planning (Street Votes...Neighbourhood Plans) - why not take this simple step to embed it at the point where decisions really get made. This shouldn't be that intractable, really.

Intensification and how to achieve it

2022-04-23T12:10:00.006+00:00

Above: backyard development behind an existing historic home in Austin TX. By my friends at Thoughtbarn.

There’s been talk this week, following the FT reporting that cities can’t deliver to the government’s proposed ‘urban uplift’ housing targets, about whether this is a genuine complaint or simply a lack of imagination. Some pointed to the potential to intensify existing urban areas with low-density homes as a way to provide plenty of new homes without needing either brownfield or greenfield land. And it’s true that we have lots of areas that were once suburbs but are now central in towns and cities, with great access to jobs, transport and local services, still formed of individual homes on big plots. If we want to avoid unnecessary greenfield development and to reduce car use, it's perverse to say that these areas should remain unchanged.

Intensification, in some forms, is common practice. People buy bungalows or small homes in good locations and rebuild them into far bigger houses. The case studies of 'successful' intensification on a street-wide scale (South Tottenham/Stamford Hill, Primrose Hill) are also examples of allowing existing homes to become bigger - not of knocking them down and rebuilding them altogether. But neither of these approaches helps with the housing shortage.

More comprehensive forms of intensification are also already possible without any new legislation. A developer is perfectly at liberty to approach the residents of a suitable street, buy plots, apply for planning permission to redevelop, and replace them with more homes in a denser arrangement. Planners are open to this in most areas, because the sustainability benefits are so clear. But there are only a scattering of these schemes that come forward, because it’s too difficult to find adjacent plots where the owners want to sell up at the same time, and the viability can be borderline.

If we are going to intensify low-density neighbourhoods, we need to look at solutions that can be implemented by individual plot owners, and not solutions that need multiple plots. Stateside, in many places, backyard development of additional homes is permitted on the plots of existing houses . This is what in the UK we often call ‘tandem’ development and, historically, planning regulations have frowned on it. This should be changed, because it has many advantages that make it a deliverable form of intensification.

Firstly, it can be done on single plots without needing to consolidate multiple plots into a single ownership. No property purchase is required, massively improving viability. Secondly, it can be undertaken by the property owner themselves – who retain control. No-one is forced to redevelop. The owners can stay in their original home, and can sell or rent the additional unit(s) themselves, to people they are happy to live alongside. Thirdly, it has fewer neighbour impacts than developing small apartment buildings across multiple plots. The street scene remains unchanged. Parking can be dealt with on-plot and new homes design-coded to avoid overlooking neighbouring homes or gardens. Croydon’s Suburban Design Guide is a good example of creating a code for on-plot intensification, although its continued insistence that tandem development be ‘subservient’ –lower and smaller than the ‘host’ dwelling – is retrograde. There are good examples where bigger buildings can be developed behind lower existing homes – have a look at Thoughtbarn’s fourplexes in Austin, Texas.

Another simple policy change would be (in accessible urban locations) to refuse applications to replace a single home with a larger single home, or for major (non PD) extensions, unless an additional home would also be created on the plot. This would change the market for under-developed plots from aspirational wealthy homeowners, to small builder-developers creating more affordable units. Historically we’ve disliked the subdivision of family homes into flats, because of prejudice against lower-income households in ‘family’ areas. The HMO use class remains a stain on our planning system and should be abolished (that’s a matter for another article), but policy should be encouraging subdivision of homes into good quality, self-contained (non HMO) flats or maisonettes, compliant with high design standards all around, including garden/balcony space for all homes and conditional on energy efficiency improvements.

While none of this would result in ‘affordable’ (as technically defined) housing, it would create smaller and therefore cheaper homes, and it would be likely that a proportion would be privately rented. This would help the ‘squeezed middle’ and first-time buyers - exactly the target demographic that the government says it wants to support. And these policy changes could be easily implemented without the over-complicated and frankly weird system proposed by the Street Votes paper. Croydon’s design guide shows that the planning and design side can be led by local authorities with appropriate local consultation, rather than expecting residents themselves to self-organise – which is too slow and patchy. The main issue is – as always in housing – not policy but delivery.

To achieve intensification at meaningful scale needs financing and a concerted marketing campaign targeting property owners in these kinds of streets. Most people see planning and building as what it is – a massive hassle and very expensive. If a turnkey solution, combining financing, planning, design and a slate of pre-approved contractors, was offered to homeowners, there could be a step-change in the speed and amount of intensification that takes place.

Intensification really could help increase housebuilding rates without using greenfield land, but only if government accelerates this with funding. Local authorities could bid for funds to deliver intensification programmes that combine marketing, design, planning and affordable loans to cover construction costs. This would generate local jobs, address local housing need, and financially benefit individual local homeowners, not deep-pocketed developers. If just 0.5% of Bristol's homeowners subdivided their house, or created an additional home on their plot each year, this would meet nearly all the council's 'uplifted' housing target. If government is serious about urban rather than greenfield development, funding intensification would be a win with political appeal all round.

Spring food for Pesah

2022-04-16T11:16:00.001+00:00

All the festivals happen this weekend. Passover, Vaisakhi, Easter, and we are in the middle of Ramadan too. My most precious Easter memories are from childhood, when we would frequently go to stay with Italian friends in their small Tuscan village. On Easter day, we would go to church and then wait outside in the tiny piazza as the priest put a taper to the backside of a papier-mache dove which then shot along a wire rigged between the church and a house on the other side of the square and back again. Firework-powered, this spectacle was some rising of the Holy Spirit indeed.

Afterwards we would go back to the house and feast on spring lamb cooked with potatoes and artichokes and mint. Utterly delicious.

This year I thought we'd look into a Passover feast for tonight, the second evening of Pesah. Consulting Claudia Roden of course, we cooked up Sephardi Jewish dishes that somewhat echo - or testify to the dialogue with - the Christian Mediterranean foods of this time of year. As I was cooking not in my own home, but with and for family on the other side of the country, I chose easy-seeming recipes with classic combinations. Parsley-flecked meatballs simmered in a garlicky sauce with lemon and fresh mint, tweaked with the use of bundles of wild garlic; rice with broad beans and dill, and the all-important tahdig, the crusty bottom; a Turkish flourless cake with almonds, walnuts and orange; and little flourless nut biscuits, also made with nubbly almonds and walnuts, very like the 'brutti ma buoni' of north Italy. Visiting the local market to shop this morning, the vegetable stall had a pile of violet globe artichokes so I couldn't resist and bought a few to nibble on before the meal; and for the vegetarian, I fried up artichoke slices in a light batter and drizzled with honey.

A springtime meal full of flavour, which was indeed as simple and reliable to make as hoped...well, except for the cake which suffered an Aga over-cooking moment and had to be somewhat brutally rescued with the excision of burnt bits, a generous drizzle of orange syrup and icing sugar to conceal! But it was a happy peaceful meal and much enjoyed by all.

Happy Pesah!

Mangoes and coconuts for Ugadi, and one of India's oldest foods

2022-04-06T20:13:00.004+00:00

One part of #cookingtheyear that I am learning a lot about, are the many different calendars used across the globe. The sun, moon and stars may shine equally and predictably, moving only a tiny amount over the millenia [although - as I discovered when reading about Makar Sakranti - enough to matter in some calendars] but there are multiple different ways to use them in deriving the staging-posts of the year.

The first new moon after the spring equinox is a conjunction of lunar and solar calendars that is the start of the New Year in several cultures. It is observed as Ugadi or Gudhi Padwa in many parts of south India; as Cheti Chand among the Sidhi people who originate from a region that is now in Pakistan; among the followers of Sanamahism, an animistic religion that probably predates Hindu practices. But it is by no means the only or even primary 'New Year' for the subcontinent - Vaisakhi is coming up, which seems to be more widely celebrated. The diversity of cultures and practices across the subcontinent comes truly home when considering the hundreds of languages and religions - and I am put to shame with how little I understand their inflections.

