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INTRODUCTION

In the organisation of its economies and the spatial patterning of its settlements, the developed world is overwhelmingly urban. Some of the oldest and most extensively developed urban societies, notably Britain and the USA, have never been ideologically enthusiastic about cities, but until the middle of this century universal urban growth on a large scale was the norm. Today over 70 per cent of the population of the developed world lives in urban areas and an even higher proportion of economic, political and administrative power is concentrated there. Even with recent population and employment trends acting to disadvantage the largest cities in many developed countries, the way of life and the organisation of economic activity is still dominantly urban.

Within these urban settlements land is used and occupied in a remarkably concentrated manner. Different national definitions make exact comparisons difficult, but some general patterns may easily be identified. In the United States, for example, metropolitan areas house 75 per cent of the population on just 1.5 per cent of the total land. In France fifty-eight unites urbaines, each exceeding 100,000 people, between them accommodate 44 per cent of the nation’s population on less than 1 per cent of the land. In England and Wales, which are smaller and more densely urbanised than most countries, 89 per cent of the population live in urban areas on 7.7 per cent of the land (DoE 1988), and in Japan extreme urban concentration can be observed in the three agglomerations of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya which account for half of the total population on less than 2.5 per cent of the national land surface. The United Nations Organisation’s Global Review of Human Settlements estimated in 1976 that Western Europe was the most densely urbanised of the world’s major regions with 3 per cent of its land surface built upon. Other figures were 0.2 per cent for the USA/Canada and Australia/New Zealand, and 0.4 per for Eastern Europe. Even if the world’s urban population lived at the low densities typical of North America, they would cover less than 1 per cent of global land.

Such low figures as these give a misleading underestimate of the importance of urban land. Judged in terms of economic output or capital

Kivell, Philip. Land and the City : Patterns and Processes of Urban Change, Taylor & Francis Group, 1993. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=166703. Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2022-09-24 12:26:13.

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values, urban land is of vastly greater significance. Even using the crude measure of the amount of land which is urbanised, it can be seen that in the economic core regions of the developed world the proportions are far higher. Within the south east of England for example, the urban coverage is approximately one-fifth of the total land.

In these highly urbanised regions, and elsewhere, urban land continues to be in great demand. This is despite, or perhaps because of, counterurbanisation trends whereby the largest cities are losing their domination over national economies and settlement systems. Many of the reasons for this will be taken up in greater detail in later chapters, but for the present a number of basic explanations for the growth in demand for land can be outlined.

Population growth in the developed nations is a prime cause of urban expansion. Put simply, more people consume more land, and for the most part this means more urban land. Crude population growth in many developed countries has been relatively modest in recent years, but it has played a part in the process of urban expansion. The population of the United Kingdom grew by only 10 per cent between 1951 and 1981, but this resulted in 5.5 million extra people. At typical suburban densities of 75 persons per hectare, this represented an additional 73,000 hectares of land for housing alone, equivalent to ten times the existing area of the city of Nottingham. Even in the absence of crude population growth, additional demands for urban housing have been generated by social and demographic changes such as divorce, changing marriage patterns and an ageing population. Each of these contributed to a reduction in average family size and a higher number of separate households.

Increasing personal affluence is a second major influence upon the demand for and disposition of urban land. Whatever the individual or local effects of the recent recession, there has been an overall upward trend in affluence. In western cities where the basic needs of life are already amply catered for, the effect of growing affluence has been to provide a further boost to the consumption of land. Mostly this involves rising living standards, translated into lower residential densities and an increasing number of motor vehicles, but it has also resulted in growing leisure time and a multiplication of leisure activities. Most of these activities demand land in, or close to the major urban population centres.

The uncertain financial climate of recent years has seen land and property re-emerge as the traditional safe hedge against inflation. Coupled with lifestyle preferences this has resulted in a rapid growth in home ownership, a trend which for financial as well as social reasons has been largely satisfied by extensive areas of low density individual family homes. The near certainty of medium to long term rises in the value of houses has been a particular attraction when the financial returns from other forms of investment have been unreliable.

