Big bad cities

The pun may have been weak, but the message behind WWF's headline ("Cities need to green up their act") seemed pretty clear: cities are the problem.

WWF (formerly, and perhaps formally, known as The World Wildlife Fund) has come up with a catchy and polemically useful way of describing our ecological footprint - the amount of the earth's natural resources needed to sustain our current lifestyles and consumption patterns. We - in the UK - are living a 'three-planet lifestyle'. That is, if the whole world were to live as we do, we would need three (or 3.1, to be precise) worlds to support us. That we are still alive is only thanks to people like the Indians, who make up for our profligacy by living a '0.4-planet lifestyle'.

The WWF report compares the performance of 60 British cities, and creates a ranking. Newport and Plymouth perform best, and Winchester comes off worst. So, these urban dens of eco-iniquity are dragging the rest of us down. Or are they? When you look at the figures again, it looks as if British cities are actually doing rather well: more than two thirds of them are performing better than the UK average. The press release seems to have forgotten to mention this.

This does not, of course, contradict WWF's main message, that we ought to consume and live more frugally and responsibly. Sure. But why are cities always the villains in this piece? In some ways (for example, sourcing food locally) it may be harder to live a one-planet lifestyle in a city. But Tesco's pandemic spread across the UK suggests that not everybody in rural areas shops locally, and in other arenas (public transport and higher density living) cities should have a natural advantage.

Asking how the green potential of cities could be better unlocked would be a constructive approach to this debate. But the green movement seems unable to move on from its utopian, pastoralist roots, regarding everything since the invention of the spinning jenny with deep suspicion. Green and pleasant land good; dark satanic mills bad.

Our cities may be part of the problem. But with a growing population, they will have to be the core of any solution.

Magic and loss

Tread softly when you tread on a childhood.

I surprised myself, when I read reviews of The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, and when I saw the trailer. I felt angry, let down, even personally affronted.

One has to put away childish things, but Susan Cooper's sequence of novels were probably the most important books I read as a child. Dad read me The Lord of the Rings (del capo, one hell of a job), and Narnia always looked a bit naff. But The Dark is Rising was perfect. It was about a child growing up near the Chilterns, where I grew up, and the books were rich, humourless and terrifying in a way that only a kid can appreciate.

The supernatural elements were prehistoric and portentous: mutilated sheep, horses' skulls and sad sea hags, not muggles, recidivist billy-bunterism and magic spells. They alarmed, but also inculcated a curious supernatural patriotism, educating the 1970s child about British folklore, and its casual and persistent horror, like a cross between The Wicker Man and the didactic monotone of Willard Price's novels.

Susan Cooper has been chillingly polite about the film, acknowledging the need for novels to change, but also questioning why an 11-year old English child had to be changed to a 13-year old American child in England. Others have also noted that an evangelical Christian director has reduced an essentially pagan world view to one that is reassuringly Manichean (anticipating the row to come over the films of Philip Pullman's novels).

Interestingly, she also reveals that she wrote the books as an exile in the USA, conjuring a vivid image of a distant Britain that is even more lost today than it probably was even then. I probably won't watch the film. But the books still grip me, and haunt me when I walk, and when I imagine I walk, in the old hills of England and Wales.

Fairways...and foul

Aside from looking as if a sporran, or some other Highlands rodent, has taken up residence on his head, there was never much to tie Donald Trump to Scotland, before his battle, reported in yesterday’s Guardian, to take over Michael Forbes’ coastal landholding 13 miles north of Aberdeen.

Mr Trump wants to build 1,000 homes, a 45-room hotel and a golf course on the site. The houses are regrettably necessary as a cross-subsidy for the nine-hole golf course, which is presented as a good thing in itself (and a saviour of the dunes, rather than, as Scottish Natural Heritage see it, a destruction of important natural heritage). Mr Trump’s sensibilities are particularly offended by the state of Michael Forbes’ property: “... the area is in total disrepair. Take a look at how badly maintained the piece of property is: it's disgusting. Rusty tractors, rusty oil cans.”

It sounds a mess, but the countryside isn’t neat. The countryside can be beautiful, alarming, calming and depressing. It can smell beautiful or rank, and can be muddy, sandy or soft. But it is rarely neat. Modern farmyards are some of its least appealing features: lean-to sheds, decaying farm machinery, scraps of blue plastic sacking and strange rivulets of chemicals vie to disabuse us of any pastoral fantasies. This, the shambolic yards seem to say, is a productive place, not a pretty place.

