An endless suburban expanse into the countryside with sparsely populated communities, poor land use and identical houses built hundreds of times over is no way to solve the UK’s housing crisis.
Although Angela Rayner promised ‘Edwardian-style mansion blocks’ and ‘townhouses’, the rush to build cheap houses as quickly as possible seems to continue. This leaves us with poorly built, repetitive red brick suburbs with windows in the wrong places, questionable plumbing and an uneasy soullessness.
These suburbs fail to constitute a city. Most British cities are flashy city centres surrounded by suburbs that only really constitute a small town, not a city district.
In contrast, European cities such as Barcelona have urbanised communities living in medium-rise apartments with access to green spaces such as Parc de la Ciutadella and public transport links most city-dwelling Brits could only dream of.
Barcelona has an Inner-city population of 1.6 million people in around 100 Square Kilometres. In comparison, Manchester’s city area covers a slightly larger area of 115 Square Kilometres but only has a population of 550,000 people, around a third of Barcelona and in a space 15% larger. Barcelona achieves this density by building medium-rise apartments close together, incorporating both retail and public space into their construction.
British cities are structurally inept for the 21st century and beyond, you can’t keep building suburbs endlessly until London and Birmingham are connected in a Frankenstein esc suburban hellscape.
A solution is required, and this solution isn’t difficult to find, it’s been done before. The UK needs to build medium-rise flats that create densely populated communities, with individuals that hold a stake in the public realm around them. We need to build Cities with citizens who take an active role in their public sphere as it affects them day in and day out. We need communities where people feel they are a part of the city and not peeking in through a distant suburb.
The benefits of this type of city are plenty. Flats would be cheaper as the land use would be spread across multiple occupants both domestically and through retail. People would also be closer together, creating cities and urban conurbations with more economically viable public transport routes. If you build your houses over shorter distances, buses and trains have to travel these shorter distances. The track has to be shorter, the conductor can work fewer hours, the bus companies have to order less fuel, and there are fewer routes with more people using each one. In theory, then, a publicly owned transport network like London can make cheaper fares and easier travel.
Denser cities would also place more emphasis on the use of Public Green spaces as the lack of a back garden would lead to more people relying on these public spaces. This, in turn, would help to make these spaces more of a ‘civic centre’. As of now not many people have a stake in urban green spaces, so new spaces are rarely built, and existing ones aren’t well-maintained. By building medium-rise apartments, communities will rely on these spaces, increasing political pressure to properly look after them, creating parks and squares where families feel safe to take their children.
Cities built with medium-rise apartments at their core is something that has already been done throughout Europe in the 20th Century and has helped to create beautiful cities, something the UK mostly lacks outside of Edinburgh. It isn’t a question of money but a question of political will. What sort of cities do we want? What communities do we want to live in? Are we happy living in empty suburbs, miles away from the city centre?
Often there can be a hegemony of thought when it comes to building houses in the UK, creating an addiction to soulless suburbs. The notion of building a different type of city with widespread urban living is rarely, if ever, debated in the media and any conversation around housing purely revolves around numbers built and not what we’re actually building.
The lack of variety in conversation leads to the persistent building of communities whose homes too, lack variety. Communities are more distanced than ever. How are new meaningful communities supposed to be built when communities are sprawled over miles and miles? Where are new relationships supposed to be forged? A community is not just the sum of its parts. By placing people in these, frankly boring, estates with nowhere to meet and nothing to do, building relationships will be difficult at best. These areas won’t constitute a community in the same way a rubber tree and a lump of steel won’t constitute a car. Communities can’t simply be a collection of people who happen to live in the same place, and it would be best to stop pretending they are. Communities need public spaces and pubs and events and a reason to meet and to socialise. And they need popular places at that, places where people want to go.
However, these popular places don’t exist. If nobody lives close to the pub, nobody goes. Instead of one or two busy pubs in a dense town centre, you have 6 half empty ones in the suburbs, making it all the less surprising when 3 of them close down.
And it isn’t only suburban pubs that are struggling, high streets are too. New houses are built miles away from existing ones. Because of this, high streets see fewer customers and less business. The high street is becoming a relic of a bygone age, slowly replaced with an Amazon delivery and a knock at the door.
It’s important to stress here, that none of us want to shop online for everything all the time. I’m sure most people would prefer a thriving local high street than a knock at the door, but we are forced into it out of necessity. For most of us, online shopping will be easier than trudging along to our ‘local’ high street in the hope that Poundland hasn’t closed down. We want thriving high streets, but we seem allergic to building the type of communities that make these high streets possible.
This conversation can’t happen, and these cities won’t be built without a cultural shift away from home ownership being the ultimate, and only, necessary target you need to hit to start a family.
There is a degree of snobbery towards flats or apartments. The differential in terms here is evidence of this. Many people see flats as simply not being good enough for them or their children, but why is this the case?
I’d argue it’s because of a lack of green space, difficult parking and substandard public transport links. For many people, these factors are a make or break when buying a home.
However, all these factors come hand in hand creating a paradox. Political pressure to build better green spaces and better public transport needs people living in apartments to provide this view with any sort of strength, but people will also never be in these apartments, at any scale, in the first place without these commodities existing first.
In short, we need to accept the risk. We need to not only build medium-rise apartments in abundance in our city centres, but we need to make these viable places to live. They need public transport, retail, greenspaces and schools to be built alongside them at the same time, so communities can be formed with public space at its heart. It’s not enough for the local council to add a cycle lane down an A-Road a few months after a new apartment block opens as if that solves anything at all other than a local politician’s ego as now, they’ve ‘changed something’ and put right the world’s wrongs.
