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What Young Fogeys get wrong about housing Their New Jerusalem is hardly a paradise

An AI rendering of London's 'perfect house'. (Grand Designs Live)

An AI rendering of London's 'perfect house'. (Grand Designs Live)


July 4, 2024   8 mins

The Renaissance in Italy came from its cities, and not by accident. What we now call “agglomeration effects” were at work here. Within their curtain walls, all classes and factions were crammed together in lunatic proximity. Unable to grow out, these cities bristled upwards in their spires, turrets, and terraces, separated only by narrow streets.

Everything about these places lent itself to a faster pace of life. These were hothouse conditions for, among other things, treason, conspiracy, republican asabiyyah, artistic experiments, scientific experiments, murder, usurpation.

Yet to a certain kind of urbanist and architect in 2020s Britain, the salient feature of the cities of the Italian Renaissance is that they were walkable. Saying no to the tyranny of the vehicle, the citizens of these places opted instead for interwoven quilts of local and communal belonging. Milan under the iron rule of the insane torturer and patron of the arts Galaezzo Sforza was in fact a “15-minute city” of human-scaled vernacular buildings and pedestrianised Great British high streets. Shops, housing, employment, open spaces: all sat happily within walkable and cyclable distance.

But to the extent that these cities really were walkable, this was a product, not of choice, but of necessity. They were under constant siege and so had to be corseted by walls — living nose-to-nose was more a matter of civic defence than anything else. Not that they would even need to spread much further out: Florence in 1400, mistress of cities, was roughly the size of modern-day Weymouth.

And anyway, would a Renaissance prince really have turned their nose up at a car, if they had existed? Cesare Borgia would probably have allowed cars into buildings. And whatever the virtues of vibrant close-knit townscapes, most condottieri tried to escape them as soon as possible, raising a palace on Lake Como or a monolith fortress attached to the city walls.

That the city states of Italy might ever be identified with settled torpor is the result of a longstanding intellectual current in English life. This is young fogeyism — the conservatism of the literate middle classes which, for one reason or another, is estranged from those forces that made Britain a modern country: the Reformation, industrialisation, and parliamentary supremacy.

In many cases, this was more of a personal effect. Towards the end of the last century nothing was more common than a tweedy journalist who felt the dissolution of the monasteries like a wound, but baulked at, say, Norman Tebbit.

But this kind of showboating belied a number of sincere beliefs and assumptions that have since been incredibly influential. Chief among them is the idea that what traditional European society really meant was strong community bonds, particularly at a local and rural level. This means that anything that might disturb this idyll — like Bolshevism, fascism, urbanisation, Thatcherism, or the break with Rome — is simply part of a generalised “modernity” that can be dismissed in toto. For fogeys this is the omnicause that effaces all others. Confronted with a transcendent evil like this, many would retreat into the quietism of architecture and antiques.

Young fogeyism, this cast of mind, endures to this day. If anything, it has become more influential. For one, its modern adherents are all business. People like Auberon Waugh and Peregrine Worsthorne were sustained by journalism, but in the 2010s and 2020s tweed and flat caps are now more commonly found in think tanks, the Spad-ocracy, architectural practice, and strategic comms. Modern young fogeys are active and driven; unlike the earlier generation, who had no real use for books or ideas, except for those found in novels, today’s young fogeys have a worked-out theoretical justification for their beliefs — drawn from Roger Scruton, Edmund Burke, and the table talk of Charles III.

And here we find the same opposition to anything that might act as a solvent to Community. For the new young fogeys, this is the car. In the output of the think tank and urban design consultancy Create Streets, one of the main young fogey outfits, the car takes on an almost demonic aspect — shrieking down “dual carriageways” at breakneck speeds, leaving small children “sheltering timidly at home”. For the young fogeys of the 2020s, the car is nothing less than the Revolution on wheels: breaking up social bonds, reconfiguring the towns and cities in their image, destroying Britain’s stock of Georgian and Victorian buildings, and causing — that old chestnut — atomisation.

This is more than idle talk. Keir Starmer, like Michael Gove before him, has announced plans for the mass construction of Victorian mansion blocks and Georgian terraces as the solution to Britain’s housing shortage. And by a strange turn of the wheel, this new generation of fogeys has now been given something like a carte blanche over these plans: it is now the politicians that approach the fogeys, not the other way round. Labour Together and Onward, two think tanks of the main parties, both appeared at Create Streets’ “Restitched” urban design conference in March.