Golf courses, on the other hand, are neatness incarnate. Flying into Heathrow or Gatwick, you get a privileged, if not particularly sustainable, view of these made-up meadowlands, which pepper south-eastern England with their curiously pock-marked landscapes. Golf courses may be neat, but they are a whole barrel of ugly too: privatised green spaces, permitted within the green belt on the basis of being a 'leisure' use, but bearing as much relationship to the countryside as Mickey Mouse does to the rodents under my floorboards.

With the rising demand for land for housing, and insistent questioning of the sustainability of green belt policies, we might be tempted to follow the example of the Mayor of Caracas, who suggested seizing golf courses to house the city’s poor. Even at a fifth of his proposed density (5,000 people per course), we could use England’s 1,800 golf courses to house nearly two million people, which must go some way meeting the Government’s annual target of 200,000 new homes.

If that turns out to be a touch controversial – as it may – here is another modest proposal. We could simply reclassify golf-courses as previously developed ‘brown field’ land (which they surely are, given the earth moving and ersatz planting that goes into their creation), and let the housing market do the rest as land values rose.

It's been a long time

I've been distracted, having holidays, not smoking, all sorts. I've also been reading Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, The Power Broker.

The book is a monster of nearly 1,200 pages, and its subject comes over as pretty monstrous too. From the mid 1920s to the 1960s, Robert Moses dominated public projects in New York, covering the five boroughs and Long Island with new toll roads, beaches, parks and bridges, creating the type of alienating, car-dominated urban landscape that Jane Jacobs has taught all good urbanists to despise. He achieved these feats through a combination of thuggish arrogance and low cunning, with unattractive top-notes of racism and class prejudice.

And yet, governor after governor, and mayor after mayor, found him indispensable, unsackable. Whatever his methods, Moses got things done, and he got them done within electoral timescales. When he was building his first parks on Long Island in the mid-1920s, he had $1 million out of a total of $15 million. Instead of completing a few projects within budget, he assembled land for a much larger number, thereby forcing NY State Congress to vote him the remainder. Caro reports him as saying: "once you sink that first stake, they'll never make you pull it up."

What would Moses have made of Crossrail's latest faltering step forwards? When I worked on the Jubilee Line extension project in the mid 1990s, Crossrail was the next big project. Offices were being set up, and engineers recruited. And then, nothing. And now, maybe something? But breakthroughs are reported so frequently, and to so little effect, that it's hard to feel too excited by the news.

We seem to be very good at stopping big projects happening in the UK. The Treasury feels that it has been burned by so many wannabe-Moses characters, that it publishes volume upon volume of guidance on stopping big projects. The safest answer is always 'no'. Soon after London won the 2012 Games, I had a meeting with a senior civil servant. "You've got the Treasury in an awful spin," he said. "You've robbed them of their three standard strategies: delay, descope and say 'no'." At the IOC meeting in July 2005, London (Jowell, Livingstone, Coe) put some stakes in the ground. They won't be quickly forgiven.

No time for heroes

Think tank ippr are arguing for a new national bank holiday for Britain, 'which would act as a national ‘thank you’ for community heroes and as a national ‘ask’ for people to give back to their communities'.

I have nothing against another day off work, but this endless flailing around after a post-nationalist national day for Britain seems doomed to fail (I'll leave Northern Ireland out of this for the moment).

We are not like other countries: for nearly 1,000 years, we have consistently failed to be invaded (hence giving us the opportunity to liberate ourselves), to stage any proper revolutions or to execute our aristocracy. Other countries can celebrate these bloody triumphs, or equally arcane religious festivals, saved from guilt by the power of tradition.

Instituting a new festival is a lot more complicated: it's not easy to find an uncontroversial historical event that fits the bill since 1066 (and it's not clear whether 'we' won or lost then, or even who 'we' were). Waterloo? Trafalgar? Too bellicose. Patron saints? We have three of them, and there are other religions (and Richard Dawkins), you know. Welfare State Day? Too lefty. Diana Day? God help us.

So, we are left with the lowest common denominator, a fuzzily inclusive 'community day'. Do you live in a community? The word is weasel-y, often used as a euphemism for 'poor people', as a hollow claim of legitimacy or as a vacuous affirmation - an attempt to create unity through its application to a disparate group of people. It is hard to imagine what depths of telethon schmaltz such a celebration would sink to.

The interesting thing about ippr's proposal is their choice of date: the Monday after Remembrance Sunday. Remembrance Sunday already serves as a curiously sombre national day, lent diversity by the contribution of the Commonwealth to the wars of the last century. It's a poignant, autumnal event, a mournful memory of individual and national loss. Rather British, when you come to think about it...

