No kidding - Village Magazine

58 April 2015

COMMUNITY not built

around children is no com-

munity at all. A place that

functions socially is one in

which they are drawn to

play outdoors. As Jay Griﬃths argues

in her magniﬁcent, heartrending book

‘Kith’, children ﬁll the “unoccupied ter-

ritories”, the spaces not controlled by

tidy-minded adults, “...the commons of

mud, moss, roots and grass”.

But such places are being pur ged f rom

the land and their lives. “Today’s chil-

dren are enclosed in school and home,

enclosed in cars to shuttle between

them, enclosed by fear, by surveil-

lance and poverty and enclosed in rigid

schedules of time.” Since the 1970s, the

area in which children roam without

adults has decreased by almost 90%.

“Childhood is losing its commons”.

Given all that we know about the

physical and psychological impacts of

this conﬁnement, you would expect the

authorities to ensure that the remain-

ing 10% of their diminished range is

designed to draw children out of their

homes. Yet almost everywhere they

are designed out. Housing estates are

built on the playing ﬁelds and rough

patches children used to inhabit, and

oﬀer almost nothing in return.

In the government’s master-plan for

England – the national planning policy

framework – children are mentioned

Bad planning forces

children indoors.

By George Monbiot

kidding

plenty of space for cars …

garden fences almost 9ft high

Also in this section:

End of milk quotas 60

Heather Humphreys 62

US-China emissions deal 64

Planet

Guardian

ENVIRONMENT

April 2015 59

only twice: in both occasions in a cata-

logue of housing types. In parliament’s

review of these plans, they aren’t men-

tioned at all. Young people, around

whom our lives should revolve, have

been airbrushed from the planning

system.

I recently wandered the new and

newish developments on the east side

of Northampton, choosing this area

because the estates here are spacious

and mostly built for families. In other

words, there is no possible excuse for

excluding young people.

In the places built 10 or 20 years

ago, there’s plenty of shared space, but

almost all of it is allocated to cars.

Grass is conﬁned to the roundabouts

or to coﬃn-like gardens, in which you

can’t turn a cartwheel without hitting

the fence. I came across one exception:

a street with wide grass verges. But they

sloped towards the road: dangerous and

useless, a perfect waste of space.

This land of missed opportunities,

in their hearts, reiﬁes the idea that there

is no such thing as society. Had you set

out to ensure that children are neither

seen nor heard, you could not have done

a better job. On the last day of the holi-

days, which was warm and dry, across

four estates I saw only one child.

By comparison, the Cherry Orchard

estate just completed by Bellway Homes

is a children’s paradise. But only by com-

parison. Next to the primary school,

with plenty of three and four-bedroom

houses, it’s designed to appeal to young

families. But while plenty of thought

has gone into the homes, it seems to me

that almost none has gone into their

surroundings.

In the middle of the development,

where a village green might have been,

there’s a strange grassy sump, sur-

rounded by a low fence. It’s an empty

balancing pond, to catch water during

exceptional ﬂoods. Remove the fence,

plant it with trees, throw in some rocks

and logs, and you’d have a rough and

mossy playground. But no such thing

was in the plans.

Other shared spaces in the estate have

the charming ambience of a prison yard:

paved and surrounded by garden fences

almost 9 feet high.

There were a few children outdoors,

but they seemed pressed to the edges,

sitting in doorways or leaning on the

fences. Children don’t buy houses, so

who cares?

Throughout the country, they

become prisoners of bad design, and so

do adults. Without safe and engaging

places in which they can come together,

no tribe forms. So parents must play the

games that children would otherwise

play among themselves, and everyone

is bored to tears.

The exclusion of children arises from

the same pathology that denies us decent

housing. In the name of market free-

dom, the volume house-builders, sitting

on their land banks, are free to preside

over speculative chaos, while we are free

to buy dog kennels priced like palaces

in placeless estates so badly designed

that community is dead on arrival. Mil-

lions want to design and build their own

homes, but almost no plots are available,

as the big builders have seized them.

In Scotland, the government is con-

sidering compulsory sale orders, which

would pull down prices: essential when

the speculative price of land has risen

from 2% of the cost of a home in the

1930s to 70% today. A national hous-

ing land corporation would assemble the

sites and supply the infrastructure, then

sell plots to community groups, hous-

ing associations and people who want

to build their own. It goes far beyond

England’s feeble community right-to-

build measures, which lack the muscular

facilitation that only public authorities

can provide. But still not far enough.

What if people were entitled to buy an

option for a plot on a new estate, which

they would then help to plan? Not just

the houses, but the entire estate would

be built for and by those who would live

there. The council or land corporation

would specify the number and type

of homes, then the future residents,

including people on the social housing

waiting list, would design the layout.

Their children would help to create

the public spaces. Communities would

start to form even before people moved

in, and the estates would doubtless look

nothing like those built today.

To the Westminster government, this

probably sounds like communism. But

as countries elsewhere in Europe have

found, we don’t need volume house

builders, except to construct high-

rises. They do not assist the provision of

decent, aﬀordable homes. They impede

it. What is good for them is bad for us.

Bellway, its brochure reveals, asked

children at the neighbouring primary

school to paint a picture of a cherry

orchard, and displayed the winning

entries in its show home. “Why not pop

over to say hello, view our wonderful

development and sneak a peek?”. That’s

the role the children were given: help-

ing the company to sell the houses it had

already built. Why can’t we shape the

places that shape our lives? •

This article ﬁrst appeared on the

Guardian’s website; www.monbiot.com

Where do

the children

play? Where

can they

run around

unsupervised?

On most of

the housing

estates I visit,

the answer

is hardly

anywhere

“

hostile to play

the charming ambience

of a prison yard