This was no small feat, and these people should be congratulated on their achievement. Through a mix of royal patronage, dogged activism and a small group of devoted practices, the young fogey’s vision of urban life has emerged from the long years of obscurity and ridicule to win a final victory in the “style wars” of British architecture, which began with John Betjeman’s rescue of St Pancras station in 1967. Georgian, Edwardian, Victorian, and other vernacular styles now outpoll all others among the public.

To an extent, theirs was a victory by default. Other solutions to the problem of housing, like help-to-buy, or Gordon Brown’s eco-towns, had all run to nothing or made things worse; and proposed reforms to the planning permissions system collapsed at the Chesham and Amersham by-election of 2021. Young fogeyism in architecture was the only organised force left standing, and so now Britain’s new housing will be built on the pattern of Charles III’s Poundbury: as walkable garden suburbs of pedestrianised lanes, piazzas, trams, and gently dense traditional buildings.

The ambitions of groups like Create Streets are grand. They hope to recreate the beloved urban villages of London, only on a wider scale, and in so doing “restitch” a frayed social fabric. This is not to be discounted. These people have thought seriously and conscientiously about the problems at hand and have offered a number of valuable solutions.

But this project will, at the end of the day, be carried out according to the worst prejudices of the young fogeys: the awe for community in the abstract; the anti-modernism; the historical claptraps about traditional life. These will ensure that, in practice, little of Marylebone, Hampstead, or Dulwich will be recreated at all. They will, more than anything else, make these young fogeys the willing catspaws of some of the most retrograde forces in English society.

“They will, more than anything else, make these young fogeys the willing catspaws of some of the most retrograde forces in English society.”

There are three reasons for this. The first: that the young fogeys often evince little sympathy for the people who will live in these new districts. They are, in the main, small traders, and professionals — often with families — who have been priced out of urban centres. For these people, the car is simply a fact of life. Small traders need to move goods and equipment, and white-collar workers have to commute to the centre of town. Things like commuter rail are often thin on the ground and unlikely to expand anytime soon, and, in any case, are of little use to an electrician who needs to transport their kit.

This is the material reality for millions of people, but all too often the young fogeys can only answer this with scorn. Cars are agents of vulgar modernity, you see: they require infrastructure that is manifestly not “human-scaled”, and the constant movement that they enable is an affront to ideas of local community and belonging. Other than this, these would-be planners can now simply fob people off with the climate (Did you know that “Conservation” is actually the most important type of “Conservatism”?).

All this has made young fogeys into some of the premier apologists — Create Streets is an honourable exception in this regard — for genuinely obnoxious measures like low traffic neighbourhoods (LTNs) and Ulez, things which really do make life harder and more expensive for the middle and working classes. One such scheme piloted by Lambeth Council caused local bus journeys of less than three miles to take over two hours.

And so, under the fogeys’ direction, Britain’s new garden districts will likely use all kinds of baroque devices to inconvenience cars and those who drive them as much as possible. Sensing trouble, a recent report from Create Streets titled Move Free urged their more fire-eating colleagues in local government and urban design not to “wage a war against motorists”. It has even argued that “15-minute cities” need not necessarily mean restrictions on transport. But having conceded the principle that a person’s right to go where they please is less important than communal and climate solidarity, it’s difficult to see how these things could ever be separable in practice.

What’s more, it’s nonsense to suppose that things like walking, cycling, and public transport are somehow more in communion with traditional patterns of life. For the original owners of the Georgian terraces that are now to be aped, the main way of getting around was the carriage or the horse: in other words, an individualist if not aristocratic form of transport in which free movement was taken for granted. Most townhouses from this era came equipped with an outside scraper to wipe off muddy riding boots. Which, then, is more in keeping with the society that produced these buildings in the first place: the car or the bollarded sham piazza?

Second is the determination to turn every urban environment into a sort of market square. One shibboleth of urban planning is that demand rises to meet supply, and so constructing new road capacity for cars is self-defeating. This is not an insight that is ever applied to pedestrians. By assigning large stretches of these new neighbourhoods exclusively to walkers, the young fogeys will simply encourage more foot congestion, which can be just as bad as traffic.

Walkability for its own sake is the fastest way to kill a real place and turn it into an extended playground for who knows what. By turning the surrounding area into a permanent mandatory funzone it has ruined the Southbank Centre, just as it will surely ruin Soho if the demands to de-car it are ever met. Pedestrianisation is well underway in the City of London, and if left unchecked it will transform what is a stately place of business into the same theme-park melange.