We had family staying for the weekend and it was a great excuse to cook up a south Indian feast in celebration. While I could have repeated - and improved on - the ugadi pachadi and the obattu (puran poli) we made at Makar Sakranti - I took the opportunity to try some new favoured Ugadi foods from the southern Indian states - rich with mango and coconut, which are symbolic of prosperity and happiness, among other meanings.

We made mavinakayi chitranna - a tangy mango rice with ancient roots, where cooked rice is mixed with spices and unripe mango; kosambari - a deliciously fresh, textured salad of mango, coconut, cucumber, urad dal and fresh coriander; and an okra (bindi) palya, the flavours of which took me back in an instant to my time in Kerala over fifteen years ago. It is extraordinary how food can so overwhelmingly bring you into a different time and place; more than a memory, a form of time travel. Alongside these, the thing that went down best with all the table were urad dal vadas with spiced yoghurt and a tamarind-mint-coriander smooth chutney. And for dessert I made sheer korma, a kheer made with sev - vermicelli - cooked in sweetened milk, with flaked almonds and pistachios. Kheer is a traditional prasada - temple food - and an easy, beautiful and totally delicious sweet that can be eaten hot but, in my opinion, is at its best chilled.

Vadas are probably one of the oldest foods in the subcontinent. In my efforts to become better informed, I've been reading Feasts and Fasts by Colleen Taylor Sen and learnt a lot about the history and use of urad dal, one of the native pulses to south India, unlike lentils and chickpeas, which originated further west. Vadas are mentioned in the earliest Indian cookbooks and are like a dal falafel - the urad dal, soaked but not cooked, are blitzed to a coarse mash, mixed with flavourings and - in some versions, but not the one I made - fermented for extra rise, before being shaped into balls or miniature doughnuts and deep-fried. It's safe to say they were a huge hit with all members of the extended family, along with the insanely tasty tamarind sauce - tamarind paste blitzed with fresh mint, coriander, ginger and spices. They were easy to make and a recipe that will certainly be repeated, but the whole meal was a massive hit. Fully vegetarian, no-one missed meat or fish, and all were super easy to make, with a great mix of sharp, fresh and rich cooked flavours and textures.

With apologies for the unstyled photos, as always it's a race against time to get a picture before everyone dives in to eat!

Nowruz, the tipping point of the year. A fish to celebrate.

2022-03-20T20:42:00.000+00:00

Today is the spring equinox and I feel that of all the New Year dates we are celebrating, this is the one that resonates most with me. Tipping the scales from darkness to light, such an ancient and unmissable moment in the year.

No wonder #Nowruz - the Iranian and central Asian New Year, which is on the equinox - can be traced back to ancient Babylonian times. I can't imagine a culture that didn't mark this day, and just about every tradition has a festival or significant calendar moment that is on, or calculated from, the vernal equinox. The next few weeks are busy ones for #cookingtheyear!

I made Sabzi Polo Mahi, and a meat-free Gormeh Sabzi (with kidney beans and black eyed beans, I can't forget that the latter are a good luck New Year food in the southern US and elsewhere, probably originatingfrom Africa) for the vegetarian. A whole fish is essential for New Year in so many traditions. Claudia Roden gives some interesting tidbits of magical lore about fish in Arab and North African culture. In southern Spain a whole fish served on saffron and parsley dressed, thinly sliced and baked potatoes, traditional for New Year, feels like a very similar dish to Sabzi Polo Mahi and I wonder if you can link across from the Arab rule in Spain to this Iranian dish. In China a whole fish is required too.

I would love to know more about where the fish symbolism comes from. One to read up on.

Purim pies

2022-03-16T22:26:00.002+00:00

Wow, it's been a while since I wrote a proper blog post. There are half a dozen in draft but it's been busy, what can I say. Plus it feels flippant to write about food or planning policy or public projects here when the world is so full of sadness and horror.

But I started this little project and I want to keep a record of what and how and when. If you want a little glimpse of a couple of festive meals - from the Deep South and from Japan - that we made in the last couple of weeks, have a look at my instagram. Today I thought I would jot down a few longer notes about today's #cookingtheyear festive foods, which draw on the work of Claudia Roden and start our exploration of Jewish holiday foods - of which there will be many more over the coming weeks.

Today is Purim - a Jewish holiday which - as I have been reading - has a lot to do with food, particular sweets and pastries. When my daughter mentioned it to a friend of hers who is of Jewish heritage, he described it as the Jewish Halloween, and there is also traditionally dressing up and drinking involved. It celebrates a complicated story that boils down to the cunning of Esther in delivering the Babylonian Jews from a pogrom, and the baddie in the story is a courtier named Haman, who has lent his name to the most common foods associated with Purim as a festival. Our family will probably now call Purim the pie-day, as it's a long time since quite so many varieties of pastry have been seen on one table.

Hamantaschen - Haman's hats - are little three-cornered pastries filled with a poppyseed filling, supposedly recollecting the hat's of the 'odious Haman', as Roden describes him, and come from the Ashkenazi tradition. From the Sephardi side we made Orecchie di Haman - Haman's ears, deep-fried bowties of pasta dough sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. And we started off with chickpea-stuffed sambousak - a sort of Arab / Iraqi pasty - in both deep-fried and baked versions. (Purim is a dairy-vegetarian holiday due to Esther apparently being on a vegetarian diet when in the palace of the Persian king.)

Many have Roden's Book of Jewish Food on their shelves, but I'm going to hazard a guess that not many actually cook from it. It is both a work of fantastic scholarship and also very personal, filled with stories from her family, friends and correspondents from the Jewish diaspora across the world, but unlike the bestselling cookbooks (many of whom credit Roden heavily for their inspiration) it has hundreds of recipes but no photos of of the finished dishes, and the instructions - drawn often from historical sources or scraps of paper jotted down - can be laconic. It's therefore a rather different challenge to cook from it when these dishes are outside of one's own family or cultural experience - you have to make a fair few decisions about how something is meant to look or taste.

While I spent a fair amount of time in Israel and the West Bank many years ago (you can read a little here) and celebrated some of the other festivals with Jewish friends, these recipes were unfamiliar to me so I tried to follow the recipe instructions faithfully but this certainly was not without pitfalls. The sweetened pastry for the hamantaschen was definitely tricky to handle and half our three-cornered hats unfolded during baking. I could have also done a better job on the filling, although in my defence there was some confusion in the recipe which had just one lot of butter in the ingredients list, but two steps in the process which involved adding butter. But they certainly were tasty when completed, if not the neat triangles of photos I looked up online afterwards. I think we should have gone even thinner on the pasta maker for the orecchie - I went down to the second-to-last setting but should have been braver. Still, everyone loved the fried pasta - but who wouldn't like deep fried pastry covered in sugar!

But the undoubted hit of the evening was the sambousak. A soft dough filled with a spiced chickpea and onion mix, they puffed up beautifully when deep-fried and were incredibly moreish. Roden says she prefers the baked version but without a doubt the tasting panel here at home preferred the fried - which also have the added bonus of cooking very quickly. (Though the baked were also liked and one panel member - not myself! - managed to eat 6 across both varieties.) Roden has a whole chapter on similar savoury pies and I can see us now working enthusiastically through all of them. (the photo below makes them look rather burnt, but that's my poor photography...they were nicely browned, promise!). The name and the nature of these made me wonder if there's a link to Indian samosas. * Note from my improved reading on Indian food - yes, sambousak and samosas are the same in origin.*

I'm not going to draw any facile comparison between the deliverance of Jews from persecution in ancient Persia, the Jewish history in Ukraine or the present war. We - do we really need to state it? - stand fully with Ukraine and with all those who are suffering and losing their lives due to unjust wars across the world. I've heard a lot from artists and musicians over the last few weeks about how art and music stand for peace, for comfort, for freedom. Roden's book talks of food as cultural exchange, as generosity and as simple comfort too. I hope you don't mind me writing about it as a little pleasure in our household and a way to learn and explore the world from our dining table.