Siren songs

I live on a busy road near Brixton Police Station, so I get to see – and hear – plenty of policing in action. From morning to night, police cars and vans rush past in a blur of sirens and blue lights, sometimes zipping past each other in opposite directions.

But you rarely see police officers out of their vehicles. Friday night was an exception. Emerging from Stockwell tube station, I was confronted by ten or so police officers in the ticket hall, with dogs nosing at passengers’ briefcases and shopping bags. What was this all about, I asked? ‘Public reassurance’, I was told, then (when I insisted that I was not feeling re-assured), ‘drugs’.

It made me think of another incident a few weeks earlier. A crowd of school kids had gathered opposite my flat at about 4pm, and were argy-bargying about. The man from Brixton Cycles, who keeps a close eye on the street, came out and told them to calm down, which they did.

A few moments later, a police car screeched to a halt, and two officers leapt out. As the crowd began to scatter and slink away, two more vehicles appeared: an unmarked car with two plain-clothes officers, and a minibus with several more. It’s worth noting in passing that all the kids were black, and all the officers white.

Meanwhile, within the past ten days, two black teenagers have been shot dead within half a mile of my flat: Nathan Foster near Brixton tube on Friday night, and Abukar Mahamud a week earlier in Stockwell. The lack of volume control shown by the police – their inability to deploy anything less than full force – is thrown into sharp relief by this horrific backdrop.

The police can’t be everywhere, of course, and cannot be expected to anticipate where crimes may take place, but this style of policing seems to have no sense of proportion, to allow for no half-measures. Police charge around in their vehicles, either chasing after crimes that have already taken place, or swarming over every infraction, however minor, as if facing the combined force of Osama Bin Laden and the Kray Twins

I know that many police officers deem the ‘bobby on the beat’ to be a public relations strategy that does nothing to prevent crime or catch criminals, but this approach - it would be tempting to call it the 'Hot Fuzz School of Community Policing' if it wasn't so serious - does not look efficient or effective. A few policemen and women patrolling on foot, particularly at night, might even deter the impression that our streets are war zones requiring personal protection, sirens and high speed driving skills to stay alive.

It’s hard to say whether a more visible presence on the streets might have saved two young lives, but we need to try something different. Whatever is happening now – however much it is presented as ‘scientific’ or ‘evidence-based’ – is clearly not working.

Paddling while England sinks

The Government’s consultation on boosting housing supply could hardly have started at a worse time. With residents of west country towns looking down at filthy waters from their first floor windows, this was not the best moment to publish policy documents that emphasise the need to create more homes, even if these are to be on flood plains.

To be fair, the Green Paper on housing does acknowledge the likelihood of increased flooding in the future, and the need to ensure adequate flood defences and to avoid “inappropriate development in areas at risk of flooding”. But these cautious statements sit uneasily with the desperate need for new housing reflected in the document. Can we have it both ways, or are we paddling while England sinks?

Seeing your home flood must be vile for the victims. Viler still must be the knowledge that, as the brown water inexorably rises, your next months will be spent squabbling with insurers, throwing out ruined carpets and furniture, chipping off sodden and contaminated plaster, just to make your home habitable again. Maybe the Environment Agency can be blamed for delayed warnings and late arrival of flood defence barriers, but these would only have bought time as rivers swelled to 36 feet above their normal level.

What is to be done? We could continue to build flood defences higher and higher, until the rivers that give many of our towns and cities their beauty are hidden from view by huge levees. Or we could turn the problem around, creating open space that can act as flood storage, and building homes that can quickly recover from flooding. The Dutch, whose country is one big flood plain, have already started to build amphibious houses on hollow concrete bases, which can rise four metres when rivers flood.

But we don’t need to go that far. Government and the Association of British Insurers (ABI) have both published guidance on flood resilience, for new build and existing houses respectively. Gypsum-based plaster can be replaced with more water-resistant materials, ground floor rooms can be used as service space, electrical sockets can be put halfway up walls and non-return valves can be fitted to drains.

Flood resilience measures might not be pretty – plastic kitchen units and concrete floors, anyone? – and leaving the ground floor to services and car parking conflicts with everything that urban designers learn about ‘animated street fronts’. But the ABI calculates that spending an extra £34,000 on making repairs to a three-bedroom house more resilient could save £37,000 on repair costs next time that the waters rise (let alone several times that in anguish).

One in ten UK homes is already at risk from flooding, and we can only expect that proportion – and the frequency and severity of floods – to increase. Instead of demanding ever higher, more intrusive and more expensive defences, like some latter-day Cnuts, we could accept flooding as a fact of life, which careful planning and design can turn from a cataclysm to an inconvenience.