Again, this has nothing to do with old-school ways of living, and it will do nothing to recreate, say, the gentle society of garden squares in places like Marylebone and Chelsea. These societies, these places, all recognised the need for exclusive areas of quiet and seclusion from the wider world — in other words, the willingness to tell people to get lost. Too often, “human-scaled” development turns out simply to mean teeming humanity everywhere, at all hours, and from which there is no privacy: once again, young fogeyism as applied here succeeds only in recreating what could often be so dreadful about traditional societies.

Third and last is the devotion to Community with a capital C. What this leaves out is what was perhaps the most important feature of traditional urban life: exclusivity and discrimination. Residents of 15th-century Florence or Edwardian London enjoyed a freedom of association and disassociation that would be unthinkable to us today. Community with your fellow creatures was almost entirely voluntary, and it was one of the main reasons why civilised living in these compact conditions was possible.

This is not what’s on offer here. Local community is not a good thing in and of itself, and it will do little to repair any social fabric in these new garden suburbs. In many cases it will do the opposite. These new developments will include requirements for affordable and council housing, the latter of which, we are reminded, does not distinguish between citizens and non-citizens. People will resist housebuilding if they come to see it as a proxy for immigration, and they will in fact resent being “restitched” to the things that they moved out to the burbs to disassociate from. In this context, gentle density and the emphasis on community spaces would sharpen these problems in a way that divided and car-centric Metroland would not.

Young fogeyism shows little appreciation for these questions, seeing in this blatant social engineering only the best philanthropic traditions of the Church of England. If a lack of community is bad, then artificial and forced community is worse. What really did it for the civilisation of the mansion blocks and the Georgian terraces was not cars, but the “New Jerusalem” — that everyone was to now live together in a shared community in which all distinctions were effaced.

In the face of these Ruritanias, who is truly advancing the cause of urban living in Britain today? That honour belongs to one group and one group only: the assorted part-time yoga instructors, small tradesmen, and consultant astrologists who combine to overthrow LTNs, or else burn, melt, and pull down Ulez cameras. These people’s cause is the cause of modernity: that Britain’s cities really should be integrated economic zones free of fines, customs barriers or restrictions on free travel. They, and the small traders and suburban transplants that they act for, will see in the proposals of the young fogeys only another attempt to constrain and reduce them.

Many will also notice a strange combination: traditional aesthetics, paired with all the stuff of Clarksonian nightmare. In people like Charles III, and indeed even in Keir Starmer, the two are already well combined. Future generations may wonder why we ever made the distinction.


Travis Aaroe is a freelance writer


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Christopher Chantrill
Christopher Chantrill
3 months ago

Back in the day it was the Duke of Wellington. He opposed railways because they would “encourage the poor to move about.” Thank goodness the Iron Duke never lived to learn about cars, dear old soul.
If you fly into a US city you will usually see recently-built suburban developments. You can tell they are recent because their owners haven’t had time to cover the ground with trees and bushes.
But if you fly into Heathrow of a morning, and circle for a while waiting to land, you notice that Britland is all rural. And the cities are covered in trees.
Yet tippy-top people wonder about the rise of far-white populism.

William Amos
William Amos
3 months ago

I have never seen the source for that quote and as it is also phrased in a rather modern register.
The Duke of Wellington has been found largely correct about a great deal of modernity. Not least the organised swindle that is mass democracy.

Peter B
Peter B
3 months ago

Thanks for a new phrase – “far white” is new on me, but seems to fit the bill much better than “far right” is most usages of the latter term !

Mustard Clementine
Mustard Clementine
3 months ago

I can’t, for the life of me, understand what people have against walkability. Set aside whatever anti-whatever stance you might have and tell me – at its core, what’s the real problem with a vibrant, walkable neighborhood? Maybe you just don’t like people (“teeming humanity everywhere, at all hours, and from which there is no privacy”), but that’s a deeper problem than any urban planning could ever solve.
While cars are part of modern life, designing neighbourhoods where walking is a viable and pleasant option offers a balanced approach to living. We shouldn’t reflexively be against something just because it’s been distorted by others. Walkable neighborhoods shouldn’t be about limiting freedom; they should be about expanding it – offering more choices in how people move and interact within their communities.
I’ve been stuck in the car utopia this person may think they want in North America, and believe me, no one’s life is better for it. I too think urbanists, housing experts, or urban planners can sometimes get a little too dogmatic about promoting high-density developments as the ultimate urban dream. But let’s not go crazy in the other direction either.