Levelling Up White Paper - some thoughts

2022-02-03T11:32:00.003+00:00

Yesterday felt a little like a reminiscence day for the regeneration sector. Remember Regional Development Agencies? English Partnerships, the OG brownfield regeneration agency, before it became all about housing delivery and ended up, after several interim acronyms, as Homes England? What about Sure Start? Isn't rural proofing reviving the 2000s approach of the Commission for Rural Communities?

The 90s and 00s revival has spread to politics as Michael Gove's long awaited Levelling Up White Paper looks to a future with a lot of old ideas brought back into play. After an idiotic introduction (someone tell Andy Haldane that Renaissance Florence was a slave-owning society, and the Industrial Revolution hardly reduced inequality), when you delve into the detail it's almost like a junior civil servant at DLUHC found an old filing cabinet full of John Prescott's briefings, and had an epiphany.

The news release came out at 9am but the full White Paper wasn't published till gone 3, so most if the commentary you will have read yesterday was based on the headlines and not the detail. But I ploughed through the entire pack of papers - yes, including the annex on missions and metrics - before 5pm (thus showing of my one and only superpower, speed reading) and have a few observations.

Commentators who point out there's not enough money set out in the paper, to meet the massive ambition of the 12 'missions', are quite correct. The missions also remind me of Gove's education reforms - the man loves to set targets and metrics. The 'list of things', as has been pointed out, feels like they've been rescued from the slush pile and it's clear that Gove hasn't won the battle with Sunak to be able to promise big ticket items. Proposed local government reforms are particularly peculiar as they would add more complexity and bureaucracy, not less - exactly what the regions don't need, and there's no detail about how much power Whitehall will genuinely be happy to devolve (judging by recent track record, not much).

But what is interesting about the White Paper is that it starts with over 150 pages of in-depth analysis about what has gone wrong, why 'levelling up' is needed and, crucially, why this is not a problem that can be solved by one department alone. With hundreds of footnotes, I would love to know whose dissertation this is that's been lifted hook, line and sinker - but the analysis is far from wrong. (And this is certainly a change from the Jenrick era, for which 'intellectually flimsy' would be a massive understatement).

The history of looking holistically at persistent disadvantage is an interesting one. In 1991, census data was used to compile the 1991 Index of Local Conditions - published in 1994, such was the state of data analysis at the time. The then- Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions rejigged the indicators and geographical boundaries into the Index of Local Deprivation in 1998, then the Index of Multiple Deprivation in 2000, and, with tweaks, this has been issued every four or so years since then. The impetus behind creating the IMD was precisely to show the whole systems issue that is persistent disadvantage, and to map this geographically. Each iteration still forms the authoritative benchmark by which to track whether policy has really made any difference on the ground, in people's lives. (For a great insight on how that data can be used, have a look at the Atlas of Inequality.)

However, policy-making has, by and large, stepped away from taking a whole systems, place-based approach since the New Labour years. The White Paper acknowledges the Single Regeneration Budget, the New Deal for Communities, and the Regional Development Agencies - mostly Labour initiatives - as important forerunners, although it stops understandably short of explicitly concluding they were the most effective interventions to have taken place over the last 30 years. Since then, policy has become increasingly thematically silo'd - as the number of civil servants in Whitehall has mushroomed, local government hollowed out by defunding, and the non-departmental public bodies slashed in the 'bonfire of the quangos'. Localgov has been reduced - as the White Paper also points out - to drafting endless bids for funding from different central government departments with little real relationship-building and no joined-up thinking.

If Gove stays around for long enough to see the core of the White Paper thinking through, and if he can wield enough influence over other ministers and departments, which is also far from easy - the real radicalism in the White Paper is that it asks for a major culture shift in the way government works. It is heavily influenced by Mariana Mazucatto's 'missions-oriented policy' concept (another interesting borrowing from a left-wing intellectual) in demanding that all of government reorients towards shared goals and indicators and therefore the cross-silo working that is the only way this can be delivered. Those of us who have been around for a long time can be forgiven our eye-rolling cynicism at whether this will ever happen. But two things potentially stand out here:

Firstly, Gove is a natural reformer, like or loathe him. He has track record in pushing through change - albeit more in the manner of slicing through the Gordian knot than through negotiation. Secondly, the tools at his disposal in 2022 are a long way from 1998. Data gathering and analysis, collaborative working tools, agile pilot projects - all of these are potentially transformational, if they are harnessed to the cause. But he'll need to find allies who share his drive and who are happy to empower people on the ground without the 20th century paperwork demands that currently means half your budget is wasted on project management.

It can be argued that the White Paper doesn't need more money behind it, because it's all about working smarter, not harder; making existing funding add up to more than the sum of the parts, not less. This isn't a terribly voter-friendly proposition as it's about systems and not products, and it certainly doesn't work to electoral cycles - either for central, local or mayoral elections. Timing is not on Gove's side - Labour set up the RDAs and the NDCs within a year of taking office, meaning they could show real results by the time an election came round - we are nearly 3 years into this cycle and he is only just beginning. The regeneration of King's Cross is cited as an exemplar of physical change but that took decades of work by a non-politically aligned body - the Kings Cross Partnership - to deliver on the ground. This is one reason why I think more mayors is potentially barking up the wrong tree.

To deliver change that will take decades, we need delivery bodies that are free to act without the risk that the rug will be pulled from under them by a change of administration. That's the real lesson of the 150 page analysis - but not one our politicians like to hear.

You can read more of my thoughts on the WP in my piece for the Architect's Journal.

Celebrating Lunar New Year

2022-01-30T17:59:00.001+00:00

We’ve been cooking more and more Chinese food over the last few years – partly because all members of the family love it, and partly because we have a growing number of great Asian shops in Colchester, due partly to the influx of far Eastern students to the University of Essex, as well as the growing ‘settled’ Asian community, so it’s easy to find ingredients and tempting to spend longer than intended browsing the shelves of unfamiliar packages, picking up odd things on spec. Some of these have been well-used and become store cupboard staples, while others have, admittedly, languished – if anyone has a good way to use dried lotus seeds, please let me know.

Growing up I never ate any Chinese food – my background is half Japanese, and to my mother Chinese food was something like the enemy as a result, while my father’s famously omnivorous appetite gets as far east as India before, puzzlingly, running out of enthusiasm. I can’t help thinking that the lack of good Chinese restaurants in the 80s and early 90s was a contributing factor. Gloopy orange sauces and ubiquitous greasy fried rice is hardly likely to inspire an exploration. But when I was introduced to good Chinese food in the early 2000s I became increasingly interested. When we moved out to Essex, we found there was a very good Chinese restaurant nearby and became regulars for dumplings, hotpots, whole steamed fish and char siu buns. When the kids were babies and we were feeling exhausted, we’d order a takeaway, and when they were able to sit at table we would go for dim sum lunches where they would be drawn in by the multitude of shapes and textures and try everything on offer.

But the quality – and the warm welcome - at that restaurant started to decline after a change in management, and they started to use plastic instead of tinfoil for their takeaways. The Asian supermarkets started to multiply, I bought my first Fuschia Dunlop book and started to think I could do better myself. This got turbocharged during Covid, when cooking our favourite restaurant foods became a way of getting some of the excitement of eating out to punctuate the endless weeks. We all became competent at stuffing and folding dumplings and I started to navigate more confidently around the flavour and texture profiles of the regional food cultures that Dunlop – for us as for so many others – introduced us to.

