Rowan Moore

Rowan Moore is one of the UKs most eloquent and respected architecture critics. His third book Prop—erty: The Myth That Built The World raises key issues about how we provide housing which has profound relevance for our current predicament. Do we have an unhealthy obsession with ownership? Tim explores the issue with him.

 

Podcast transcript

Tim Abrahams: I love your cushions.

Rowan Moore: Yes. Have you seen them before?

Tim Abrahams: So, it’s Preston Bus Station centre point MI5 building and Outram’s Pump Station. But I don’t get that one.

Rowan Moore: That’s the National Library of Argentina by Clorindo Testa. They’re all Adam Nathaniel Furman.

Tim Abrahams:  Are they all Adams? 

Rowan Moore: Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: Oh, great. I recognize the Pomo ones. Yes, but not the

Rowan Moore: They’re All British except that, but Adam’s got Argentinian heritage,

Tim Abrahams: So, there we go. Good day to you. Super urbanists. I am Tim Abraham’s. Today I have invited myself into the home of one of the UK’s most enduring and insightful writers on architecture, Rowan Moore. Now Rowan, being a gentleman, has allowed me in largely, I think, because the subject I wish to talk to him about is most germane, do not let the cushion talk distract you. I want to talk to him about property, but this is not because Rowan has recently married and has just moved into a new house. But because he has published a book on the subject, a history of how we think about property perhaps, and with only months to go to the next election, and with the issue of housing, hopefully being at the top of the agenda, Rowan’s book is a timely intervention. There is however much to unpack in it and a lot to interrogate him about.

Rowan Moore: I’m Rowan Moore, architectural critic of the Observer and author of Property, the Myth That Built the World that has recently been published by Faber. My previous books were Why We Build, which was about the non-functional reasons why people build things. And my second book was called Slow Burn City, which is about London in the 21st century, but also referring back to its past to some degree. There’s an evolution in those three titles, which is away from being purely about architecture progressively because when I’m writing about architecture, I so often find there’s a story behind the building, which very often is to do with property and who owns it and why they own it, and what all the different factors are relating to ownership that quite often predetermine what the architecture’s going to be to a very large degree. So, although I continue to love architecture in itself and to be fascinated by it, I’m also interested in what lies behind it. And so, my second book about London was still quite architectural, but obviously when you’re talking about a city, you have to also have to look at a lot of the forces behind it and not just the facades on the streets.

Tim Abrahams:  Was there a particular moment when that coalesced into the idea? Actually, I need to take this forward. And

Rowan Moore: I think that’s always been a feature of my writing about architecture right back to the very beginning. So, it wasn’t a light bulb moment, but I did crystallize somehow. The other driving force behind this book is I’ve lived my entire adult life in what Margaret Thacher called the “property owning democracy”. The first election I could vote in was the one that brought her to power. And it shows you how old I am, and so. I’ve lived all the way through it and experienced the ideas that she promoted that ownership is great and everyone should own. And I do own and I have personally, as I say in the book, done well out of it, eventually after some struggles. And then progressively it became clearer and clearer that it’s not delivering all the promises it should. And we now have what’s commonly called a housing crisis. Sounds interesting, in how we went from this great dream of partnership to a situation where it’s become one of the biggest problems facing the country.

Tim Abrahams: Now that’s a very interesting moment that you’ve alighted upon. People ask me when I was reading your book, what’s the book about? I was asked three or four times or by the end I could reduce it down to something quite pure and I said, it’s a history of our understanding of property. It is interesting for me that you’ve picked out that moment as a significant one – Thatcher’s election and the idea of the property-owning democracy – because there’s a series of pivotal moments when the idea of property coalesces.

