Are you allowed to choose the colour of your house, the height of your grass, or more importantly can you have a garden gnome?

In this podcast, we delve into the world of town planning. We discuss the evolution of urban planning, its pros and cons, and whether new cities have it right or if there are still lessons that can be learned from old towns. We also look at how town planning can affect people's happiness and examine what should be the key considerations when it comes to planning a new town.

A few things we mentioned in this podcast:

• Hampstead Garden: The History of The Suburb
• Annual personal well-being estimates
• ‘Britain’s Love-Hate Relationship with New Towns’
• The Private Production of Urban Planning
• 10 Reasons Explaining the Importance of Urban Planning

For more information on Aleph Insights visit our website https://alephinsights.com or to get in touch about our podcast email [email protected]

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing town planning. I'm not sure of a way in. So Nick, tell us why we're talking about town planning, that normally does the trick. Yeah, so I was trying to think of something funny to say.

Before we start, I have a prediction about this podcast. Oh yeah, go on, go on. Well, I predict that Nick is going to make the case for not having a lot too much planning. I'll make the case for having lots of planning and then at the end we'll come together saying, well, actually, yes, you do need some planning. That's what I predict. Interesting.

Hold that thought. I think you might have gotten onto the Aleph Insights

Cognitive Engineering Podcast formula. But where do I fit into all this? Or is it, you bumble along in the background as normal? No, no, the master puppeteer. Okay, Nick,

town planning. Tell us all about it. Yeah, don't switch off, listener. It's more interesting than that. Well, let's hope so. So I was inspired to think about this last week when I decided to go for a walk on a nice sunny morning to Hampstead Garden suburb, which is a place not far. It's about an hour and a bit's walk from where I live. I've never heard of it. I've heard of Hampstead.

I've heard of West Hampstead, Hampstead Heath. I've never heard of Hampstead Garden suburb.

Yeah, they want to keep it that way. It's a very strange and interesting little place, which is a small suburb. It's probably about one mile by half a mile. It's not huge. And it's almost hidden in the sense that no sort of main roads go through it. And you would really only go there if you wanted to go to Hampstead Garden suburb. But it's a really, I mean, it's interesting architecturally because it's all it's a mix of different but very consistent early 20th century architectural styles. So it's hugely protected. I mean, it's very, very difficult to change anything. They've got a very stringent set of rules that you have to live by, including like not having garden gnomes and not painting your house a funny colour, all those kinds of things, not allowed all sorts of things. So they, and so it's pristine. I mean, utterly sort of, it's like going back in time to the Edwardian era. And except for the cars and the people, obviously, but it's, you know, a really interesting little place to walk around. And it has a nice, it has got a non-denominational church, and it's got a big synagogue, and it has a nice playing fields. And it's got Henrietta Barnett School, which is a really staggering building. It's a really kind of tall, you know, vaguely neoclassical type building. I was really impressed by it. Now, before you go on, I hate the sound of this place. Yeah, it's very Stepford Wives. I would hate to live there. God, it would drive me nuts. But let me finish making the case for it, right? So it was an early example of a planned town.

Yeah.

get into the horrors of Milton Keynes. Yeah. I mean, look, on the face of it, wouldn't it be nice just to plan all this stuff, right? Planning is good. And plan a place that would be nice to live rather than just let it all grow up higgledy-piggledy. Before I bring in you, Peter, just the thing that you said, I mean, first of all, it just sounds just too good to be true, just too nice. It just sounds a bit like Truman Show-esque a little bit. But the big thing is that you're not allowed gnomes. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm no big gnome lover and I don't have a gnome. You're not a gnomosexual? I'm not, no, despite what you might have read in the press, no. And the very fact that I'm not allowed to have a gnome immediately makes me want to have

a gnome. Okay. Well, don't move there. There are people in Hampstead Garden Suburb who moan about this. And I think, why are you there? Go and live somewhere else. That just sounds very controlling.

Yeah, very controlling. So anyway, but the point is planned towns, good thing. Peter.