Last year we celebrated Chinese New Year just by ourselves because – of course – we had no other choice. But this year – with my #cookingtheyear project in mind, and with an increasingly long list of symbolic and traditional foods I wanted to cook – we definitely needed extra mouths at the table. So we invited over some friends and I went, well, a little mad.

We had:

The New Year’s essential boiled and steamed dumplings with four different stuffings –minced pork and prawn, shiitake mushroom and tofu, minced carrot, cabbage and celery, and a Xinjiang-esque pumpkin with cumin.
Cold buckwheat noodles dressed with chilli, garlic, spring onion, and sesame.
Tiger salad – for the year of the tiger – cucumber, green pepper and coriander leaves with a sharp-spicy dressing
Clay-bowl chicken – a cold dish of poached chicken with a sesame paste-based dressing topped with roasted peanuts, spring onions and sesame seeds
The traditional whole fish – a seabass, simply steamed, with sizzling oil poured over strands of chilli, spring onion and ginger on top
Tiger-skin pork – bowl-steamed for hours with black beans and salted mustard greens
A vegetarian ma po tofu – a dish I’ve been meaning to make for ages, and hadn’t got round to trying
Stir-fried oyster, shiitake and enoki mushrooms with garlic and spring onion
Blanched choi sum with sizzling sesame oil over spring onion, chilli and ginger strands
Rice…of course!

It was joyous, insanely good fun to cook, and fulfilled the test of having more on the table than the nine of us could possibly eat at one sitting. We ended up with fortune cookies, a friend brought a book of Taoist astrology from which we read out our horoscopes with much glee, and the kids tried to teach everyone mah jong, which was thus proved to be totally incompatible with lively conversation – and the conversation won out. I didn't take any nicely staged photos, which is exactly as it should be.

A great store of leftovers is never a bad thing and I actually made a further dish – fish fragrant aubergines – and decided on the night that would be just too many things, so kept it back. So our New Year’s feasting will keep going for a few more days, and I’m looking out for more auspicious calendar dates that can provide an excuse for exploring seasonal, symbolic Chinese foods from across that huge country.

Makar Sakranti, Pongal and the turning of the sun

2022-01-17T21:38:00.001+00:00

One of the most important festivals for the Indian subcontinent took place over the last four days. Makar Sakranti comes in a whole variety of regional names and variants, known as Pongal in Tamil Nadu, Uttarayan in Gujarat, and many variants besides. The importance of the day is that the sun moves into Capricorn, and starts to move northwards in the sky, so while Hindus have mapped their system of deities onto the date, making it a time to honour Surya, the sun god, I can't help thinking it must be a far more ancient moment marked in the calendar - the turn of the year. One of the most curious things about the tropical solar calendar - how the sun moves relative to the earth, measured from equinox to equinox - is that it gradually shifts out of sync with the (also solar) sidereal calendar measured by how the sun moves relative to the stars. So once upon a time, the turn of the year at the solstice and the turn of the sun northwards into Capricorn, coincided - in 272 AD. And in another 9000 years, Makar Sankranti will be in June. What is even more extraordinary is that Hindu astronomers may have worked out that these two calendars slowly slipped past each other some 3000 years ago. But I digress...

This is the time when the immense Kumbh Mela takes place every few years, with temporary cities for millions of people springing up at sacred sites. Locally a whole host of associated rituals come with this pivot point in the solar calendar, from bonfires and trick-or-treating for Bhogi / Lohri, to harvest celebrations in regions where this coincides with harvest time, kite-flying, river bathing and more. It's a four-day festival and lots goes on in the way of food and drink.

We celebrated with a northern Indian Sakranti dish for the first day of the festival - a fantastic Gujarati baked dish called Undhiyu - and a southern Indian ven pongal for the last day (today). I also tried my hand at making one of the sweets that was most ubiquitous in all the different accounts of this festival that I read - til ladoo, balls of sesame and peanut in caramel, for which I learnt you need to have developed some kind of incredible heat-proof skin as you have to roll the balls in your palms while the mix is still hot and malleable. The kids predictably loved the til ladoo, everyone liked the undhiyu a fair bit (and in particular the fantastic parathas that I roped the house bread-maker, T, into producing) and the pongal was pure comfort food.

I could have cooked for weeks with all the regional recipes I started to discover in association with this ancient astrological tipping point. The turn of the year - tropical, sidereal - in hot regions and freezing ones - has always been marked so clearly. A traveller in ancient times must have known that, no matter where they ended up, there would be celebrations to join in with as the sun turned about. And now we really are out of that festive season and starting to look for other reasons to celebrate.

Above: Undhiyu and parathas. Undhiyu would traditionally be made in a clay pot, buried, with coals placed on the lid so it would bake with indirect heat only.

Ven Pongal and aubergine gotsu. Pongal is basically another grain porridge and a sweet milk-cooked version is part of Tamil ritual around Pongal, their name for the solar festival. Was the dish named after the festival, or vice versa? Who knows.

Milk-rice

2022-01-16T19:23:00.003+00:00

Last week started with Bodhi Day on Monday - the day when Buddha (Gautama Siddhartha) reached enlightenment after meditating under the bodhi tree for 49 days. This came after many years of asceticism, including severely limiting how much he ate, so much that he was emaciated, and when he decided that the 'Middle Way' between extreme self-indulgence and self-mortification was the path to enlightenment. It is said that he ended his se⁹ven years of asceticism by accepting milk-rice from a farmer's wife, Sujarta, when he started meditating under the Bodhi tree, and in some versions that this gave him the strength to achieve enlightenment.

So it seemed clear we should be breaking our fast with milk-rice too. But what was, or is, milk-rice, and what is the history of this food? This took a bunch of reading up on, and as always I'd be glad to be put right. With a wide range of subcontinental variants on cooking rice in milk, broadly speaking it seemed that most interpret Sujarta's milk-rice as the more soupy rice-pudding kheer, from the mainland, but in Sri Lanka it is the more cake-like kiribath. Milk and rice both come with huge symbolism in the subcontinent, and the more I read, the more I learnt that both these milk-rice dishes come with national and religious overtones, ritual importance across all the region's religions, and more.

Kheer is believed to be an ancient dish as it is mentioned in Ayurvedic texts and is an importat Hindu temple food, or prasadam, coming in a huge range of regional variants, and kiribath is practically synonymous with Sri Lanka, also with a host of associations. Another, more elaborate Sri Lankan/Tamil version of milk-rice, pongal, actually gives its name to the festival which is the regional version of Makar Sakranti, of which more later. Both kheer and kiribath are, in their regions, the first food offered to babies at weaning, the first food eaten at New Year, and at many other important occasions. Of course this is both sensible and symbolic - being plain, nutritious and highly digestible as well as using staple ingredients. Kheer is often elevated with the addition of rose water or other flavourings, slivered nuts and dried fruits as well as coming in more savoury versions involving different dals.

I realised this is the same principle as the kutia that we made for Orthodox Christmas a couple of weeks ago - a basic grain soup, one of the oldest and easiest dishes to cook, with deep-rooted symbolic value to go with its nutritional importance. And of course milk-rice puddings are common from China through central Asia to Iran, Turkey and across to north Africa, through to the arroz con leche of Spain, and - of course - the English rice pudding. Each place uses flavourings that reflect local ingredients - Claudia Roden's Book of Middle Eastern Food has recipes for mastic-flavoured rice pudding from Greece, saffron-flavoured version from Iran, Egyptian Ashura made with wheat or barley, as well as a vermicelli-milk pudding which can also be found in Indian cookery, known there as sheer korma, according to my Madhur Jaffrey book. Next week we'll be making a pongal which is another

On Monday we broke our fast with the Sri Lankan kiribath, which I had made the night before and left to cool and set. It was soothing and delicious, at least for all the members of the family who like rice puddings. There is, unfortunately, one for whom rice puddings are near to the devil incarnate, and I'm going to blame school dinners for that. They valiantly tasted but even the cake-like, cooling kiribath was not going to find favour. I have begged for their patience, as we cook our way through many variants of milk-rice for festivals this year.