Rowan Moore: As you say, it’s not just about the present because I wanted to give it a wider span both in time and space, as it’s not just about Britain and it’s not just about the current decades. So, I do go back in the past and I’m looking at where the sort of modern idea of private property came from. So, there’s a particular moment that interests me, which is 1649 or thereabouts, which is at the end of the English Civil War. The King has been defeated and executed. All sorts of things seem possible. There’s a turmoil of ideas and you have the levellers and the diggers who are two groups of dissidents, troublemakers. They’re seen as both almost equally threatening by the establishment, and even after the king has been deposed and executed, Oliver Cromwell is very much trying to hold up a different status quo. And as far as he’s concerned, they’re both equally troublesome, but they actually express ideas that almost frame the opposition of discussion about property ever since in that the levellers were about private ownership and the diggers were about communal ownership and the level the levellers championed the right of individuals to own and they said that owning land, it’s almost like a piece of your body, it’s almost like a limb. because if you work the land, your body goes into the land and contributes to it, and what grows out of it is an extension of your body.

So, they were basically championing the rights of small holders, of small landowners against royalty. Again, aristocrats and large landed estates. And the Diggers said land should all be held in common and it was a corruption of God’s Edenic ideal that anyone should own anything and they both got suppressed. But the Levellers ideas pop up again in John Locke a few decades later, who also has this idea that your property is an extension of your body.

And if you come to own it through work, and if you’ve done that, then you deserve to have it; and it shouldn’t be removed from you because it was like an amputation to take it from you, and John Locke also said, property is natural. So, he gives property this elevated status that it is given by God. Which lays the foundations for the Anglo-Saxon model of ownership over the next few centuries and especially laid the foundation for the establishment of the United States through its constitution and then also through the Public Land Survey, the expansion of the United States across the continent of North America. The Public Land Survey was instituted shortly after the Constitution was published and it was the idea that the whole continent should be gridded up with lines that denoted property ownership even before that land had been taken or appropriated and

Tim Abrahams: That historical transition is, I’m very glad you raised it because it’s a key one. It strikes me that here is the fundamental period when we are thinking about property. You mentioned Locke’s idea that property was natural.

Rowan Moore: So, Locke tells a story about a man wandering in the wilderness. You know, again,an Edenic state, somebody a bit like Adam and he picks up an apple and he eats it. Locke says, at what point does that apple become his? Because by the time it’s in his body, it’s clearly his and you can’t take it out again. Locke says the apple became his through his labour of finding it and picking it up and therefore by extension, if you cultivate land, grow things, harvest the produce, cook the produce, then it becomes yours through a natural process, and I’m having some difficulty defending this because it’s not a definition of natural that I would precisely have myself, but it doesn’t, it appeals to a natural state of mankind before civilization started.

Tim Abrahams: And also, it was quite convincing at the time even though we may not fully identify with it. It’s illuminating to know that was very persuasive because Locke’s ideas go on to be influential. The idea of property being somehow a natural state is very influential on the enlightenment philosophers. Hume suggests that there’s plenty and the poets knows more than the philosophers because if we lived in this idyllic Edenic state as you describe it, there’s enough property for all. Interestingly, Adam Smith adapts it to the degree to which he says that there is sufficiency, but it actually behoves society to pretend that there isn’t.

In the fact that by self-betterment we can attain status and actually the struggle for attainment of status is something of benefit. So, we begin to trace the revolutionary nature of this idea. because it spreads out throughout human history. I thought it was very interesting that you chose the American one because immediately you have this idea that by creating this relationship between the body and the land that you therefore have this justification for what is an imperial endeavour really.

Rowan Moore: Yeah, and by the way, an important point to make in passing is when people like Locke are talking about property, they’re talking about agricultural land. Nowadays we tend to be talking about building land. That’s just an important point to notice. So, Locke made this argument about the naturalness of property and he did think about what do you do about greed? What do you do about people acquiring too much? And that troubled him because he was coming from a Protestant work ethic position, that it’s not about massive accumulation, it’s about acquiring what you need for yourself and no more, and he did worry about what would happen if there wasn’t enough to go round. But he said thanks to the existence of America, which he’d had some practical involvement with, although he hadn’t actually been there. He said, that’s okay. There’s a limitless land. America is so big we will never run out of land.