Geoff W
Geoff W
3 months ago

If I’ve understood Mr Churchill correctly, you’re one of those unpatriotic snobs who approve of trees.

Edward Hamer
Edward Hamer
3 months ago

Agreed – pointing out the possible flaws in these plans is sensible, but it would be self-defeating to go too far with it. Planning town centers around cars really is unpleasant and does make life harder for e.g. people with small children.

David Morley
David Morley
3 months ago
Reply to  Edward Hamer

If truth be told, it even makes it harder for car drivers! Cars are great, until every one has one and needs to get to work. Then the whole thing breaks down.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
3 months ago

Walkable neighbourhoods are great, but you have to remember some of the most economically productive and vital people in society have to get to work. The laptop classes might get a warm and fuzzy about wandering along boulevards, drinking coffee and buying vegetables at a farmer’s market. Yet, down here in reality, plumbers need vans. Nurses need cars to get to big hospitals. So do the people who run logistics at Tesco, you know, the place were many of us buy food?
The Young Fogeys described in this article seem to be designing ideal communities for an imagined world, not the real one.

Lindsay S
Lindsay S
3 months ago
Reply to  Ben Jones

Reminds me of lockdown when people bemoaned anyone leaving their homes and it needed to be pointed out just how many “key workers” were necessary for people not to starve to death in their homes.
I’ll happily walk to my local shops but when it comes to work, I can either drive for five minutes, walk for an hour or spend an hour on public transport. It’s a no brainer! I’m not spending an hour walking prior to starting a twelve hour shift and public transport is frequently unreliable!

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
3 months ago

I pretty much walk everywhere that I can, but I’m not blind to the desolate windswept pedestrianisations created by councils to “reinvigorate” the centres of towns and cities already devastated by retail flight, pub and restaurant closures and high commercial rates. Just banning cars doesn’t create a paradise. E.g. compare the dowdy pedestrianised east end of Glasgow’s Sauchiehall street with its vibrant west end which allows vehicle traffic. (sorry for using the “v” word).
Or look at Aberdeen’s Union Street, if you can bear it.

David Morley
David Morley
3 months ago

I’m guessing the author just really likes his car. I thought the article was a bit silly to be honest.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 months ago

Nothing is wrong with walkable neighborhoods, so long as people CHOOSE to live that way. In some large European cities, it’s a necessity since the constraints of space require multi-use areas and buildings that blend shops with residential.
North America has no such constraints; cities are built out instead of up, and the car is a necessity for getting about. Plus, people don’t necessarily want to live packed in among others; they like having yards and space to move about, to let their kids play and their dogs run around. This doesn’t make one way better than another; it just makes them different by virtue of their settings.

Milton Gibbon
Milton Gibbon
3 months ago

Asabiyyah = social solidarity. Why use two words everybody understands when you can use one that nobody does.

Brendan O'Leary
Brendan O'Leary
3 months ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

I had to look it up.
I got this from Oxford reference:

Social solidarity with an emphasis on group consciousness, cohesiveness, and unity. Familiar in the pre-Islamic era, the term became popularized in Ibn Khaldun’s (d. 1406) Muqaddimah. Asabiyyah is neither necessarily nomadic nor based on blood relations. In the modern period, the term is analogous to solidarity.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
3 months ago
Reply to  Milton Gibbon

Personally I enjoy learning new words. I Googled it and learnt something, so more power to the writer’s elbow.

William Amos
William Amos
3 months ago

I fear that this is a quietly sweaty polemic endeavouring to pass as as a sober counterpoint.

Ben Jones
Ben Jones
3 months ago

An interesting, witty and enjoyable article. Thanks, Travis.