Cooking through the year's festivals

2022-01-09T20:59:00.003+00:00

My friends and family know that what I really love more than anything is food and cooking. The holiday period was a time to cook away at all sorts of meals for different occasions, plus I was given three cookbooks for Christmas. Two of these were Claudia Roden's classics - her Book of Middle Eastern Food and the Book of Jewish Food - which, as well as being full of wonderful recipes to try - are also cultural histories of those food traditions, interpreting centuries of change, trade, repression, poverty and wealth through spices, techniques, food combinations and food stories. I read these books a long time ago, when my parents got them, and I was so glad to have my own copies and to immerse myself again in Roden's wonderful scholarship, and her love for how food reflects and shapes culture.

Reading about the foods associated with important moments in the year - festivals, anniversaries, seasons - I made mental notes to try out some of these recipes at the appropriate moments. Coming out of a holiday period where food is so central and celebratory, I started to think about all the other food cultures and how they mark their important annual moments. Perhaps I could cook the foods associated with other traditions too, as a way to expand my repertoire of dishes as well as learning about those cultures of which my understanding is too superficial. I marked up a spare calendar with as many festival and feast days as I could google, and we've started to cook our way through them. Here's a bit about what we cooked this week. I am sure I got some things very wrong, so I'd love to hear what and how you cook for these festivals - and of course, for the many high and holy days coming up through the year.

1. Kutya - Orthodox Christmas

Kutya (or kutia) is a kind of grain porridge with dried fruits, poppyseed, honey and nuts, traditional to Ukraine and with variants common from Belarus in the north down to Greece and Sicily in the south. It is found in the Orthodox Christian traditions only - in Sicily, likely a leftover from the Byzantine occupation as it is found nowhere else in Italy. This is a food that may date back to Neolithic times - an ornamented version of what would have been the daily staple food of barley or wheat porridge. Apparently it is a food which you might ritually exchange with family and friends, and leave out as an offering to ancestors, as well as throwing it at the ceiling to see if it stuck, in which case you would have a good harvest - rituals which point to ancient, pre-Christian roots.

We had it for breakfast on the 7th although really it should have been the first course in a 12-course Christmas Eve meal. Lacking wheatberries, I used a mix of pearl barley and brown rice - as the dish also reminded me of both an English rice pudding (which itself is an interpretation of the sweetened rice dishes of the Middle East and Arab Spain) as well as Japanese rice porridges from my childhood. It was pretty good, although I could have had it with just nuts and honey and no raisins - doubling up on the sweetness felt a bit unnecessary.

2. Fattah - Coptic Christmas

The Coptic church has good claim to be more ancient than any other existing branch of Christianity and, like the Orthodox church, it celebrates Christmas on the 7th January. The Ethiopian Copts are one of the sects that lay claim to part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem - and they have the roof, which they have made into the perfect quiet, secluded monastery where I used to spend a lot of time when I was researching in the city back in my university days. In tribute to those lovely monks and their rooftop life, peering down through the lanterns of the domes into the church, I considered learning to make injera and to go all out with a full Ethopian meal - but life intervened, so instead I made an Egyptian fattah, which, again, is a basic, everyday food elevated on feast days, like Christmas, with meat and additional garnishes. One of our kids is vegetarian so I made it with aubergine and pumpkin instead.

Fattah uses leftover pitta or flatbread, toasted into crisps, as the base on top of which various toppings, almost always with a yoghurt sauce, are piled. It is found in variants and different pronunciations across North Africa and the Levant - the fattoush of Lebanon is another example - and is a classic frugal food from a culture where flatbreads would be made daily and there would always be leftovers not to be wasted. We piled ours with rice, a yoghurt and tahini sauce, the aubergine and pumpkin cooked with onions and spices, and a lightly spiced tomato sauce which soaks into the rice and bread, and topped with pomegranate seeds, pine nuts toasted in clarified butter, and chopped parsley. It was beautiful and delicious, and we finished the platter.

3. Pulihore rice, ugadi pachadi and holige - for Guru Gobind Singh's birthday

Guru Gobindh Singh is the tenth guru and a major figure in Sikhism who lived in the late 17th and early 18th century. Finding out about what foods might be associated with this important day sent me down a rabbit warren of research and I'm expecting someone to tell me I got it all wrong. It was relatively clear that the day is celebrated with rituals and visits to the Gurdwara but not altogether clear what food was involved. I went with the Times of India's suggestions of pulihore rice, ugadi pachadi and holige, each of which then needed a lot more research to understand how they were made.

Pulihore rice (or puligoyara rice or many other transliterated spellings) is rice dressed with a thick sauce based on tamarind pulp and jaggery, an unrefined form of sugar, along with various spices. There are about as many versions of this as you would expect from a country as large and varied as India, but the basics seemed to be that the rice should be cooked and cooled before it is dressed, and that peanuts are added in which bring texture as well as protein to the dish. It is known as a 'temple rice' which would be prepared and given out to the poor at temples on feast days, and also as a rice for taking on long journeys, because it can keep for many days without spoiling. This must have to do with the combination of the sour acid of tamarind along with sugar, which act as a preservative - the same principle as sushi rice which is also dressed with a sugar-acid combination and was a way to preserve cooked rice.

Like the Ukrainian kutya, this is staple food made special without adding many expensive ingredients. Apparently you can make large quantities of the sauce and keep it for dressing rice as and when you want to make the dish. The sauce was incredibly delicious, though I should have used slightly more sauce to slightly less rice when I dressed it, as it ended up a little under-seasoned when assembled. But altogether something I would definitely repeat.

Ugadi pachadi is a kind of food for which English doesn't have a word. It's a drink but also food, and highly symbolic in the ingredients, which are meant to symbolise the six emotions of life: sweet, from jaggery, representing joy or happiness; sour, from tamarind, representing unpleasantness or disgust; tangy unripe mango symbolising surprise; bitter neem flowers for sadness; spicy chilli or black pepper for anger; and salt for fear. It's traditional for New Year in some states, and the ingredients also have significance from an Ayurvedic health perspective. I was certainly cautious about whether this mix of flavours would be in any way delicious or merely something to gulp down dutifully, but it was refreshing, spicy, and moreish - a great foil to the rich rice dish. We served it into glasses like a drink but I think a small round bowl with a small deep spoon would be better.

Lastly the holige - a sweet stuffed flatbread of which there are also many variants, and also an elevated version of a staple food, made special through judicious use of cheap but aromatic ingredients and the extra effort. A soft, highly elastic dough is used to wrap a filling of sweetened, cardamom-spiced dal and coconut, and rolled out thin. Our eldest daughter proved to be the best at the making of these, managing no rips or tears in the outer layer of dough, although ours were definitely far from as thin as they should be and nowhere near the level of skill in this video. They were incredibly comforting and delicious, pretty easy if aesthetics is not the primary aim, and certainly something to make again - the filling would be a great way to use up leftover cooked chana or other dal.

Only a week and already so many new foods, new stories, reflections and learning. I might not keep this up for long but even a few dives into these different food cultures brings up a lot. I am much more familiar with European, Middle Eastern and Japanese traditions than any others, so I would love to know what feast days you celebrate and what foods you make for them. Please leave a comment!

