Sir
Patrick Geddes Commemorative Lecture
held annually by the
Royal Town Planning Institute in
Patrick Geddes is widely regarded as
the founder of modern town planning. His interest in the natural sciences led
him to a professorship at
The first lecture was held in 2004 to
coincide with the 150th anniversary of Geddes'
birth.
The fifth and latest lecture was presented by Harry Burns, Chief
Medical Officer for Scotland 4 June 2008 : The Biological Consequences of Living in
Adverse Circumstances. A full house gathered to hear him at the Royal Society of
Edinburgh. He was introduced by Stewart Stevenson, Minister for Transport,
Infrastructure and Climate Change. It was a chance to reconnect today’s work in
planning with its vital roots in public welfare. And it recalled Geddes’
own lectures at the same Society more than 120 years earlier. The text of Dr Burns lecture has not been
made available to the organisers, though it has been eagerly awaited by those
who missed it and by those who wanted to reflect further on what they’d
heard. Something is being put together
for the record and will be posted here when it appears. In the lecture, Dr Burns drew largely from
his most
recent Annual Report to Scottish Ministers.
Glasgow Centre for Population
Health is a key focal point, and the work by Harry Burns, Carol Tannahill and Russell Jones reads across to the vital
connection between public health and urban design made in US Director of Public
Health Howard Frumkin’s influential lecture to GCPH in 2006.
All four previous Geddes lecture texts are posted below, latest first They are
viewable in pdf form at the RTPI website here
2007 Richard Wakeford: Wanted: Visionary planners to apply levers
for a sustainable world
2006 Greg Lloyd:
Planning and the public interest in the modern world
2005 Raymond Young: Cities in Devolution
2004 Jonathon Porritt: Sustainable Development Past and Present
Wanted:
Visionary planners to apply levers for a sustainable world
The
Sir Patrick Geddes Memorial Lecture 2007
Edinburgh Edinburgh 6 June 2007 .
Richard Wakeford
Director
General, Environment, Scottish Executive
Introduction and outline [accompanied by Smetana’s Moldova
Design with nature
In my new role as Director General,
Environment in the Scottish Executive my job is to ensure delivery of one of
the new Government’s five strategic objectives – the objective known as “greener”
– to improve
I defer to the experts about the full
significance of Geddes. Real specialists will recognise the link between Smetana’s
- the need
to design with nature; and
- the
concept of ecology.
Designing WITH nature emphasises that the human race has a special place with
respect to the natural world. It’s a compelling theme. So
why, after a whole century, has the design with nature thing not taken off?
And can thinking based in ecological
systems help us with the challenge of climate change? The human race can’t
detach ourselves from the huge natural system that is
our planet. So, if the world is just a big system, can systems analysis
techniques help us?
Those techniques can help us focus
on breakthrough solutions where efforts can be especially effective in
achieving change. In addressing climate change, a systems analysis approach
points to a different role for planners in local, national and international
partnerships. It suggests that there are limits to what can be achieved through
government guidance and through bending the market using taxation or public
spending. Changing people’s mindsets is the most powerful dimension of change.
So, just any old plan won’t do. The
goal must be plans that are owned by the whole community; plans that have the
power to inspire; plans that unite people to deliver the vision. The planning
profession needs to lift its eyes and aim to engage the mainstream. It needs to
communicate and compel from a sense of vision. After all, isn’t that what comes
more naturally to planners than to the rest of us?
Personal
background
While not a planner by profession, I
am passionate for the cause of proper development planning and sustainable use
of our natural resources. That is invaluable in my latest role in Scottish
environment and rural affairs. It was central to the work of the Countryside
Agency in
That was a year of so many inspiring
people. Professor Chester Rapkin, for example, taught
regional planning in the
Design
with Nature – McHarg
Design with nature felt right to
Lewis Mumford, as it had to Geddes,
and to Ebenezer Howard who inspired the garden cities movement. It was the
title of a book written by another great Scottish planner – Ian McHarg. It is a product of the late 1960s – the period of
Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”. It was a time when mankind increasingly came
to be aware of our impact on the world. It was a time when many governments
came to create Departments of the Environment.
Ian McHarg
had been brought up on the edge of
“I
spent my childhood and adolescence squarely between two diametricallydifferent
environments, the poles of man and nature…
“There
were two clear paths from my home, the one penetrating further and further to
the city and ending in Glasgow, the other moving deeper into the countryside to
the final wilderness of the Western Highlands and Islands. The road to
The
other path was always exhilarating and joy could be found in quite small
events, the certainty of a still trout seen in the shadow of a bridge, the
salmon leaping or the stag glimpsed fleetingly, the lambing, climbing through
the clouds to the sunlight above, a cap full of wild strawberries or blaeberries, men back from the Spanish Civil War at the
firepot of a lift from an American tourist in a Packard convertible.” Ian McHarg, 1968
The book itself provides early
examples of strategic environmental assessment. A case study of highway
construction in
The traditional pattern of American
development would see urban sprawl over the countryside as each neighbour in turn sold up. Each sale would lead to a self
contained development, with little regard to what had gone before – a gas
station here, a car showroom, a shopping mall, suburban tract housing. Before
long, the original landscape character would be a distant memory lost under
concrete.