George Venning
George Venning
3 months ago

The Fogey-ish/Poundburyish/Create Streets position is reactionary and what you think of it will depend upon what you think it is a reaction to.
If you think that it is a reaction to high modernism, and the thrilling onrush of the future, then clearly you are going to consider it retrograde. Create Streets is not going to deliver the thrills of Corbusier at his best, or even, perhaps of the homegrown crop: Lasdun, Spence, Roddy Gordon and the Smithsons.
But, as the absence of any modern names in that pack implies, that isn’t the reality of development in the UK. The reality for most people in most places is dismal, identikit developer-led places full of near identical homes on a cack-handed facsimilie of a “traditional,” “vernacular” street. Such developments are placed at the edge of settlements and don’t provide much in the way of attractions in and of themselves, so people climb into their cars every time they need to do anything.
Go to a development by your local PLC house builder and ask yourself, would I rather live here or in Poundbury? Chacun a son gout of course but, over in Dorchester, Poundbury commands a hefty premium over other modern developments – because people like it.
Properly considered, the fogeys aren’t about putting a ceiling on people’s architectural ambitions but about raising the floor. If a fabulous practice were to propose a series of hyper-modern developments linked by a high speed cable car and studded with hitherto unthought of amenities, I don’t know that Create Streets would even oppose it. What they would, and do oppose is monotonous developments that are just about good enough to scrape through the planning system and that only because most people don’t know what a better altenative would be – because there is such a paucity of really good developments in this country to point at and say “like that please”.
Also, what on earth is he talking about when he says that “walkability” has ruined the South Bank. The whole point of the complex is and always has been its pedestrian terraces but you can still park (very reasonably) at the NT and the reason you can do so is that not many choose to drive. What is the golden era of the South Bank to which he is harking back? The 80s perhaps? When it was surrounded by rough sleepers and so neglected that the skaters were able to comandeer chunks of the nation’s premier arts complex (an invasion now set in heritage aspic).

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 months ago

The AI image of the perfect London house is a dog’s dinner, replete with architectural solecisms. Is that a giant order at the sides or a superimposed order? Why does the heavy balcony cut across it? The proportions and detailing throughout are crude. Poundbury’s much better.
The author has one or two good points but negates his argument by his sweeping disregard of civilised urban planning. What’s wrong with terraces, squares and mansion blocks? Who really thinks the new Singapore-on-Thames between Vauxhall Bridge and Chelsea Bridge offers a better alternative?

William Amos
William Amos
3 months ago
Reply to  Andrew D

It looks rather like a developer has closed the local Pub and converted it into luxury residence.
Which is about right for most of the desirable districts of London these days.

Saul D
Saul D
3 months ago

European cities are building to very similar architectural plans, from Warsaw to Montpelier. You build flats of 5-8 storeys above shops and commercial establishments at ground level, with walkable streets, plazas and parks, and then you put the cars underground – either just the parking, or the whole roads (cf Barcelona). Build to a high standard with terraces, large windows and space and shared heating/cooling. Make any roads wide enough that the small number vehicles that use them can co-exist with trams, buses and bikes in addition to pedestrians, and line with trees to improve shade.
Which is all great for young people, but at some point you get children, and then you want a private, non-shared, protected outdoor space – usually known as a garden or yard. Which then gets families moving out to the suburbs where they look for traditional places with separated spaces, and absolutely need the car to taxi the sprogs from place to place, and do family shopping. City blocks become less enticing when you need to have a safe way to get a 13-year old daughter back from music practice on a wet, dark winter evening. Or where you’re carrying the groceries for a family of four.
Of course plenty of families grow up in cities. But as lifestage changes, so do aspirations and desires. Architecture creates different demographics, because different demographics seek out different architectures. It’s not one or the other. It’s both.

Richard C
Richard C
3 months ago

Overly long, overly wordy, lacking a focus and lacking a point.

William Cameron
William Cameron
3 months ago

Its demand and supply innit ? Yes. So why do politicians only talk about supply ?
Demand (in economic terms) isnt wanting something. It’s wanting it and being able to pay for it.
Houses are bought with borrowed money. The cheaper the money the higher the house prices. The more available the money the higher the house prices.
So you can build another million houses – and their price will not fall because banks will just lend more money on them. If you want cheaper houses reduce the availability of lending- either by interest rates or by controlling the amounts lent. Either or both will reduce house prices- without laying an inch of concrete more.

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
3 months ago

I think young Travis is a budding Douglas Murray. Nicely done! I look forward to reading more from this writer.

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 months ago

Not sure about that. Murray is a disciple of Roger Scruton, hero of the young fogeys that the writer deplores

David Morley
David Morley
3 months ago

Most townhouses from this era came equipped with an outside scraper to wipe off muddy riding boots

Apart from the horses causing massive pollution, horse riding and cycling are pretty similar. Individual in nature and pretty good for urban distances.