Which of course raised the question of what happened to the people who were already there, who were in fact occupying the land and also proved not to be true, because eventually the North American continent was occupied and divided up and so on. Then this argument about how it’s a reward for hard work is then used against the native population of North America. So, he says they basically don’t use the land efficiently because they don’t cultivate it, or they did to some degree, but not at the scale that the colonizer did. So, then he said the ability of Europeans to get more yield from the land justifies their appropriation of it so long as there’s enough left over for the native population, which is a formulation that gets repeated again and again in the 18th and 19th century as well, we’re entitled to take this land and make it more productive as long as there’s enough left over for the native people, but somehow there wasn’t or they end up in reservations.

Tim Abrahams: So, we are looking here at very much at the negative consequences of the early enlightenment. One of the other aspects is that Locke’s formulation and the way in which Hume and Smith take it forward is that property challenges birth right. If you have property you can vote. How does that influence the way in which the institutions of the modern state?

Rowan Moore: It’s an incredibly powerful and productive idea. So, you know, the industrial revolution could probably not have happened without the institution of this idea of property because it protects the right of landowners against arbitrary imposition by monarchs, for example. Which gives people the security to invest in land, to invest in a coal mine or a mill or a lot of the early industrial revolution was carried out actually by aristocratic land owners because they had the security of tenure to do that. Then the idea obviously in the United States built this very powerful and rich country and it does protect rights of property owners who after all, is a large number of people, not just large land owners.

So, my book is not saying everything about property is bad, that’d be very hypocritical of me and I don’t believe it. But it’s really just to point out the different aspects of it and ultimately to ask how can its promises be better fulfilled? Because its promises that it makes you rich and happy and free as an individual and does the same thing for societies. And quite often it does. But I also point out the ways in which it doesn’t. So, I’m really exploring the ways in which it has and hasn’t worked and how it might work better in the future. And conceptually I would say that the important thing is to get away from this idea that it’s natural and given by God rather than that it’s a very useful instrument, a very effective economic and political tool. But it’s not inevitably the only one you can use. I call it a convenient fiction.

Tim Abrahams: I have the question there. What is property and you’ve answered it? It’s a convenient fiction by which we organize land spatially.

Rowan Moore: Yes. Which is also not universal. So, you have societies in the world, which believe you can own land that God owns land

Tim Abrahams: Such as…

Rowan Moore: Nomadic societies, fuel societies. And then you have all sorts of shades and different definitions and descriptions of property in different places and different ways of holding land that give you different rights and responsibilities and restrictions, which quite often are just geographically based. If you’re a nomadic people, you just use land in a different way, you’re not going to draw lines around it and build fences because that’s a nonsense. So, it’s basically a practical issue, really not a theological or philosophical one.

Tim Abrahams: And you highlighted earlier that what Locke’s talking about is an agricultural understanding of property and what we move to in the industrial revolution, not exclusively but more commonly is a domestic or an industrial or an urbanized idea of property. How does our concept of what property is change at that time?

Rowan Moore: I think we’ve now arrived in a situation where in a country like Britain, most people live in cities. Most people are removed from the production of food. It’s not at the heart of their daily experience and their forefront of their concerns. Of course, it is still important who owns agricultural land. It’s just not at the forefront of most people’s everyday experience. Whereas ownership of a home or your non-ownership of a home is very much in the middle of your life.

Tim Abrahams: I don’t think you and I are the people to split hairs on what Marx said when, because that’s obviously, it’s a dangerous road to go down. But you quote Marx and Engel’s call for abolition of property in land, an application of all rents of land to public purposes. Interestingly, that’s in the Communist Manifesto, isn’t it? Later there’s always a later Marx also says “communism is the positive expression of annulled private property at first as universal private property.” There is there, I think, an interesting counter-story in which he suggests a universal ownership, can only be provided or can only be exceeded to voluntarily once everyone’s got their own bit to almost simultaneously give up. That’s how I understand it. Well, I don’t know if you could shed any light on that.

Rowan Moore: As you say, this is dangerous and complicated territory, but he wasn’t exactly anti-property. He just thought it should belong to the proletariat and not to private individuals.

Tim Abrahams: He also distanced himself from a Digger understanding.

Rowan Moore: Yes. And he also distanced himself from Prudhon who was crudely speaking an heir to the Diggers who did believe in small-scale communal use of land, not ownership. So, Marx wasn’t an anarchist, he didn’t believe that everyone should sort of do their own thing. He believed it had to be organized at a state level.