McHarg investigated
an alternative approach in which development would be concentrated along
existing highway routes – not as ribbon development but as planned communities.
Leaving the valleys as greenspace would provide
capacity for greater storm water run-off. It would allow more attractive
places, with views, and access to greenspace – for
recreation that helps physical and mental health. In short, good planning with
nature would provide a better way for the community at large to obtain the
benefits of development while protecting natural resources.
How could the community persuade the
individual landowners not to sell up each small farm to the highest bidder?
Only by finding some way of pooling the profits of development – to benefit
those whose land was zoned for open space, as well as those owning areas that
could take denser development.
Economic analysis showed that
planned development would be worth significantly more than uncontrolled sprawl.
Here was hard financial proof, in a nation that can be pretty sceptical about it, of the value of planning to the
community. All that was needed was a method of sharing the benefits fairly!
Design
with nature – a recurrent unfulfilled paradigm
In
After more than half a century of
town and country planning, are we designing with nature now? After McHarg, in the US Anne Whiston Spirn took up the baton in a seminal book “The
Nature in the
Today in the
That means renewed attention to
urban parks, from entire “green necklace” systems within metro areas to the
emerald-green sanctuary of small vest pocket parks. Community gardens, green
roofs, street trees and planted median strips all count. So-called green geurrillas alight on vacant lots and turn them green
overnight.
US columnist Neil Pearce also
reports on the “green blue” strategies -– handling urban water in more sensitive,
planet-protecting ways, by “daylighting” streams once
enclosed in concrete pipes and by filtering stormwater
more slowly through landscaping features that avoid big engineering solutions
in favour of nature’s more modest but ecologically
sound ways.
There is also attention to health:
for example, tackling asthma-inducing air pollution, and attacking the obesity
epidemic impacting American society. Public health researcher Anne Lusk calls
for linear urban parks to encourage not just walking and biking but such
energetic activities as running, skating and rock climbing (giving adults a
chance to socialize and witness youth’s athletic prowess). She also suggests
“health enterprise zones” to encourage gyms, stores offering fresh groceries
and other health-oriented businesses in rundown areas.
Design
with Nature – the Scottish approach
Scottish Executive support to the greenspace movement also helps the concept of design with
nature. There is lots of good practice which Greenspace
Scotland helps to spread. But design with nature should be second nature for us
– for a whole range of reasons. And it isn’t yet.
At a presentation last month Harry
Burns, our Chief Medical Officer, spoke about the environment and health. A lot
of research was still needed, he said, and we may not be picking up all the
elements in play. But he is convinced that the direct environmental impact of
threats to health remains important; and how we perceive those risks may be
more important than the direct effect. The poorest people already have the
poorest health outlook, which is made worse by lack of exposure to nature and greenspace. So, the creation of supportive environments
should play a significant part in improving the health of the most deprived
sections of our community.
He was concerned that the pursuit of
best value has usually meant pursuit of the best financial deal. Because the
health benefits of good planning are difficult to quantify, they are often not
taken into account. Those benefits can include personal fitness, mental health,
shorter hospital stays – in short a range of benefits that would save society
money in service costs, sickness benefits and the like, as well as creating a
happier community.
If we are to make it easier to
include such benefits in planning decisions, we must obtain better science
backed estimates of the impact of environmental improvements on the prevalence
of chronic ill health. That might add powerful impetus to the new
administration’s Greener Government programme. Health
and the environment could be a cross cutting issue for the new Government. They
are part of the ecological system Geddes would recognise.
A
systems approach to urban environments
Do the planning system and other
rules fail to look at whole systems – in a better partnership with nature? The
UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has recently published a
comprehensive report on the urban environment. Here is an illustration from it.
It illustrates a system, but just one
part of a larger system. These are all ecological networks of a kind that Geddes would recognise – where
the boundaries are not boundaries of separation but boundaries of identity.
The report concludes that the
'effective management of the urban environment requires a new approach to the
governance of our urban areas'. Rather than
focus on ever more technological fixes, it says that the collective failure to
improve the urban environment is because 'much of what is conventional wisdom
has not been implemented effectively'. Improving the urban environment is
'everything to do with human behaviour, institutional
inertia, lack of joined up government, failure to frame problems appropriately
and failure to recognise the complexity of different
constraints'.