Yeah, I totally agree. I think all towns, no matter how higgledy-piggledy they may seem, have some degree of planning. Even if it's pretty atomic, like somebody had decided that that is where they're going to build a house, that's a plan, right? So they've optimised that fairly atomic decision. But what about if we talk degrees of then? Yeah, so degrees of, right? So on a sort of city or town scale, there are lots of good reasons for planning. And it seems they've brought it not being a complete mess and unlivable. So some degree of kind of steering of where things are built and where things cannot be built, what activities can be done and what activities can't be done helps everyone sort of gel along a little bit better together. Yeah, that's what the Nazis said. Yeah. But the town that you're in, the way the streets are laid out, where the schools are, where the shops are, that's really pretty fundamental infrastructure to human life that lives there. So in order for it to be effective, you have to put some degree of control in it. Otherwise, it would just be a complete mess and everyone would build their houses too close to the well or too far away from the stream or whatever. And it would, it wouldn't, it just

Okay, so before you go on, what's your prediction? Well, hold on, hold on, Nick, before you go on, actually, because something that not everyone might be aware of as a listener, especially if you're not in the UK, is actually the kind of the context of what we're discussing here, and the subtext of what we're all talking about, is that new towns in the UK have got a bit of a bad rap. They're kind of a byword for being a bit naff and planning gone wrong. So maybe we should have

said that earlier. Is that a fair kind of characterisation? Let's think, if you think of a new town, you're probably talking about a shopping centre, probably made, it looks like a box and made of concrete. Some sort of, you know, attempt to a public space with concrete pillars. You know, very orderly road layouts, probably lots of cul-de-sacs. And, you know, lots of sort of perhaps the old tower block here and there. Lots of open space. Town planners thought that was something people want in their towns. I don't I don't think that's right. But so they built in lots of open space and parks and those kinds of things. But also but I think all of them have this have a sense of being dead. I mean, that's they still get after being put in a mixer for 70 years. You know, these places have really desolate town centres, you know, and there's no sense because they're not organic, you know, because someone has said here is the town centre. Yeah. So so just who just. Yeah. Yeah. To go back to your question, which is what you're coming on to. Are people happier or less happy? Yeah, they're going to be happy. They're going to they're

going to report being happier is my is my prediction. Peter, have you got an intuition?

I don't know. I think my intuition is that people in towns are generally less happier than their wider county neighbours. I so I don't know. I think they'd be less happy in new towns.

Yeah. Although I mean, most people live in towns. Right. So my comparison is with the county as a whole and also England as a whole. But but 82 percent of people living in new towns or rather 82 percent of new towns have people have below average satisfaction. 70 percent of them are less happy. Sixty five percent of them are more anxious. So I I feel like now there's all kinds of causes and effects going on here now. It could well be that, you know, people who are those things, you know, have tended to move to new towns. I'm not saying new towns cause people to be miserable, but I thought was an interesting bit of data. But I think this just, you know, what are the problems with planning is is the question here. And I feel like the issue is the idea. I think the idea that you we know how to do it, I think, is that that is the dangerous thing. The idea that we and the kinds of things that planners looked at, you know, when they were designing these things was like, OK, well, we think that people, you know, here and this is the kind of thing they would have thought. Well, that you've typically got a housewife who needs to go to the shops once a day and, you know, she's going to need to be able to walk there or take the bus. And so we need to have a little shopping center here, here, here. And then we need to have the big shopping center, which you might go to once a week, once a week. When it got to Milton Keynes, you know, that was in the era when they were everything was designed around cars. And it was like, OK, well, everyone's going to be driving everywhere in the future. So we're going to make the entire town basically a place you can easily drive around. And these are the kinds of things which, you know, you can see why they did it. It was like, look, to the best of our knowledge, this is this is what is going to be based on. And what do you want if you're in a car? You need nice, nice, big, straight roads. And so we'll just make everything nice, big, straight roads. And that's why it doesn't work, because that whatever it is that people want from towns, it's a lot more numinous than that. You know, people don't just want the list of things that people in the 60s thought made people happy. They don't just want, look, I want, you know, to be able to get to a nice shopping center conveniently. It's all kinds of other things like history and chaos. And, you know, and I mentioned open space. I mean, I don't like open space in my town centers. I want it to be crowded in with buildings and shops and,