Moving on - reflecting on 3.5 years in public practice

2022-01-07T21:52:00.000+00:00

Its quite surreal to leave a job over Teams. After 3.5 years, I left the Greater Cambridge Planning Service at Christmas, which was quite a wrench as well as the right thing to do. When I joined the service as part of the inaugural cohort of the brilliant Public Practice initiative I had no idea where that journey would take me, how long I'd feel driven to stay in the team, and the opportunities it would give me to contribute to the public good.

What have I learnt from this stint in the public sector?

A few moments stand out to me.

Passing through a new neighbourhood, which the developers call Great Kneighton but which everyone else calls Trumpington, at school-leaving time and finding the streets filled with kids of all ages freewheeling around on their bikes, not a moving car to be seen. This shouldn't feel unusual but, for a new-build district in this country, is unheard of. And later, at the Clay Farm Community Centre at the centre of the district, speaking to a number of people - many from immigrant backgrounds - who love it as a place to live and are so glad that they could find a place to live there. But who are already priced out from their next house move, as their kids need more space, and are wondering where they can afford.

At a youth club - hearing some young people express very practical ambitions, such as starting a business, alongside a hopelessness about the big picture future that was frightening.

At Barnwell, listening to residents speak of overcrowded homes and a total frustration with how the 'system' appears to bar them from any improvement. And how this quickly turned to talk of immigrants jumping the queue.

The amount of my inbox that deals with a few people raising the same issues over and over again, and how none of those people are any of the above. Because those people don't try to get a hotline to a senior planning officer, copying in elected members, Council chief execs, other campaigners and, for good measure, a few local MPs, to ensure their voice is heard.

I've loved the work I've done, and I'm proud of having done a fair bit to demystify the process of planning to many audiences, and to get a lot more people involved in the process. But what small changes I managed to make, are paltry compared to what needs to be done.

Public planning is fascinating, thrilling, frustrating and worrying in equal measure. But the perception of legitimacy in planning is draining away daily, and the impact of this - in practical terms - is making planning nearly impossible to carry out. This self-fulfilling spiral can only be stopped by radical change in the way that planners and the public work together. We can't be fighting this stuff out through judicial reviews and examination in public - it's a hideous waste of time and money, and sucks resource out of actually doing planning well. We need a big reset, and not one that privileges the well-resourced activists against those that don't even know what planning is.

Planners in local authorities are absolutely trying their best to do the right thing. Contrary to some vocal online voices, there are no brown envelopes from developers, and things are not sewn up before the public have any chance to have their say. Public planning - at both the development management end and the plan-making end - is people trying to balance up difficult trade-offs, make good decisions, avoid legal challenge and meet the standards that both their politicians and their public demand. But it's not hard to see how it could appear very different. How do fields of new homes seem to get waved through the system while your back extension is held up for months? Why are planners meeting developers in closed pre-application discussions? Why haven't the hundreds of people who objected to that site in the new Local Plan been listened to?

From the inside, it's easy and tempting to excuse the poor performance of many planning authorities by explaining the hideous lack of funding and systematic problems they face. But there's no point crying over spilt milk here. This is the world we operate in, and if we want to change it, we need to be far bolder far quicker.

Consultation is not a referendum. That can't be said often enough. Consultation is a chance for decision-makers to ensure they are aware of as many relevant facts and views as possible, before making a decision. It's research, fundamentally. But it doesn't mean that any of those views- regardless of how many people may voice them - have merit and deserve to change the course of that decision. That can - and does - happen, when those new facts or views clearly outweigh the previous assumptions or evidence.

Planning is a means to legitimise the disadvantage suffered by a minority in the interests of the majority. This is always worth remembering. So we need to quickly find ways of hearing from everyone and demonstrating that legitimacy loud and proud, however uncomfortable it may be for the minority.

Our system is highly flawed. Planners try their best to get something worthwhile for the majority - say, affordable housing - with one hand tied behind their backs. Because land value is king - and also a completely artificial construct - and because we have no means to regulate who buys or rents a home, and why - we are never going to end up with true affordability. Councils - who can make different judgements about land value and regulate who gets a home - don't own enough land to make a difference. (And even if councils could massively increase their building programmes, Right to Buy means that council-built housing ends up as a privatised investment asset before very long.)

Planning is just one branch of policy-making and politics. My insights would - I am pretty sure - be echoed by people working in benefits, tax, trading standards or farming. How we make good policy, that has legitimacy and agility, is a major 21st century challenge and we need bold shifts.

It's the right time to move on - I've done a lot, and learnt a great deal, but I want new challenges where I continue to learn and contribute. The GCSP team is - despite all the challenges - in great shape, and I'm hugely excited to see the ambitious climate-focused Local Plan work through the next stages. I'm already enjoying not juggling two jobs - it was surprising to me how many of my colleagues thought I was a full-time GCSP planner and didn't realise I was also running HAT Projects alongside. Like so many over the last two years, I've got near to burnout at times, even with all the privileges I carry, so a refresh feels good.

What next? Well, more time for HAT - we have lots of work to do - and for a few personal projects that need to come off the back-burner. I took over as Chair of the Creative Colchester Partnership last year and I need to give that a boost of time and energy to reshape it into the support network that the local creative and digital sector needs. In due course I want to carry on contributing to the public sector, but I want to find the right role and way to do that (open to suggestions!) There are some exciting projects I'm already starting to get involved with in the planning world, and I'm curious to see where they lead.

I'm always focused on where I can have the most impact for good, however fluffy that sounds. That's why I went into architecture initially, then into regeneration and then into planning. Let's see where that journey takes me next.

Richard Rogers: architecture in public service

2021-12-19T19:00:00.004+00:00

Last night I started to write a post with reflections on working in local government, on the occasion of moving on from my role at the Greater Cambridge planning service. This morning I checked my phone to find the news that Richard Rogers had died, prompting a host of other reflections on what public service means for an architect.

When I was looking for Part 1 jobs in the early 2000s, people were starting to talk about this unit that had been set up in the new Greater London Authority - run by Richard Rogers, no less. The Architecture + Urbanism Unit, or A+UU, was suddenly the place to be. The most talented of my graduating cohort, Emily Greeves, got a job there, and over after-work pints we would hear exciting stories of how they were radically changing the city from their messy studio in City Hall.

The A+UU made working for the public sector aspirational - something that hadn't occurred to me before. But apart from the A+UU itself (I wasn't brilliant like Emily, and I was so nervous the one time I interviewed for a job there that I completely flunked it) I couldn't see another place with the same ambition and power to actually change things, in either central or local government. It took over 15 years for me to finally try out public sector employment, through the inaugural cohort of Public Practice placements in 2018.

Public Practice itself is some part of trying to deliver what Rogers called for in his 2008 speech in the House of Lords “Trained architects should be placed at the heart of decision-making, at ministerial level in government and at cabinet level in local authorities. We must make sure that these design champions have the clout to make a real difference to decision-making.” PP has turned the tide – very slightly – in placing architects into government, but the clout is sorely lacking. The architects who are most technically senior in local and national government are nowhere near the calibre of Rogers, and the big names in contemporary architectural practice aren’t stepping up to the plate of political engagement.

It’s difficult to imagine what politician-architect pairing today could write a manifesto with the depth of Rogers’ 1992 collaboration with the MP Mark Fisher, A New London. We’ve gone from the ambition of Towards an Urban Renaissance to Building Better, Building Beautiful, with its reductive formulas and lack of social agenda. The weak mantras around ‘beauty’ suggest that the only thing wrong with our towns and cities is the styling of their facades. Rogers understood that it was the structure and functioning of a place – not the styling – that made it successful. He knew that architecture could only be part of the process of renewal – not the answer in itself – and that social, environmental and economic policies all needed to be part of the mix.

Rogers was passionate about the impact of places on the people that lived in them, and an eternal optimist that places could be transformed for the better. So are many architects and planners. But few with reputations to lose put themselves consistently in the front line, as Rogers did for so many years – and are willing to take all the flak that came with it, as he did. It was brave, public-spirited, and inspiring - and I, for one, am grateful.