The Commissioners were strongly
persuaded by the evidence. But their recommendations were more technical than
transformational - amending planning guidance to recognise
the health benefits of greenspace; incorporating
Health Impact Assessments into strategic environmental assessments; a new
environmental contract between central and local government; and higher
priority to green spaces around social housing.
In short, we need designing with nature
to be integral to our systems. For that, it’s important to understand where in
systems action can lead to fundamental change.
Levers
in a sustainable community - Falmouth
Let me give you two examples of this
– one modest and one regional.
Beacon Regeneration Community Partnership,
As a member of the UK Sustainable
Development Commission, I helped judge the Deputy Prime Minister’s sustainable
communities awards.
The Beacon Regeneration Community
Partnership transformed the place. The source of success was a handful of
determined local residents, supported by local health professionals, teachers,
police and housing officers. When government challenge funds became available
and the district council was required to find out about local ideas, it was two
local health workers who suggested that tackling asthma should be the priority.
Hundreds of damp, mouldy homes were improved, by installing central heating,
double glazing and other energy conservation measures. With dust and damp
removed from the homes, children became healthier. They went to school more
often, so parents could get jobs and hold on to them, with less need for child
care. Children performed better at school, improving their life chances.
This success provided the catalyst
for further action, including traffic calming, dog litter bins, tree and bulb
planting, free security lighting for vulnerable people, a skateboard park, and
courses and self help groups in the community office and youth club.
All this was triggered by a handful
of people who cared enough to be leaders when cash became available. Those two
health workers didn’t dare dream of transforming the estate; but they found the
point to apply levers – where their small efforts had disproportionate effect.
Chicago
[
Let’s look at another big system.
One of the best books I have ever read - William Cronon’s
“Nature’s Metropolis” - tracks the history of
At its hub, the entrepreneurs of
The establishment of food processing
gave
And finally in the 1890s
Identifying the leverage points in a
system – in other words, small actions that have a disproportionate influence –
is important for anyone wanting to trigger a significant change.
Systems
analysis – where to apply levers to best effect
The late Professor Donella Meadows, of the US Sustainability Institute used systems
analysis thinking to identify a kind of league table of dimensions in which
leverage points may exist . This is her list, in
increasing importance as you go down it.
Points of intervention in a system
12.
Numbers (standards, indicators)
11. The size of buffers and stabilising
stocks, relative to their flows
10.
Material stocks and flows (how much change can we cope with?)
9.
Delays relative to rate of system change
8.
Negative feedback loop strength (taxes)
7.
Gain in positive feedback loops (incentives)
6.
Information flows (eg consumer choice)
5.
Rules of the system (laws)
4.
Self organisation, spontaneous innovation
3. The
goals of the system
2.
People’s basic mindset (instinctive behaviour)
1. The
power to transcend paradigms
At the top of the list we have
numbers – big numbers. Do numbers have the power to change anything? In the
main, we react to numbers with a sense of helplessness. How many people in
rural
A long time ago, a very senior
person told me that the only things that governments could do were to make laws
(and enforce them) and to levy taxes (and spend them). While better than
numbers alone, laws and taxes are only halfway down the table. The reason is
that politicians are constrained by the public, by those who will vote for them
in future.
And enforcement becomes difficult.
Can we fine people for heating their homes, while having windows open for fresh
air?
There should be a law against it, we
hear people say. But unless people are persuaded of the need for the law – they
will surely ignore them.
Look at speed limits; set too slow
they are unenforceable – everyone breaks them.
Taxes aren’t a panacea either. You
may recall the fuel price escalator. The idea was to encourage people to buy
more fuel efficient cars by committing to increase fuel tax each year. Rural
groups led demonstrations at refineries and cut the supply of fuel to filling
stations; people needed to be better persuaded of the case for the increased
tax.
In truth, our elected
representatives need to use their powers of influence to make laws and taxes
effective as levers. They can change people’s behaviour
by their passion and rhetoric.
The
importance of changing mindsets
If their influence is to result in
changed behaviour, it is the cumulative small
decisions of individuals that will make a huge difference. Efficient markets
require better information. Better information can help people to buy products
in a more discriminating way. Labelling of embedded
carbon content has just started. But changed decisions will only happen if
people are looking for the labels and acting on them. People need to feel engaged, and informed by such labelling,
and then they can change the market towards sustainability.
Breakthrough depends on the people’s
mindset. Influence comes from every leader who helps to shift the basic mindsets
– footballers, big businessmen, the Royal Family, planners.
The
role of planners in changing mindsets
Planners could play an inspirational
role here, in changing people’s mindsets. “Hang on a minute”, I hear you say, “how many people have ever heard of an inspirational
planner”. Architects maybe, but planners?
That world fair in