you know, people. A couple of things, just I want to bring you in, Peter, but before we do, I've spent quite a reason. I know Milton Keynes pretty well, by the way, because I was brought up in Bedford, which is not far from there. And people used to love Milton Keynes for the shopping. You know, that's the big thing about Milton Keynes. But what you may or may not know is it's just roundabouts. I mean, just endless roundabouts. And I'm very good at getting lost, but I'm a master at getting lost in Milton Keynes because everything looks the same. It's just endless roundabouts and with like grassy slopes everywhere. And it's impossible to get around. The other thing that is quite cool in Milton Keynes, and it goes back to this or when planning comes up against reality, is I think it's got a concrete cow. Are you familiar with this? Yeah, the concrete cows. Yeah, they're very famous. Yeah. And of course, what people, you know, getting another papier-mache bull and putting on top of the concrete cow is a fun local pastime. Anyway, I digress. No, look, the other thing I want to talk about is I think what could be interesting here is I think is the English stroke British context to what extent we like being in somewhere planned, because most countries around the world, or even if we just go to Europe, they're pretty planned. Even their older towns or cities are pretty planned. So, I mean, a good example is Madrid, which, you know, lots of Europe, they've got this grid system that they love. Yeah, Barcelona is an amazingly grid like place.

And I don't think we like that. A fun fact, the sort of iron grid it's sometimes called in town planning is really, really ancient. So the first, one of the first examples of it was in Indus and Katmandu valleys in 2,600 BC, the plans were, the towns were built in this grid pattern. Yeah, and those

towns are no longer around, which just goes to show. See, isn't it the case, though, that like lots of individuals traipsing up and down where they really need to go, what where the shortest paths are, you know, it's going to give you a more optimal system than trying to work it out a priori and laying down a set of roads for people. I mean, that's I suppose my deep down feeling is why not? Why not? You know, the roads that we've got in central London, which are a little patchwork of really windy, wiggly, woggly, they represent some optimisation from the past that we're not aware of.

Yeah. Except, well, it becomes less optimal as it gets filled in. It's no longer optimal for. It was optimal. And there's modes of transport change as well and density and all that kind of stuff.

But I like the fact that we have to adapt around it then, because it means that, for example, we you know, a drawing board happy technocrat from the 60s might have looked at the city and said, well, tell you what, let's level it all and build just straight roads. That's much better. And in fact, they did do that. They did do that to part of the city.

They nearly did. The big sway, the Whitehall was nearly rebuilt to be a sort of government,

big government complex. But instead we go, well, you know what? Traffic's bad. Let's have a congestion charging zone and let's try and get traffic out. We'll pedestrianise. And hey, Presta, the whole thing's much nicer because we've adapted to the city and not the other way around.

I feel we're sort of skating on this a little bit. And I also feel we're a bit one sided at the moment. Peter, I want to hear, you know, what are your thoughts? Push back against us.

Well, I wouldn't disagree that complete centralised planning. So designing a town from scratch is necessarily a good idea. I wouldn't argue that at all. But there has to be some degree of planning. So working with what you've already got or starting from scratch, you want to include a bit of the chaos, a bit of the finding where the desired paths are. But you also need to plan it. Otherwise, it will be chaotic. So you can't just, let's say, right, big, big, big, open greenfield site. People go and live there, build what you want, where you want. That will very quickly become a sort of tragedy of the commons where you have people competing for proximity to the well or the road or whatever. And so, yeah, so you need some degree of planning in order to promote like quality of life, to predict the economic growth or decline of the town and sort of incentivise business or residential zones in that to suit the changing need of the town. And in order to plan, you know, plan immunity, sort of plan things like transport and plan things like utilities. You need to have some degree of understanding of where you're going in order to plan for these things which take 10, 20 years to sort of bring into service. So, yeah, you need some degree of planning. Where that line is, probably depends on what kind of town you're planning. So in North London, it's pretty chock-a-block. There's not much you can do. You can't just level these houses and rebuild them

because it'd be too expensive, much as I'd like to. Sorry, isn't the answer to this really boring, which is just something in the middle, you know? You've got to plan it a bit, but don't plan it

too much. Yeah, well, look, it's probably worth mentioning the kind of Chicago school libertarian type argument against town planning, which is that if you internalise, try and marketise all of those factors, then you end up with incentives to get it right anyway. So to go to Peter's point about proximity to the well and that kind of thing, well, if I'm a landowner and I want to maximise the rent I can charge, you know, I want to get that right. You know, if I build five nice houses and they make people better off than 10 nasty houses, then that will be reflected in higher rents that I can charge, right? So I'd rather do the thing that maximises the value of that land and that ultimately is maximising the value of what people are willing to pay for. So that's the argument. And then to back Peter up, I've got a good example of where actually you get externalities all the time. So things that aren't necessarily marketed and which you have to have some kind of regulation about. And that's, I don't know if you're familiar with a little place called Piccadilly Circus. Have you heard tell of such a place? What do you think of when you think of Piccadilly Circus? I think of Eros. The what? Eros. Eros, yes. But what else? Lots of traffic. Traffic, but also big signs, big flashing signs. That's what everyone thinks of. There's that big wall of flashing signs. I think of that beautiful vista