The property boom has been facilitated by the availability of finance. This

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INTRODUCTION

has come partly from growing personal affluence which has had its main impact in the residential sector. In Great Britain , for example, home ownership rose from 49 per cent of households in 1971, to 66 per cent in 1989. Tremendous growth has also taken place in property investment by institutions, such as pension funds, investment and insurance companies. These have been particularly attracted to land and property development in the commercial sector, notably through hotels, offices and the retail and leisure sectors, although 1992 saw a dramatic downturn in property.

Transport and communication changes represent another major explanatory variable in helping to account for the continuing demand for urban land. In particular the shift from rail to motor vehicle transport which occurred in the USA from the 1920s onwards, and in Europe rather later, enabled the much freer movement of people and goods from point to point rather than being confined to predetermined lines. This allowed a loosening of the urban fabric to take place and prompted new phases of urban development. At the same time, major new nodes emerged in the form of motorway interchanges and junctions, and international airports which presented new locational opportunities for economic activity, often on the outskirts of cities where land was relatively cheap. These opportunities were rapidly seized by developers of office and retail complexes, science parks and high technology industrial estates, all of which created new urban forms. More recently the plethora of telecommunication and other electronic advances has given a further twist to the locational patterns of economic activity, to the point where some of the traditional connotations of urban have all but lost their meaning.

Urban land use must thus be seen as a constantly evolving pattern rather than a static entity, even so the past quarter of a century has seen more rapid and profound change than at any other time in recent history. It is also important to view land as a multifaceted aspect of urban development, not simply serving as a neutral space or container of activities and objects but as an intrinsic part of virtually all aspects of urban life. Above all, land is the key to understanding two important aspects of urban development. First, it is vital in explaining the shape, layout and growth of urban forms. Second, it is at the centre of the city’s activities, influencing economic development conferring power and determining the relationships between different social groups and activities.

LAND AS URBAN MORPHOLOGY

Individual cities display morphologies and land use patterns which range from the very formal and carefully ordered to apparently haphazard collections of buildings, spaces and activities. The precise pattern is determined by a multiplicity of factors including the age, style and scale of development, the needs for different kinds of land and the nature of its

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ownership. The economic explanation of the land-use pattern must incorporate forces which extend far beyond the city’s local boundaries. As Carter suggested (1983:114): ‘the plan and built form of the town are direct reflections of the nature of culture on the large scale…the town epitomises in its physical nature the complex of political, economic, and social forces which characterised the period of its creation’.

As examples Carter contrasted the towns of Renaissance and Baroque Europe with their formal layout, classical architecture and defensive needs with the very different but equally rigid morphologies of the North American gridiron plan. Both were shaped by strong, centralised planning influences; in the former case the aristocratic land owners and state military architects, in the latter case by the Land Ordinance established to regulate the settlement of North America after 1785. The rationale behind the European designs can be seen in terms of the aesthetic appeal of formality, the nature and scale of contemporary warfare and the desire for pomp and ceremony. The American example, on the other hand, has been explained (Stanislawski 1946), as a reflection of the democratic principles of the time and the desire to divide and allocate land on broadly egalitarian lines. This may be true, but undoubtedly the system also owed much to the needs of simplicity and expediency in laying out numerous new settlements on largely virgin land. As with most morphological designs, these have remained remarkably enduring features of the towns in which they were applied.

A more marked contrast may be found by examining the morphologies and forms of land development which typified the explosive growth of industrial urban settlements in the nineteenth century. These forms are particlarly widespread in Britain and the rest of Europe, although they also occur commonly elsewhere. In these cases the form of development was influenced partly by detailed local factors such as ownership, location and physical resources, but overwhelmingly the shaping force was the needs of industry developing in a competitive laissez-faire environment. Little centralised planning occurred and the industrial city became dominated by its core, the needs of industry and the prevailing transport technology. As Goheen (1970:11) explained for nineteenth-century Toronto ‘industry was able to demand almost any land in the city, such was its bidding power and such was the utility which manufacturing gave to the land’.