Tim Abrahams: Yeah. Through the book, as you’ve intended, one begins to question the idea of property and its sacred status. Why do that? If you don’t mind me asking a blunt question, but I think it’s very interesting.

Rowan Moore: Because I think that elevated status given to private property has got us to a situation that’s causing quite obvious problems. In the case of Britain and a few other places, it’s caused an inequality, of wealth in property that has become a very dominating economic and social feature. You know, we in Britain or in significant parts of Britain, we’re now in the situation where there’s just a huge difference in people’s wealth, life prospects, security based on luck more than anything else as partly age based. If you’re old enough and you had the means to invest in property 30 years ago, you’re going to be doing a lot better than someone who’s a bit younger that then perpetuates to the next generation. So, you can have two people who are equally talented, equally hardworking, et cetera, but they have very different lives based on their luck in this property market essentially. And that doesn’t seem right.

We have a situation where people’s life decisions, their life chances are very severely impacted by their ownership or lack of ownership. And that just seems really hard to justify. And then you could also say it manifests in issues of climate because the philosophy of private property doesn’t have a lot to say about the impacts of what you do on your land, on everyone else who’s not on your land. Pollution is a good example of that. And then climate change is this worldwide manifestation of that problem. Yeah. So, I’m saying here’s this powerful idea that is also producing quite serious problems. So can we look at the idea and see where those problems come from and also see what might be done about it. And then I also look at the line of thinking that says, you never entirely own something yourself.

Henry George was a famous protagonist of that theory. So, he said as have other people that if you own land, its value doesn’t just come from what you do, it comes from has someone built a railway line nearby? What are your neighbours doing? Are there other businesses in the locality that contribute to the well-being or otherwise of that place? To quote Marx again, he said an isolated individual could no more have property in land and soil than he could speak. So, in other words, owning land is an intrinsically social and enmeshed activity. It’s not something that can exist in isolation. And from that, in the case of Henry George came the idea that the other property is social and that in his case you can tax this in ways that return its wealth to society.

Tim Abrahams:  Henry George is advocating a property tax.

Rowan Moore: Yes. He advocated a land value tax, which he said would, if you had that tax and nothing else, you wouldn’t need any other taxation. And it was a taxation on the element of profit in land. So, you can own land, but the speculative profit of it gets taken away from you.

Tim Abrahams: So as soon as the land increases in value, because for instance, a new railway line opens and a new railway station. So, near your property rate is raised in price.

Rowan Moore: State. Yeah.

Tim Abrahams: And you therefore pay a higher rate of property tax.

Rowan Moore: Yeah. So, land value tax has been a bit of an obsession of sometimes slightly cranky political groups for quite a long time. It’s never quite happened.

Tim Abrahams:  Are you talking about the Liberal Democrats here?

Rowan Moore: Possibly. But for one reason or another hasn’t quite happened ever in the way he envisaged. But the principles are actually built into the British planning system to some degree. So, when the Labour government came to power in 1945, they brought in the Town and Country Planning Act, they nationalized the development value of land. So, they said you can own land. The development value belongs to the state. That really comes from Henry George ultimately.

Tim Abrahams: Can you help us understand what development value means?

Rowan Moore: That’s the value that comes when you have the right to build something on it. So, when you get planning permission basically. So, the philosophy behind the Town and Country Planning Act was that development value belongs to the government. When you get planning permission for something, the government is giving you that value. And that’s then the basis through which things like planning gain can happen. So, it is happening in a somewhat rickety way, but it is actually built into the planning system. These ideas that go back to Henry George,

Tim Abrahams: The planning permission increases value of land and some of that value should be returned to the state, either through planning gain or through potentially some other form of taxation system.

Rowan Moore: One of the other things the labour government in 1945 did was institute the program of new towns, which were in turn based on Ebenezer Howard and the Garden City. And Ebenezer Howard was very explicitly influenced by Henry George. So, there’s a lineage there.

Tim Abrahams: In fact, just interject, so we’ve got this, one of the interesting aspects and one of the most neglected aspects of the Garden City movement is that a trust is the centre of it from which any value which increases as a city develops and land values increase generally.