you have of as you look northwest to Regent Street curving off beautifully. Yeah, yeah,

it's very nice. But just to your right, if you're standing at Eros looking in that direction, is this horrible big wall of flashing bright lights advertising Coca-Cola and stuff like that? And that is basically an accident because when they widened the roads in Piccadilly Circus in, I think, the 20s or 30s, they demolished the buildings, but they forgot to change the regulation about not having basically the regulation that said you weren't allowed to put huge adverts on your building applied only to the buildings around Piccadilly Circus. And when they demolished some of them, the buildings behind them did not have that restriction applied to them. Hence, people immediately, all the owners of those buildings slapped up huge adverts and they've been there ever since. They've then become a feature, I guess. I mean, I think

they're pretty horrible. You find them in tourist guidebooks for London as a thing to go and look at. It's like, really? It's just a big neon sign of Coca-Cola. Don't you like that stuff?

So that's the point. If you let people do what they want, what they might do is benefit themselves at a cost to other people. And that's where you get things like sanitation problems and noise pollution and other kinds of pollution. So yeah, no, I do accept that while externalities exist, there's going to be a role for a planner.

Hmm. I've got a question I want to ask, but before I do, because we're sort of at the end,

before I do, is there anything else? Yeah, I just wanted to name some of the preposterous sounding ideas that Town Planner, well, I think partly it's, I have an objection to the kind of people who want to plan towns. I just think they're probably not the kind of people you want to plan towns. But there are things called Ebenezer Howard's three magnets theory, the concentric model zone, otherwise known as the Burgess model, the Radburn superblock, the sector model, the multiple nuclei model, you know, all of these kind of crazy concepts where you sort of say, look, wouldn't it be great if everything was pentagons? And then hey, presto, your city looks like a load of pentagons and everyone hates it.

Just working on the names alone, they don't sound any more ridiculous than the concepts we come up with in our reports. Well, that's probably true.

Actually, before the question, I've got just a comment, and I guess this falls onto town planning stroke sociology. Actually, I think, again, another new town I know very well, which you mentioned, which one of the immediate post-war places is Harlow. So I used to live sort of five minute drive from there. And one of the interesting things about Harlow, various things is, first of all, you can stand at the edge of Harlow and it's got these beautiful rolling hills. And you stand there and look at Harlow in the middle of it. And I have to say Harlow, again, is a byword in certainly where I used to live for just being a bit rough. Let's just say that. As you look at this beautiful rolling Essex countryside and you can't help but stand there and think this would once have been so beautiful. But you've got all these horrible concrete blocks. But I think what's interesting is Harlow's got a reputation for being very rough and for having very rough people and for being crime ridden. Apologies to any Harlow listeners out there. But it's almost exclusively, if I'm correct, it was made up of people who've been bombed out in London, specifically in the Docklands, I think. So from, what's that, is it called the Isle of Dogs? The bit where it, yeah. And they all got moved to Essex, to this new town. And so I think one of the reasons why people in Harlow are kind of like they are got reputation is because there's always hardcore East End Londoners just being suddenly plonked in the countryside. And like some weird social experiment. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

You can take the, you can take the cockney out of the Isle of Dogs. Exactly. Yeah. I've got a