The power of industry in shaping the city was extensive for two reasons. First, manufacturing industry became the prime motor of urban growth and the dominant, although not the largest, land user in the city. But its influence went much wider. Industry reshaped the social map of the city and played a large part in determining and providing the housing needs of the urban populations. In addition, the industrialists came to dominate the civic and other institutions which shaped the political and cultural life of the city. Even wider than this, the nations which first created large urban/industrial agglomerations, notably Britain, Germany and the USA, were stamping their

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INTRODUCTION

own imprint of development upon large parts of the rest of the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Second, and from a more purely academic perspective, the industrial/ urban form proved to be an enduring role model for development throughout the western world, certainly up to the mid point of the present century. Much of our understanding of the city, including the derivation of a large body of urban land theory which will be reviewed in Chapter 2, thus stems from it. Clearly, in the final quarter of the present century, the large industrial city with its traditional land use needs is undergoing profound change.

One of the major underlying questions of this book therefore is the extent to which our understanding of and planning for the city, based as they are upon a largely outdated model, are valid for present day and future needs.

The typical urban morphology which emerged in the latter phases of industrial growth in the mid twentieth century carried forward many of its earlier elements, but it also introduced important changes. These will be discussed more fully later, but they need to be introduced here. Above all, the morphological anarchy of the nineteenth century became tamed by the introduction of comprehensive town planning. This had many effects, amongst which the encouragement of hierarchical forms of urban centrality, the segregation of urban land uses and the introduction of a degree of order and tidiness were important. New forms of transport permitted a greater degree of specialisation in land use and created new locational imperatives. New building standards and codes were enacted as a response to the most squalid and haphazard aspects of earlier urban conditions. Social requirements in the form of community facilities, better space standards and amenity and environmental considerations were brought to the fore. Building materials and techniques became more standardised so that a greater degree of uniformity became the norm. Huge swathes of low density housing developments, high rise office and apartment blocks, efficiently laid out industrial estates and modular schools and hospitals were replicated from one city to another. Above all, the residential suburbs, catering for car owning residents became the characteristic morphological addition to the twentieth century city.

LAND AS POWER

Traditionally, the ownership, or occupation, of land has conferred great economic and political power. Originally, this was especially true of the large agricultural estates, but the cities too proclaimed the power and wealth of the major land owners, be they individual aristocrats, the monarchy or bodies such as the church. One of the greatest social changes prompted by the Industrial Revolution in Britain, was the transfer of power from the small number of wealthy ‘landed gentry’ to, at first a small, and then later a growing, number of urban and industrial interests. From this point onwards

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the power and influence of the individual land owners declined rapidly, except for those few like the Howard de Waldens and the Dukes of Bedford, Westminster, and Portland who were fortunate enough, or shrewd enough to possess large holdings in the growing urban areas.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, land, especially in urban areas, has retained its allure as a source of wealth, power and status, but the ownership pattern has changed significantly. There are still a few individuals who have made large fortunes from urban land, but for the most part the twentieth century has seen the emergence and steady growth of three different kinds of land owning groups. The first of these is a set of institutions, including pension funds, insurance groups, investment companies and other corporate interests. These bodies are interested in urban land for a number of reasons. Most obviously, they may actually use land and buildings to accommodate their own office functions, and in this they may be looking for prestige and corporate identity as well as functional office space. Who could fail to notice for example the Woolworth or Pan Am buildings in Manhattan or the National Westminster Tower in the City of London. More significantly, however, urban land and property represents to such bodies a commodity in which wealth may be stored and which may be traded, often with good prospects for capital gain and favourable tax conditions.

The second major set of urban land owners, which has also grown markedly during this century, is located in the public sector. This includes central and local government, public utilities, state owned industries and a number of other state and quasi-state bodies. Their involvement in land ownership stems from two different reasons. First, a number of public bodies exist in order to provide services, most of which require land, e.g., for schools, hospitals, roads, and housing. Second, for reasons of social equity and planning efficiency, public sector control may be exerted over land development and urban expansion. In a number of European countries in particular there are long traditions of municipal land ownership, and state bodies are often involved in the process of land development.

The third group of owners is the growing army of individual house owners. These have been responsible for a greater fragmentation and dispersal of land holding than ever before. Their motives are twofold. Most obviously there is the status, social advantage and freedom which is conferred by home ownership, but there are also economic benefits in the form of favourable tax arrangements and the prospect of long term financial security.