Rowan Moore: Yes, exactly. So, the bit that people most remember about the Garden City is the idea of the garden and the city. That it’s houses and work and green stuff altogether. But I think possibly more than half the book is actually about the financing of it or a very significant part of Howard’s book is about how do you finance it. And the idea was that it would be held in trust and that, so a piece of land designated as investment is made in that land that increases the value that generates profit that Howard called the unearned increment. And that profit should be recycled back into the trust to build public amenities and maintain public amenities . That’s essentially the philosophy behind the new towns.

So, you had development corporations who are acquired land and granted itself planning permission, invested in infrastructure, raised the values, generated profits, which can then be recycled for the public benefit. Which is in fact what happened. And it’s a bit disputed exactly what the figures are, but it’s sometimes said that the entire new towns program ultimately didn’t cost the treasury anything. That might be a slight exaggeration, but it was certainly a pretty effective way of funding a very ambitious and effective program

Tim Abrahams: To be devil’s advocate, not quite devil’s advocate to offer a counter case. Wouldn’t it be better rather than questioning property, wouldn’t it be better if we just secured property for everybody?

Rowan Moore: Tell me more.

Tim Abrahams:  It’s a weak manifesto on this to stand for election. But let’s go back to one of the pivots that you’ve lighted upon for the book, which was to go back to 1979 and the election of Thatcher. And you talk about the property-owning class and property-owning democracy. One of the really touching episodes and really revealing episodes in the book is where you discuss what happened to one of the individuals who was the first who bought their own home. A thought experiment. What would have been the implications if every single sale that was made under that scheme, every single bit of profit went into building more homes?

Rowan Moore: That was one of the main problems with that scheme because right to buy was good in some ways on the whole, people prefer to own their own home if they can. It’s not right for everyone but it’s pretty clear that’s pretty widespread aspiration. I think it’s particularly true in the UK because the alternative models are not very attractive. I think there’s a basic appeal about owning your own home that should be respected. It’s not right for everyone, but it’s certainly good to make it more widely available. And also, true that there were quite negative aspects to the situation when Margaret Thatcher came to power, which is that you had very widespread council ownership, which did put immense power in the hands of local authority housing departments who were not always the greatest custodians of that power. And it did limit people’s freedoms in some ways. So, the idea of expanding ownership was not a bad one in itself. The problem was that replacements weren’t built neither at the level of social housing, nor at the larger scale.

Tim Abrahams: There was a double loss in many regards.

Rowan Moore: Two things have gone wrong. I would say between sort of the early eighties and now. One is that the supply of social housing has diminished in quality and quantity. And the other is in the private sector house prices have gone up to an insane degree. And those are two different but related things. The first one, the problem was caused by the failure to replace at an appropriate rate. The second has been caused by both a failure to keep up with demand and also a continuous incentivization of home ownership by successive governments and actually seeing house price inflation as a good thing, which has ultimately got us in the situation we’re in now. Which are, yeah,

Tim Abrahams:  Seems to me utterly insane. That condition. The idea of house price inflation being good.

Rowan Moore: I say in the book it’s a weird wealth that means so little in practical terms to those who have it and so much to those who don’t. Because as you say, if you do and you can say, gosh, it’s amazing my house is worth this much. But you can’t use that wealth except by getting off the property escalator.

Tim Abrahams: Except by dying and giving it to your kids. It is a nonsensical situation. You mentioned, I don’t know whether I want to go back to my manifesto of houses for everybody. Yeah. But thinking through the idea of the book, tell me why and in particular ways why my idea is ludicrous.

Rowan Moore: I didn’t actually say it was ludicrous. We could mention Hernando DeSoto who’s the Peruvian economist and former presidential candidate who had this idea that you could give title and land to people in informal settlements. So, he said if you have people squatting on land living in favelas, you give them the title to their land and that will unleash a huge amount of wealth and it will give them the freedom to start businesses. They can use their land as collateral, et cetera. And he’s been quite influential and it has been implemented sometimes. And as it’s been implemented successfully, the places in which it has not been implemented successfully have been, when people have got tied on their land, it’s worth extraordinarily little, they’re still very poor.

