Building vulnerable suburbs on the edge of the South-East

1. Building vulnerable suburbs on the edge of the South-East Allan Cochrane, The Open University Bob Colenutt and Martin Field, The University of Northampton Presentation to CRESC conference, SOAS London, September 2013

2. For much of the period since 1945 (and in accelerated form after 1979) it has been taken for granted that home ownership has been the route to security – delivering invulnerability (or at least reducing invulnerability) through bricks and mortar. • The suburbs have been invented as places of safety away from the threats and challenges of the (cosmopolitan) city, as protected spaces of family houses, gardens and steadily rising property values (Barker). Making a suburban world

3. Suburbs as monocultural – also an escape from dynamism, creativity, diversity (Jacobs) • Popular representations of life in England’s ‘home counties’ well into the 1960s are quintessentially suburban • Men in pin stripe suits and bowlers travelling up to the city or Whitehall to work • Women at home, maintaining the domestic sphere Critique

4. Containment of urban England (Hall et al) – making up the green belt • Defending South Bucks (Charlesworth and Cochrane) • 1990s attempt to construct forms of suburb that drew on images of rurality in the South East, apparently to escape from urban sprawl into the protected space of the countryside (Murdoch and Marsden 1994 and Marsden et al 1996). Defensive suburbia

5. Imagined as having secondary status – housing for those working in the city (Chicago School and its legacy) • 21st century new urbanism and the drive for sustainable communities beyond the metropolis (Duany) • California model (Dear) • Zwischenstadt (Sieverts) Re-imagining the suburbs

6. No longer quite so secure; no longer quite so protected • Living with multiculture – no longer (so) monocultural – evidence from the Census • The case of Milton Keynes • And, equally important, play central role in the way in which social and economic relations are experienced and even driven Thinking through the implications

7. In early years of this century, London’s suburbs were at the core of wider plans, expressed through language of sustainable communities – sustainable urban extensions. Housing to maintain economic growth • Some aspects of the suburban (or exurban) dream had to be re-imagined in this context, as new development was interpreted in ambivalent terms – threat or opportunity • Translated into the language of ‘infrastructure’ “We were dubbed as anti-housing but we were never anti-housing. Infrastructure should be planned around the housing not after it” Living through the implications

8. The 2008 crisis in the housing market was just one expression of the wider financial crisis - not only were plans for new house building put on hold, but in most parts of the country – outside London - house prices fell • In this context policy shifted, too towards an emphasis on viability • “When you are planning a new town you must have massive infrastructure. Planners say they will get this from roof tax and section 106 but if they can’t get developers to hand over their money that’s it.” From sustainability to viability

9. Still at the imaginative core of public policy – housing growth on the edge of the South East • Centre for Cities • City Deals – the case of Milton Keynes • No longer protected spaces: the search for invulnerability has helped to create new vulnerabilities as they have ceased to be marginal or secondary spaces Towards a suburban world