Street Votes - what's the big idea?

2021-12-01T23:14:00.002+00:00

Everyone in the planning and architecture world has been trying to desperately get some insight into the approach that new Secretary of State, Michael Gove, might take to the vexed question of planning reform. There has been plenty of speculation and few actual pronouncements, but this week his comment that the idea of Street Votes - as proposed by the Policy Exchange, a thinktank - was a 'cracking idea', gave commentators something to grab hold of.

The concept of Street Votes is that residents of a street could band together to develop a 'street plan' which, if approved by a supermajority of votes in a mini referendum, would then permit whatever it contained to automatically gain planning permission. On the face of it, how democratic and what a great way to avoid planners having to determine lots of individual planning applications! And how fantastic for the property owners, who could all stand to profit by building extensions or even whole new homes by subdividing their dwellings or building in their gardens. But, ever the pedant, I've been mulling over what this might really mean in practice.

Let's say you were the owner of a house in a stereotypical street of 30 semi-detached houses somewhere in, I don't know, Surrey. (Street Votes wouldn't, if the Policy Exchange proposals are followed, apply to any homes built before 1918, and to make things simple, I'm using an example from the report itself, which says 'A street of suburban bungalows, for example, could agree on the right to create Georgian-style terraces.') 20% of our notional street, or a minimum of 10 households, would need to get together and develop the detailed designs required to constitute a plan for approval. This would involve surveys, architects fees, engineers, energy consultants and so forth - as well as, of course, the participation of homeowners themselves. The Policy Exchange report sets out a complicated set of geometrical principles which they feel would be appropriate, including setback, height restrictions, plot ratios, rules for corner plots and much else besides, for the full 'design specifications' which would confer automatic planning permission.

It would represent a fair amount of work to develop such a scheme on a technical level, and that before you get into whether all the neighbours agree on what a 'beautiful' design might look like. All of which would need to be paid for up-front with no guarantee of success at referendum. Compared to the ease of getting a plansmith to draw you up a back extension, this would be a significant investment for the households on our notional street - after all, it's basically developing a planning application for a multi-million pound development. The notion suggested in the report that architects might do this pro bono - forget it.

Then, building all that extra floorspace is also expensive. The worked example in the report requires, by their figures, a £2m investment per household in construction, in order to realise a net profit of £1.7m. There seems to be an implied expectation that developers may finance this up front in deal with homeowners to vote for their plans. And there's a reason developers aren't going round already offering to do this kind of deal with a streets-worth of homeowners - it's time-consuming, risky and complicated. I'm not convinced that cutting planners out of the equation is going to fundamentally alter that.

Imagining that neighbours will magically come together once the potential for increasing the value if their homes is dangled, is naive and could be hugely divisive. I was once involved with a project where at one stage some residents suggested a version of just this - that they all agreed to sell off part of their back gardens to be developed for mews-style homes. It didn't get far. Most homeowners didn't want to look out at a new home at the bottom of their garden, and felt the financial gain wasn't worth the pain. And that wasn't even a scheme at the scale of what the report proposes, where homes would be demolished and completely rebuilt to create more floorspace, and residents would have to move out during the process.

The successful precedent given in the report concerns mansard extensions which were added to a row of homes in wealthy Primrose Hill, of the kind (pre-1918, conservation area) which are in fact explicitly excluded from the Street Votes proposal. These were privileged owners who could pay for good architects, and for the building work, and didn't create any more homes to meet local need. I can see Street Votes being a great success for enclaves of wealthy suburban households who want to gain several extra bedrooms, a cinema room and a basement gym. But that's not going to solve the housing crisis.

The proposals suggest that 60% of votes would be needed to approve the code, and at leat 50% of households must have voted. Simple maths to show that only 30% of residents might need to be in favour in order for it to pass. Imagine being one of the residents who voted against a street design code, and then being surrounded by building sites like a 'nail house'. The proposal says that rights to light would be unchanged, but if a code stated that development could extend to a building line significantly in front of the existing frontages, or significantly behind existing backs, you could find a very tricky situation ensuing where retained homes had their views and daylight curtailed. It would be more sensible for the 'deal' to be that the whole street had to be redeveloped at once, or not at all, but again, there's a reason that kind of project - with the decanting of residents to temporary rental accommodation, like a private estate regeneration scheme - is a rarity.

Most people know that I'm fairly sceptical of neighbourhood planning, because it raises unrealistic expectations among residents about what can be achieved. With honourable exceptions, many neighbourhood plans, which take years to produce, are poorly drafted and practically meaningless as a result, because funding is limited so residents work with minimal professional advice or input. Groups are then understandably frustrated when proposals they oppose go through despite their neighbourhood plan, and end up blaming planners.

I'm all for a streamlined system, particularly for householder applications and simple typologies. There is far too much time wasted in planning departments assessing applications which are boring and repetitive, making the same mistakes again and again. And I definitely want to see suburban intensification- for climate, for social and economic sustaibility, and to meet housing need. Clearer rules and good pattern books - which, in effect, would be what a street code would be - would help no end. But asking residents to develop these themselves, with the added machinations of no win, no fee developers muscling in, could result in bad codes, warring neighbours, confusion and more delay in the process. Like neighbourhood plans, this proposal could result in very few codes actually being passed and a lot of wasted effort and disillusionment among residents.

An alternative approach would be for government to fund detailed, professionally produced pattern book designs for existing neighbourhoods, which could be consulted on through proper process, and result in fairness, certainty and speed for all - and yes, value uplift for homeowners too. But that wouldn't sound quite so much like power to the people, would it.

Weeknotes w/c 22nd Nov 2021

2021-11-28T21:50:00.000+00:00

On Wednesday I went, with a HAT colleague, to Essex County Council's High Streets Business Summit at the decidedly un-High Street venue if Hoyland House, as an opportunity to get back to in-person networking and hear some perspectives on where next for the High Street. Great to reconnect with some good people from across the area, and a few insights from the panel - pr should I say, disappointingly, the manel - they really could have done better on that, although it was great to have Holly Lewis from We Made That and other female speakers given short slots.

Among some fairly predictable perspectives, it was good to hear Ojay Macdonald unpick the role of tax structures in shaping our town centres. With a good historical perspective on how we ended up where we are on tax, and the major issues regarding taxing immobile rather than mobile capital - bricks and mortar via business rates rather than the fluid money of online trading - he cut through a lot of guff effectively. He touched on the issues around residential conversion through permitted development; the commercial rental debt mountain caused by Covid; colocation vs disaggregation of uses in town centres.

I asked a question about active travel and reducing car use vs the perennial plea from traders for cheaper and easier car parking in towns. A few years ago, I would have heard a lot of support from a panel like this about the need to drive into town and shop, and probably some articulation of the benefits to towns of making parking cheaper. It is a positive sign of the times that no panel member attempted to make this case. The global pressing need to wean us off cars, and the side benefits of improved public realm, were stated by all. The next challenge will be to persuade and support small traders along that journey, as they are not all yet on board. Active travel as a front in the political battleground may be becoming more vocal. I'm glad that, although not of my colour, the Conservative administration of Essex is currently very firm in its commitment to cycling and walking and I hope they keep this up.

This week ended with a fantastic performance of Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother Unplugged at DanceEast. More in a separate short blog.

Hofesh Shechter: Political Mother Unplugged

2021-11-28T21:30:00.000+00:00

Yesterday we went to see Hofesh Shechter's Political Mother Unplugged - a reworking of his work Political Mother from over 10 years ago, for nine young dancers from his apprentice company, at DanceEast in Ipswich. We are so grateful to have such incredible work available for us to experience, in the intimacy of a studio theatre, so close to home. Some apprentices - the dancers were outstanding, and the piece intense, emotional, at times painful.