There is another sense also in which land is associated with power and control. Drawing upon the work of Michel Foucault (1984), Cullen (1990) has argued that political treatises in the eighteenth century began to bracket architecture, land and space together with control and power. Foucault is interpreted as arguing that the city, its built form and the practices of those

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INTRODUCTION

who sculpt that form are largely concerned with imposing institutions and structures of control over individuals.

LAND AS THE BASIS OF THE PLANNING SYSTEM

The two major themes outlined above, land as urban morphology and land as power, come together to form a large part of the basis of town planning. In Britain and elsewhere, the planning profession which began to emerge at the beginning of the twentieth century was concerned with many aspects of urban development, but new and more pleasing forms of urban layout and a concern to protect the interests of the weaker groups in society were central. In both of these endeavours, the use, disposition, ownership of and access to land were key factors. In short, town planning was largely synonymous with land use planning.

As far as morphology was concerned, the central task was seen as overcoming the worst aspects of the congested, and insanitary jumble of land uses which had typified the industrial city. Attempts had been made by a few enlightened industrialists in nineteenth century Britain and Germany, to build model settlements in which the needs of industry and its workers could be satisfied harmoniously, for example, at Port Sunlight near Liverpool. Early planning documents often proposed Utopian urban forms, some of which sought a return to more formal, pre-industrial layouts, whilst others attempted to deny urbanity by incorporating large amounts of open space and rural imagery. The interwar years were particularly influential, for they produced the International Congresses for Modern Architecture (CIAM). These paved the way for Le Corbusier’s ideas on the Ville Radieuse with its tall blocks of flats, wide areas of public open space and careful segregation of motor vehicles and pedestrians.

Many of these ideas were taken up in practical form after the Second World War, notably by the British new town movement, but whereas other European countries were emphasising technical innovation, in Britain the focus was firmly upon the vernacular. The layout of the American city too was influenced by the modern movement but here it was given a particular character by Frank Lloyd Wright. This took development in a very different direction where the preference for individual family homes and gardens was to be combined with the freedom of the motor car in a virtually anti-urban form known as Broadacre City.

The impact of these elements of the modern movement upon the morphology and land use of today’s cities has been considerable. Le Corbusier’s ideas have been used, albeit in a penny-pinching form, in high density residential developments in cities throughout the world. The new town movement culminated in Britain’s postwar development of more than thirty new towns, a style of urban development widely copied elsewhere and even more extensively reproduced in debased form through a multiplicity of

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suburban housing estates. Lloyd Wright’s ideas too shaped the development in North America, and increasingly in Europe, of low density cities with out- of-town shopping centres, leisure complexes and dispersed luxury housing developments.

Following the land as power argument takes us also to the heart of the planning system. In Britain especially, but also elsewhere, planning consists largely of the three elements identified by Peter Hall (1980). A professional bureaucracy forms the centre, and this is surrounded by a number of pressure groups and politicians. The first and third of these groups seek to balance and accommodate the demands of the middle group. The system is thus inherently political and it is significant that in seeking to analyse the politics of local planning, Blowers (1980) entitled his book The Limits of Power.

A large part of the justification for a planning system is that it resolves competing claims over the use of resources (especially land), attempts to balance an uneven distribution of power and protects the interests of weaker groups. In a practical sense, this includes the provision of land for community facilities and for housing poorer members of society and ensuring that some checks are kept upon the dominant land using activities. Much of the development of postwar planning in Britain, notably that in the new towns, placed great emphasis upon relatively egalitarian approaches and the importance of community values. Lord Reith (New Towns Committee 1946) was quite clear that these communities should be balanced, with a contribution from every type and class of person. The success of the planning system in protecting the weak, particularly in the provision of housing and community facilities, should not be discounted, but the ‘Robin Hood’ view of planning taking from the rich to give to the poor is not always appropriate. In the field of urban renewal, especially, there are abundant examples where relatively weak local communities have been pushed aside by a collusion of local authority and property development interests. In recent years, the prodevelopment policies adopted by a number of governments in order to combat urban decline have tended to downgrade the power of local and community interests.