They’re very vulnerable to people coming along and saying, oh, I’ll buy your bit of land off you. And then saying it to all their neighbours and then amassing land and then turfing the mag, which has also happened. I guess the idea of everyone owning is attractive. I don’t think it’s ever going to happen and I think quite a lot of people are always going to want to rent because it just suits them. That’s probably where I would depart from you. But I think there’s always going to be a dynamic situation and you’re always going to have appropriation and winners and losers and you’re always going to have people using barely legal terms and barely legal means to achieve their ends.

So, there’s just going to be a pushing and a pulling forever in which I think the state always has to play some role of redressing the balance from time to time and protecting weaker people. So, I don’t think it is an ending story. There’s never going to be an arrival point at a perfect destination. I’m not proposing any ultimate solution because I don’t think there is one. But I think, you know, in the pushing and pulling that needs to go on at the particular time we are in now, the pushing has to be more against the idea of the sacrosanct nature of private property than the opposite. If I’d been writing this in 1979, maybe I would’ve been a bit more Thatcherite? because maybe the more evident problem at that point was the overreach of public ownership.

Tim Abrahams:  The main problem with that program is that there wasn’t a like-for-like. You are not building anymore. The idea – it is only a valid exercise if it extends outwards.

Rowan Moore: Ultimately what’s important obviously is the quality of the homes that people have. Do you have a home full stop? Do you have a home that allows you to live your life as you would like to live it? That has basic qualities of comfort and safety and health and the ability to give it your own identity. That’s what’s fundamentally important. This is a place where you can get on with your neighbours and you’ve got all the services you want. Those things are obviously what is most important. Not the title of the property. The title of the property is a means to those ends.

Tim Abrahams: I would agree with you in an absolute sense, but if you speak to anybody in their thirties at the moment, they would say, I’ll just take anything please. That’s the desperate state we are in.

Rowan Moore: Yeah. So, the idea that you might, in finding a home, be looking for something that reflected your dreams, your personality, your lifestyle, whatever that’s got severely atrophied because yeah, people just go, I’ll just grab what I can.

Tim Abrahams: First step on the ladder and then you realize that’s the ladder.

Rowan Moore: Yeah. That is the ladder; a ladder with one wrung. That’s a very serious problem. And in the book, I talk about how Britain used to be famous for the ideal of a house with a little garden that most people could aspire to, and that was seen as a very civilized thing. And in London, at any rate and much of the southeast and certain other cities, that’s gone and how many houses have gone to get built in London now?

Tim Abrahams: There is, if I was working for the Centre for Cities for example, I would say what you need to do is reform planning law. Let’s build more and that will solve things.

Rowan Moore: I’m very hostile to the idea that it’s purely a question of supply and demand and that if you just release the constraints and allow house builders to build whatever they want, wherever they want, everything will be solved. Because we’re never not going to have planning people like planning. Planning is actually a very popular thing when it comes to protecting where you live. Again, undesirable development, I think it’s right that land is a scarce resource. I think it’s right. That is protected and governed by rules to some degree. If you have planning, you therefore always have some restriction on supply added to which it’s been very clearly shown that house builders will never build in the quantities where they lower the value of their product. So, there’s a concept called absorption, which is that housebuilders will only build at the rate at which the market can absorb their product.

Tim Abrahams: Just to, this is the argument say for the House Builders Federation, what we need is an agreed local plan where there are areas of development, it’s set out, everyone knows where it is. That means that small house builders can build a number of homes to their limit, 9,10. This then becomes an insurgent to the monopoly of the larger house builders. And that one of the issues is the way absorption actually works is because of a monopoly situation; that they can control it. Whereas if you have a situation where everyone’s agreed where everyone can build, then smaller house builders can pick up the slack and there’s some… absorption is a function of monopoly. Is there something to be set for reforming planning laws so, we don’t have the situation where monopoly thrives i.e. the only people that can keep building are volume house builders, because they can see out any protests on a local level because you don’t really have

Rowan Moore: and they can invest in the expense of planning.

Tim Abrahams:  Expensive planning, expense of publicity, the expense of just sitting It.