I spend so much of my time working with words - writing, reading, editing, sharing stories and using words to analyse and persuade. As often, it took some time for me to turn off my word-brain and allow the non-verbal world of movement to sweep me under. The wonder of dance and music is, for me, the chance to do without words, without analysis, for an experience that can mean something completely different to each person on the audience. Once in that world, it is hard to decompress afterwards and try to put words to what has been experienced. I struggle with the post-show small talk, to say anything other than the obvious about the technique and the commitment of the dancers, some comments about the sound or the lighting.

The piece was intense, and halfway through I felt that it was going to be especially hard to re-enter the world of small talk. But it ended in a surprising sequence that surfaced the audience back to the present in a way that reminded me of how Shakespeare often ended plays. His epilogues - where a character breaks out of the frame of the play to address the audience directly - or the final scenes that sometimes feel almost banal in their tidying-up of unfinished business or their crowning of the next king with hackneyed ritual - serve a purpose in bringing the audience back to earth, and the plays where this doesn't occur - Hamlet, for example - are the more devastating for the lack. The ending of Political Mother used a simple device to remind the audience that we were, after all, only watching a performance and that the real world was still out there waiting for us, more troubling for being real and therefore never coming to a neat conclusion.

It was an emotional conclusion nonetheless, with performers in tears at the curtain call for other reasons. The show was in preparation in early 2020 and was cancelled at the last minute due to the pandemic and the sudden shutdown of all live performance. It was due to premiere at DanceEast, and now, was finally being performed there at the end of its post-pandemic run. Live art has suffered so much over the last two years, and brave, bold performers like these deserve all our support.

Local beats remote

2021-11-21T22:07:00.001+00:00

This week has seen a lot of work at HAT on the new public realm projects we are working on for Colchester Borough Council and Colchester BID. I can't emphasise enough how fantastic it is to work on projects that are literally on our doorstep. We are designing improvements for streets we walk through every single day.

Even so, looking at them through the lens of a project reveals things I had not known at all. Helena and Katarina, in our team, have done some amazing research into the history and the present day of these streets and spaces. Dredging up old photos from the library round the corner and paintings from the local museum archive, standing on street corners counting people, bikes and cars, taking photos of all the pavement types in the town centre has been totally illuminating. (My contribution was finding a couple of Nigel Henderson photos of our patch in the Tate's online archive - they must have been from when he was teaching at the Colchester School of Art. The image at the top is one.)

This kind of close observation and research is priceless. And being able to step outside and treat every casual trip to the shop as a part of that research is very fulfilling. It's a complete counter to the idea that work gets divorced from location post-Covid. I do love Google Maps like the next person, but it's not a substitute to being physically in space, watching how people move, feeling the pavement under your shoes, hearing the sounds. Taking that much time to just be on site isn't possible when site is hours away.

More and more I feel I just don't want to work on sites that aren't super-local. I love not having long trips to site, and knowing the personalities and the dynamics in the community with a real intimacy. At the same time Tom went on a site visit to a possible job that is quite far away this week. He did it by public transport, although driving would have been quicker, because that's how we do things now. When we've previously had work in similar places, we've driven. But now when an opportunity to pitch comes in, the first test is to see whether we can get there without a long drive.

We did a couple of small feasibility studies during Covid where we had to make do with very limited access to site but it was far from ideal, and the ideas suffered. Remote working is fantastic on lots of levels, but being on site is fundamental to architecture. The most difficult bit currently is persuading some other team members, and even planners and clients sometimes, to come out on site with us - I can't help feeling that some people have got just a bit too cosy having to never leave their screens. Here again I am very glad to be working on projects on our doorstep, with clients and collaborators who live and work in the town too. Local beats remote.

Weeknotes for, um, the last 2 weeks...

2021-11-12T21:19:00.001+00:00

Last week was certainly an eventful one as, at the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service, we launched our big Local Plan consultation on 1st Nov. This is the third major plan-making stage I've shepherded out into consultation at GCSP and slightly bittersweet as I'm moving on at the end of the year. But it also shows exactly why I'm moving on. The launch went really smoothly - and I know the team can now build on a solid foundation of engagement and communications practice that I've helped develop. We've got the interactive map which links through to the full digital plan, we've got three gorgeous videos on targeted social media placements which have already had over 20,000 views, we've got great illustrations to show that planning isn't just blobs on a map, and we've got over 30 events, online and in-person, from youth club sessions to community coffee mornings and webinars that are actually interactive, not just chalk-and-talk. Already we have hundreds of brilliant comments in feedback.

The first webinar was all about plan-making and how consultation influences the process, and it's well worth a watch. In it, we explore a lot of stuff about the different kinds of insight that consultation and engagement bring. Its really important to me that consultation is seen as research, rather than a referendum. It's user research, social research, evidence gathering. The day before the webinar I went to a youth club and heard a massive range of important observations about place and identity. I simply learnt things I could not have found out in any other way. Consultation is not about seeking approval for things, or making a protest. It's about improving, it's part of a process, it's about learning and teaching and reflecting. Or at least, it should be.

On a more specific level I also helped at a small consultation event we did at HAT for the next artist commission for the Indies project - creating beautiful wayfaring artworks along the independent shopping streets of Colchester. This time it was Ben Coode-Adams presenting a sort of Saxon-medieval village sign for the 21st century. I'm so excited to see his piece, and Nicola Burrell's at the other end of the route, come to fruition. Alongside these we are working on a number of public realm projects in Colchester and I'm so excited to see what the cumulative impact will be in a year or two. There are wonderful spaces just crying out for a little love and attention, and I hope we do them justice.

We did a great walkaround with the head of the Planning team and some colleagues and it was just so good to be in physical space looking at things together. I love the ability to work quietly at home sometimes, but I am just so glad to get back to in person meetings. You build dialogue and relationships in a completely different way. The old adage that the most important parts of the meeting are the bit before and the bit after the meeting, not the meeting itself, is so true. The ability to share a quick joke, to draw someone aside for a quiet word, to just be fully human together, makes the work so much smoother and easier. We had a one new project over lockdown where we ended up presenting week after week to endless 'camera off' names on a screen, from which disembodied comments would issue seemingly at random. Needless to say those relationships became really difficult and conversations which should have been fun became painful. A walk around the park together would probably have sorted it but they refused to leave their desks. After a couple of weeks where nearly every day has had some kind of in person meeting or event, I feel wholly more optimistic and energised.

I've recently, belatedly, got onto the podcast wagon because I finally caved into another overdue activity and started running. I hate running but the pods make it bearable, and I've even found some of my nighttime runs under a starry sky (the only time I can fit them in midweek) surprisingly not as awful as they might be recently. I've been really enjoying A is for Architecture (yes, I know I should have caught up on all the episodes before I recorded mine!) as well as my friend Ben Yeoh's pod and also Ruth Beale and Amy Fennick's True Currency podcast made last year as part of their Alternative School of Economics. Not enough space here to go into all the good stuff but have a listen.

I'm somewhat glad to say that the lack of weeknotes last weekend was not due to overwork and collapse but to having a houseful of good friends descend on Friday and spending the entire weekend cooking, walking and dressing up. I was recently given Claudia Roden's new cookbook, Med, and tried out some recipes on the assembled masses. A glorious Moroccan Moorish spiced chicken smothered in vermicelli, with cinnamon and flaked almonds alongside saffron and ginger in a rich fragrant sauce, was a revelation. It triggered an unexpected resonance with the staple chicken noodle dishes of Central Europe and the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition (something of course that Roden is the expert on), as well as the chicken noodle dishes of the far East, which also combine sweet and savoury. It made me think about the strange journeys of noodle dishes across the world and the absolute comfort food they represent everywhere.