Many examples of this can be seen, especially where the rise of an office economy has required a fundamental restructuring of urban land uses and a new economic infrastructure. In the USA the needs of urban renewal in some cities have resulted in powerful corporations persuading city governments to do much of the job of land assembly and provision of infrastructure (Friedland 1982). Following the 1949 Housing Act, city and federal governments began acting effectively as brokers for private developers. In the process they biased the power struggle between the political liberals and labour leaders who wanted low cost housing to replace slums and the corporate interests who wanted commercial and high rent residential development. The situation heralded what has happened in the London Dockland redevelopment in the 1980s. Such developments may well be desirable in the interests of the overall urban

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INTRODUCTION

economy, especially where they follow a long period of decline or dereliction, but they lend weight to Cherry’s question of’Whose values are being protected, and by whom?’ (1982:86).

LAND AS ENVIRONMENT

During the 1980s, there has been a renewed concern over the quality and protection of the environment. Although much of the interest has been expressed at a global scale, or has involved ‘natural’ landscapes, there are also many local issues concerning urban environments. Much of the original motivation for the development of suburbs came from the desire of wealthy people to construct pleasant environments which were separate from the congested city, and similar motives help to explain counterurbanisation trends today. Within the city itself, environmental concern was first translated into exclusive parks and walkways for the nobility, but by the nineteenth century municipal parks for all citizens were becoming common. Much of the imagery of planning, be it for municipal parks, garden suburbs, green belts or the design of contemporary office developments, has invoked the idea of bringing the countryside into the city.

URBAN CHANGE

The past two decades have been a period of far reaching change for urban areas in the developed nations. Almost all urban activities have been affected by the processes of change, to such an extent that even the concepts of urbanisation itself must be questioned. Naturally, there are profound consequences for our understanding of urban land issues.

Perhaps the most basic factor to be confronted is that a number of powerful forces have been conspiring in those countries with market economies to direct growth away from large cities. By the middle of this century there were signs from some of the largest cities, including London, that after nearly two hundred years of rapid urban growth the rate was slackening. In the middle 1970s a reversal from urban population concentration to deconcentration was widely identified in the USA by Beale (1975), Berry (1976) and Vining and Strauss (1977) amongst others. The results of the 1981 and 1991 censuses revealed that the process was well established in Britain too, and in fact had been since the 1950s. Hall and Hay (1980) summarised the growth trends, particularly from North American evidence, as moving:

1 from larger to smaller metropolitan areas 2 from metropolitan cores to fringes 3 from urban to rural areas 4 from older manufacturing areas to newer service areas.

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It soon became clear that these processes were very widespread and complex in their impact. The fact that they went beyond mere suburbanisation and local decentralisation led to the use of the term counterurbanisation. This process of counterurbanisation has been comprehensively reviewed for a large number of countries by Champion (1989). In this review, Frey (1989) suggested that it was the 1970s which represented the important decade of transition with counterurbanisation in the USA, at least, being a reaction to the economic shocks of the age. Champion concluded that by the end of the 1980s counterurbanisation was widespread but not universal. Some countries and cities continued to experience urban concentration and in others there were signs that the pace of counterurbanisation was slowing. Population figures for London, for example, suggest that some growth has resumed since 1984 and this prompts the possibility of a fresh reversal, back to the pre-turn- around pattern. Until further evidence becomes available there must remain some doubts about whether the 1970s represented a temporary hiccup in the pattern of urban growth, linked perhaps to cyclical economic depression, or signalled a long term tendency towards population dispersal and urban decline.

Whether temporary or permanent, certain explanations can be cited in this pattern of urban restructuring. First there is an economic dimension, expressed through changing patterns of urban employment. The large industrial cities of the western world have lost much of their industrial raison d’être in the face of competition from the newly industrialising countries in the Pacific rim and elsewhere. This has resulted in a dramatic decline in the number of industrial jobs in the urban heartlands of Britain, Germany, France and the USA. For example between 1971 and 1987 the following manufacturing job losses were recorded: London Local Labour Market Area, 602,000; Birmingham, 149,000; Glasgow, 110,000; Manchester, 103,000; Liverpool, 101,000 (Champion and Townsend 1990). The manufacturing plants which remain in these countries have been forced to change their modes of production, reduce and restructure their labour forces and choose new locations. At the same time, substantial growth has been recorded in service sector jobs; in Britain, for example, over 2.5 million service jobs were created in the period 1971–84 (ESRC 1989). Almost without exception these jobs had different labour and locational requirements from the manufacturing jobs which had previously sustained the cities, and hence they led to different land use needs.