David Morley
David Morley
3 months ago

Didn’t find the piece very convincing in its stitched together criticisms. But interesting that this much is going on. I’m not quite so sold on the nostalgia, but a sense of vision has been sadly lacking in Britain as we all sat back and waited for neoliberalism to deliver paradise automatically.

UnHerd Reader
UnHerd Reader
3 months ago

The thing about all of these “walkable” communities is that they tend to be totally inaccessible to the disabled and the elderly. As a working professional with an acquired disability, I need to be productive, to get things done efficiently, etc. Drive-through banking, curbside pick-up at restaurants, etc. are essential to do this. Some stats say that at least 20% of us will wind up with some kind of mobility disability in our lifetime, and quite frankly, public transit and “walkability” really aren’t very good at accommodating this.

Anna Clare Bryson
Anna Clare Bryson
3 months ago

Travis looks much too young to remember the original “Young Fogeys” of the late Seventies and Eighties – So this is probably why he believes that they were somehow against Thatcher and Thatcherism…Several original YFs were very pro-Thatcher (Charles Moore, Scruton…), like the rather younger J. Rees-Mogg… The fact is that as a sort of intellectual “subculture” they were trying to epater the liberal-left progressive middle-class who all hated Thatcher with a passion rather than trying to identify with Wet small c conservatism as in Prince Charles..
So it’s a bit lazy just to elide this particular breed of conservatism with nostalgic communitarianism and NIMBYism in general – which is actually particularly rife in some parts of the left (Greens? and Green-leaning left/libs).
Still, I like the Renaissance Italy comparison…but it reminds me that when the Italian Renaissance cities were going through their amazing culturally flashy period they mostly (Florence certainly) couldn’t have survived economically without grain supplies from France and England, those relatively boring places…which were of course also developing their urban cultures… and this “freedom of association” thing…hmm…yes, associations were an essential and distinctive part of town life, but…e.g. disassociate yourself from (or never get into) the guild in your work area, in a medieval or early modern town- in Italy or England – and you would have been in all kinds of trouble. And there were masses of rules and regulations (not always enforced, to be sure) on consumption, behaviour etc…

Andrew D
Andrew D
3 months ago

As an erstwhile young fogey (smoked a pipe in my university days c.1980) I would agree that the writer hasn’t really understood his target.

Alex Lekas
Alex Lekas
3 months ago

The 15-minute city of old was built of practical necessity. There was no mass transit or personal vehicle to make transportation a non-issue. Today’s version is being forced on people at the point of a virtual gun to erase personal mobility from the list of freedoms we have too long taken for granted.
I’ve lived in Europe and quite like the city life of walking about in relative safety on streets lined with cafes, boutiques, and places of work on the bottom floors with residential spaces above. And I live in the US with its open spaces and cars as a necessity. No value judgment is necessary. America is so large a land mass that cities can be outward built. Europe, by comparison, has to build upward.

Rob C
Rob C
3 months ago
Reply to  Alex Lekas

Not to mention, walking around “in relative safety”. You can’t do that in the U.S. because of certain demographics. For the same reason you can’t use mass transit, safely.

Andrew R
Andrew R
3 months ago

The idea of 15 minutes cities is laughable. Planners have spent the last 30 years creating a 24/7 part time service economy. During that period we have imported over 7 million people and in order to accommodate such numbers there has to be high density building within cities. Over time as demographics change these areas will become ghettos, the rich will have the prime areas within the city or will move outward to gated communities.

House building has been on the fringes of towns and cities with limited outdoor space, reduced parking and are poorly serviced by public transport. More importantly they lack the necessary facilities such as surgeries and schools. Within the town itself local businesses suffer due to the lack of footfall because of policies that restrict public vehicular access.

Planners have a hard enough time future proofing their urban areas but a dose of reality is needed not utopianism.

Vici C
Vici C
3 months ago

So, basically, a village. But a real village is organic, a baton is handed down through the ages. A brand new village filled with brand new people has no soul, no history, no shared anything, no roots, no identity. On the con side, living full time in a village is pretty insular and could lead to narrow mindedness and bigotry. But at least the name of the football team is authentic.

Judith Shapland
Judith Shapland
3 months ago

That’s the best dissection of modern idiot-thought that I’ve read for a long time

Prashant Kotak
Prashant Kotak
3 months ago

This writer gets better and better with every piece.