Future 2050: Living local

We’ve debated localised communities regularly in TransportXtra, however fast-forward 25 years and it’s time to get real, according to SYSTRA’s Technical Director and visionary Transport Planner, Andrew Archer

In a famous experiment, the game theorist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling asked a group of 100 volunteers to imagine that they had to meet a stranger in Manhattan on a certain day. They weren’t given any other information except for the fact that the stranger would know as much about Manhattan as they did.

Schelling then asked the volunteers to come up with a place and a time for the rendezvous. Over 80 of them gave the same answer: they would wait at 12.00 noon under the great clock at Grand Central Station. 

For Schelling this extraordinary result was revealing of the way humans interact in game-like ways according to complex social rules that are obscure to them. But for those interested in how we plan our towns and places it hints at something else: how deeply towns and cities can be imbued with implicit knowledge of the people who build and live in them.

Old, failed, environmentally stressful developments will have to be decommissioned, populations moved, sometimes against their will using executive powers. There will no doubt be protest

Everyone just knows that such-and-such a clock or monument is a natural meeting place. These half-hidden meanings are something that we naturally sense when we visit towns that seem particularly charming.

As tourists our attention may be captured by picturesque details, but it is the feeling of complexity, the feeling of a way of life embodied in the place, that draws us in.

The promise of escape

And yet this dimension is strikingly absent from the places we have built in the last 100 years under the shadow of the private car with its promise of escape. Escape into what?

The infrastructural demands of booming car travel and the mistaken rationalism of planners who believed they could exploit it to anatomise human lives into different functions of work, home, health, education, play and so on - zoning them out for efficiency and connecting them by road and (sometimes) rail - has created urban and suburban places that are notable (sometimes notorious) for their feeling of soullessness or lack of a sense of ‘place’.

What may be worse, this distributed planning model is continuing to drive the climate crisis that we spend so much time wringing our hands over.

A single mother on a median income is unlikely to be able to live in the fashionable parts of London or Dublin or Edinburgh where the dense, integrated urban fabric is still intact, but will instead have to separate her work and domestic lives and connect them by commute in the way our planning has encouraged.

It is not that she doesn’t want to live in a “localised community”; she can’t afford to. But we do not have to keep living with the mistakes of the past. By taking emphatic action, local living could become the norm for people and every type of family construct in the UK in the very near future, not as one alternative among many but as the overriding outcome of a revolution in planning that adds new infrastructure and sweeps away vast quantities of the failures of the recent past.

A Ministry of Place?

As a first step, let us imagine an incoming government that is at last both serious and clear eyed about the dangers of the environmental crisis and the social costs of our degraded social realm. This administration creates a Ministry of Place and makes transport, education, health and planning subordinate to it.

No more silos when it comes to capital investment. Everything is developed holistically to ensure that there is always a high degree of local integration that maximises access to amenities, minimises the need for travel, and promotes mixed use everywhere. Large out-of-town enterprises have accepted the social cost they create and agreed to pay levies that are used to ensure that local high streets are occupied with retail and other businesses.

Employers are encouraged through tax incentives to promote more work from home or from one of the many well-equipped local work hubs that are available in all new-build estates. Every new investment is preceded by timely consultation to see off the “NIMBYS” and guarantee responsiveness to local need. Everywhere the transport hierarchy starts with active travel and works down to the private electric vehicle, the need for which has been hugely diminished by the density of the plan.

This is a world where what were once considered luxuries, available to only a few, have become everyday living. Once commonplace for our grandparents’ generation, everything you need is close by: shops, local bakers and butchers, a thriving high street, clean air, and easy access to parks, sports, and leisure facilities.

Led by the community

We no longer call these “localised communities”, we simply call them home. Planners have been led by the community and ensured that use is deeply mixed, amenities easily available, and the traffic dragon is tamed while policy makers have incentivised employers and investors to see the value of a different way of living, but beyond that places are allowed to develop organically, reflecting the lives and values of the people who live in them.

They grow not only to serve need but to be dense with meaning. It is a dramatic change not just in utility, but in soul. It’s simple. We have stopped designing for the car. The Planners mandate is: No build policy- if it’s not accessible to essential daily services, you can’t build it.

Such a future of localised living can be achieved with speed if the political will can be found. Twenty-five years is time enough. But it won’t happen cost-free. Such a radical change will require stick as well as carrot.

Old, failed, environmentally stressful developments will have to be decommissioned, populations moved, sometimes against their will using executive powers. There will no doubt be protest. Planners will need to find extraordinary reserves of self-confidence in their vision of a better society, even while acknowledging the failures of the previous, most recent attempts to achieve social improvement through planned housing.

Games need rules...

It is a commonplace paradox that freedom can only be achieved through the limits we place on ourselves. Games, as Schelling pointed out, cannot be played without rules. As we come to better understand the rules of the complex social games we play, we can see better how to win them.

The chess pieces need the right board to move on.  Localised communities represent freedom, not limitation. Or perhaps, freedom through limitation. We sleepwalked into a world that pleases almost no-one, dazzled by an illusion of freedom. Now it’s time to wake up.  

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