In the social sphere too the 1970s and 1980s witnessed far reaching changes. The impact of changing age structures, family sizes and marriage patterns upon housing requirements and urban development has already been alluded to. In addition, changing lifestyle preferences, growing environmental awareness and increasing personal affluence for many encouraged people to seek work and residence in small towns with better living conditions, cleaner environments, lower crime levels and lower local

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government rates. In the process the size and power of the big cities has been weakened.

These two processes have been encouraged by improvements and growth in transport which has been both a prime mover and an enabling factor. In the West European countries for which statistics are readily available, traffic volume measured in millions of vehicle kilometres, increased on average by 17.5 per cent between 1984 and 1988. In the USA, starting from a much higher baseline of vehicle useage, the increase was 8.1 per cent. (International Road Federation 1989). In Great Britain, the ownership of cars and light goods vehicles increased by 23 per cent in the decade 1975–85 (Dept of Transport 1986). On the one hand transport congestion and delays in large cities have acted as a disincentive to industrial location, and on the other hand the growth in motor traffic has opened up outer suburban areas and small towns, both for industrial/office employment and for residential purposes. Even changes in the technology and handling of seaborne freight, and the dramatic decline in liner passenger traffic have hit many large port cities severely. This can be seen particularly clearly in the contemporary land use patterns of major dock areas.

Finally, government policies have played a significant part in the pattern of differential growth between large cities and other localities. In Britain, for example government policy during and after the Second World War actively encouraged the decentralisation of industry. Regional policy as variously operated in the postwar years, coupled with new town development programmes resulted in economic activity deserting the older and bigger cities in some measure. Similarly, in West Germany the regional planning policy (Kontuly and Vogelsang 1989) and in France the villes moyennes programme (Winchester and Ogden 1989) militated against big cities.

Alongside counterurbanisation, another major concept which helps to articulate the changing land use needs of modern urban society, is that of the postindustrial city. Hall (1988), in particular, suggested that Britain at least is well along the road to a postindustrial economy. Somewhat earlier he had suggested, along with others (Brotchie et al. 1985) that the microelectronic information technology revolution was beginning to produce changes in our pattern of living and working at least as profound as those produced by the Industrial Revolution, but within a shorter time frame.

The land use consequences of these trends, especially those of counterurbanisation and postindustrialism are still unclear and subject to intense speculation. But the general implications for urban and quasi-urban land patterns can be outlined. In short, the massive forces of economic and social restructuring are having, and will continue to have, profound significance for urban land. The overall pattern of change can be broken for convenience into two major components.

On the one hand, most large cities show signs of serious inner area problems. The loss of job opportunities, the concentration of deprived social

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groups, the collapse of the urban infrastructure, the unpopularity of many public sector developments and the difficulty of attracting private sector investment have all combined to sweep away the previous vitality of many of these areas. The immediate consequence has been to throw the inner city land market into turmoil. Land which once had a relatively high demand, and hence value, attracts little commercial interest once those traditional uses have deserted the city. As a result, vacant and underused land has become a common characteristic of such areas.

Conversely, the demand for land on the urban periphery, and in small towns throughout the outer metropolitan fringe is relatively buoyant. In Britain, Hall (1988:16) suggested that even if the major urban agglomerations succeed in stabilising their populations, the continued growth of what he terms the Golden Belt and Golden Horn regions in the southern half of the country will ‘entail a voracious demand for conversion of rural land for urban purpose’. This then is the general context, a massive and relatively recent restructuring of urban areas and their economies, even to the extent that our traditional notions of the city as a settlement form must be reexamined. It raises many issues about our understanding and use of urban land, which will be addressed in the following chapters.

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