question. Yeah. My question is this. What is the most organised place that you've ever been to? I'm thinking about a city here probably. And what is the least organised place that you've ever been to, either lived or visited? And what's your preference? What are your memories of those places? Which did you like the most? Oh, I can jump in straight away because I've got, I must admit it's slightly loaded. Well, I was going to ask you about Brasilia. Well, I've never been to Brasilia. Oh, okay. Don't tell me about Brasilia then. No, I probably shouldn't. I mean, I'll leap in. Yeah, I've got a couple of places. So first of all, just thinking about the most organised place I've ever visited or lived, which is in University of East Anglia. I studied there, did a master's degree. And they've got ziggurats, so this sort of concrete designed in the 70s, pyramids type structures. So that's the very organised place. But also, I think you probably know this. As far as I know, do you know what the oldest city in the Western Hemisphere is? Jerusalem or something? Maybe let's say in Western Europe. I think I'm right in saying it's Cadiz. Okay. In southwest Spain. Okay. Sounds a bit implausible to me, but if you say so. No, it is. Because I think it's founded by Phoenicians, I think, or something like that. So yeah, I think the oldest city in Western Europe. And I lived there for a year. Okay. And the interesting thing about Cadiz is that it's on a peninsula, as you might know. But actually, I didn't, both the organised and the disorganised place that I'm talking about, I didn't like either of them. Because in the ziggurats in Norwich, it's just very difficult to live in. You couldn't really see out and you couldn't see your neighbours, because the way it was kind of designed. Whereas in Cadiz, you'd have thought on a peninsula, I was always getting lost. Because the roads are just so higgledy-piggledy and narrow. And you'd think on a peninsula, it was only like, you know, maximum three miles wide or something, you can't get that lost. And I go, right, I have no idea. But if I go that way, I'll hit the sea. And an hour later, I was still wandering around these sort of these roads, these little alleyways that go all over the place. Again, it's your roundabout problem. Yeah, I'm just getting, yeah, getting frustrated. Yeah. Anyway, those are my two places. Didn't like

either. Peter or Nick? Well, I grew up in Northampton. So again, I was pretty close to Milton Keynes. And I always, I always liked Milton Keynes when I was pre-teens. It was, there was something exciting about it. I liked it. So I, so there we are. I've never lived there. So I don't know what it's like to actually live there. But as a cyclist, it's a very good city for cycling. There are cycle paths everywhere. It's a very good way, very good place to get around by bicycle. Why did you find it exciting? I don't know. I'm trying to, I'm trying to think what it was, but it was just the, it was, I kind of liked the whole feel of the place.

Because it was an engineer and it was all super ordered.

Concrete-y orderedness of it. Yeah. And the big plate, the big sort of glass fronted things.

It is worth saying that it's horses for courses, isn't it? I mean, you know, I'm not, force everyone not to live in Newton.

I mean, I can, I've not lived there, but I can imagine having cycled and walked around a bit, I can imagine it would be the, if you, if you find yourself having to live in a suburb, the suburbs in Milton Keynes are probably quite nice because you are very sheltered from the roads and they're kind of little tight knit sort of groupings of houses. So you could imagine you know, a community spirit developing there. I don't know if that's what actually happens, but on paper it looks quite nice. So that's sort of a highly organized kind of thing. But my ideal place to live is basically a white cube in the middle of the woods. Like, so the house itself is highly organized, but it's amongst a completely disorganized, chaotic natural environment.

I like the sound of that. I like the sound of that. I think that probably, I feel like if you ask someone what their ideal house is, you discover that they're describing themselves. I feel like a white cube surrounded by messy, messy nature is a good way of perhaps, Peter, that's his soul.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we don't need to cover the disorganized thing that I mean, that's a nice answer as it stands. Nick?

Yeah. What if I throw in the same city twice? I was thinking, should I go for Rome, which of course was planned by the Italians, but feels very, sorry, planned by the Romans, I suppose, back in the day, but feels very organic and messy. But I think London, one of the things I love about London is just how many different things there are in London and how the neighborhoods can change in such a short space of geography. But just thinking about the contrast between, say the West End, not the West End, but even if you go a little bit further, so out to Regents, that area around Regents Park, the very planned Georgian development in Regents Park and contrast that with the City of London, which of course is just as grown up over millennia in the way that it wants to be. Very light touch planning, as you'd expect. But it feels, I mean, just it's a tiny part of London, but it's packed full of geography. It's got streets everywhere and little alleyways and tunnels and it's excellent. I love the City of London. And Regents Park, which is supposed to be really nice, I just find still find very sterile and it's been there for 200 years, but it still hasn't got any life. You know, there's no feel of shops or bustle. It's just, you know, big white Georgian houses and cars. So, yeah, I think I'm going to put London in twice under

different circles, different bits of it. Nice. Yeah, no, I like that. I like that. Okay, we'll stop there. As always, thanks for listening. If you've got any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast.alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you've enjoyed the podcast, Peter, what should people do? They should consider hitting the like button. And follow us on your chosen streaming service. Thanks, as always, for listening. You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. Until next time, goodbye.