Why protesting can make you richer
Town & Country Planning, August 2007
I live in Crystal Palace, a half-forgotten corner of south London on the border of five boroughs – which means that its dealings with officialdom are usually somewhat fraught.
Everyone knows about the pioneer glass exhibition centre and concert hall that made the suburb famous, and which burned down so spectacularly and mysteriously in 1936. Not everyone knows that, some centuries before that, it formed a section of the Great North Wood known as the Great Stake Pit, where the wood was felled that was used to build Sir Francis Drake’s ship The Golden Hind.
I mention these barely relevant details as a way of saying that the history of a neighbourhood – even when the only physical reminder of it is a local authority information board – is important to its identity, and therefore its economy.
People invest in places that stand out as special. They do not want to work or live, generally speaking, in places where people light say – as Gertrude Stein did of Los Angeles – that “there’s no there there”.
And when you look around my immediate neighbourhood, at the multiplicity of green spaces and parks, the most obvious aspect of the history of the past century has been a series of beneficial confrontations between those who lived here with authority and with developers.
Honor Oak Park, quite nearby, was saved from development by a series of mass demonstrations in the 1890s. The series of magnificent gardens and parks above Streatham Common, notably the Rookeries, which I can see from my home, were saved by similar efforts in the 1920s and 1930s.
We have been told by those that rule us for the past generation, and particularly these days, that smoothing out the planning system to make development easier is a vital element of a wealthier society.
Actually, the existence of all these parks across south London – so laboriously fought for by their neighbours – is a considerable source of wealth. Psychic wealth, of course, but there is no doubt that those of us who live nearby have more valuable homes because of their proximity.
In all these cases, it was successful resistance to the banal plans of developers that has made those neighbourhoods the relatively wealthy places they are today. Protest is good for the economy, in other words.
I notice that the architect Terry Farrell is making a related argument in his enjoyable battle against those who are making such a miserable hash of the Thames Gateway developments.
His plans for a series of major parks across the area are uncomfortable to the centralised bureaucrats who are allowing the development to become a disconnected mush of inhuman post-modern towers.
They are irritating to developers who see the possibility of profit slipping away from them. But is there really any doubt that they would make the Gateway wealthier, in all senses of the word?
Thinking back to the various cities where I have worked, the opposite process is also all too obvious.
If protesters had succeeded in preventing Oxford City Council from demolishing the St Ebbe’s neighbourhood of the city, along the riverside, in the late 1960s, it would now be a bustling and wealthy area – just as Jericho (saved from the bulldozers) did in fact become.
It has recovered a little now, but when I lived there in the 1980s, St Ebbe’s had become little more than a glorified series of car parks.
When the new Brown government starts unravelling the local planning system, in other words, they need to stop for a moment and think historically.
It then becomes all too obvious that local resistance can be wealth creating, and banal development can be impoverishing. Put on the glasses of hindsight, Gordon, if you can conjure them up, and you may be able to see the difference.