Rowan Moore: Yeah. I certainly think that clarity in the planning system is a good thing. If you can say this is the land that’s available, these are the constraints on building on it, those are the rules, no more discussion that’s attractive in principle. Agree with that. In practice it seems extraordinarily hard to achieve. But I also think that’s not going to be enough on its own. I really don’t see an alternative to a more proactive role by government, learning a bit from the Attlee government and from New Towns movement, which certainly cannot be done in the same way again, partly because it’s heavily dependent on compulsory purchase, which is a very contentious instrument. A little while ago I said if you can build high-speed railway lines, you can build new towns. But of course, we now discovered you can’t build high-speed railway lines.

Tim Abrahams: You can in Morocco, you can in Thailand, but apparently not in the United Kingdom.

Rowan Moore: But if you take the attitude that housing is infrastructure, which to some degree it is, if you take it as seriously as roads and airports and railway lines are taken, you might be getting somewhere.

Tim Abrahams: I think we should just compulsory purchase something even if we’ve got no intention of building on it. Just to put the frighteners on people.

Rowan Moore: Something that’s changed in a way that should be advantageous since the 1940s is the value of land. Which means that the unearned increment is much, much bigger. Ebenezer Howard had no concept of the sort of 20, 30-fold, whatever it is, increase in value that comes when you get permission to convert agricultural land to building land. So, there’s actually wealth that he could not conceive of. So, in principle, if you know, you look at the green belt, you look at the incredible value locked up in it, there really should be a way of developing a very small proportion of that land in a way that is beneficial to everyone. But I wouldn’t pretend I’ve got all the answers to how to do it, but the principle is there.

Tim Abrahams: From what you’re saying, you would look at the ideas of how to hold value in trust as expressed by Howard in the Garden City movement, there’s a garden city around the green belt. You don’t really have to go too far to see the example, do you? It is interesting that at the beginning of our discussion, you described the idea of moving further away from architecture throughout your writing. But obviously what you are writing has huge implications for architects. What messages do you think architects should take from the book? And we’re coming up to an election, what should the general public as perhaps two different people, what do you think we should be advocating for asking for from that?

Rowan Moore: I think architects have got a really important role to play potentially. Because if you are talking about new housing on the green belt or adaptively reusing existing buildings, design is a huge part of that and you can do it well or badly and it can make a huge difference to the outcomes, how it’s designed and part of the problem is that if you say to people, oh, some new housing might come to your locality. They know immediately what that means, which is the developer’s standard product and they don’t like it quite reasonably. But if it was possible to convince people that actually it could be better than that and by which I’m not so much talking about the look of the houses as how are things planned so that public benefits are actually created…

Tim Abrahams: To the existing homeowners as well as the new ones.

Rowan Moore: Yeah. There’s a high level principle here is that you have an enormous amount of wealth. You release that wealth. It should be possible to do that in a way that is beneficial to almost everyone. But it’s very hard to say to people, this is what happened here, because the examples don’t exist all that much.

Tim Abrahams: It’s a vicious circle we’ve got ourselves into, isn’t It?

Rowan Moore: Yeah. So, there’s a lack of trust, but that’s partly a question of design. And we’re in a situation where architects are very marginalized now and frustrated in general. But there’s actually an opportunity. There is a very important thing where they could play a role and this is beyond the scope of this particular book, but maybe some architects should get together and say this is how you could do it and now we have Create Streets who are saying, look at Poundbury. Poundbury is new housing that has some public facilities, some public aspects to it. It has got this architecture that is said to be beautiful, but somehow, they’ve made all the running with this and you would’ve thought architects could push back or make their own contribution and there’s a space that Create Streets have occupied because no one else is. So, maybe some architects should rise up and fill that space.

Tim Abrahams: And propose the Newtown of

Rowan Moore: Propose some models. Yeah,

Tim Abrahams: I think that’s an excellent point to end on. There’s probably questions I haven’t asked, but one of the things I’ve learned during making these things is if there’s a lovely point to end on, then end on it.

Tim Abrahams: Thank you so much to Rowan. It’s amazing because although I do disagree with some of what he focuses on in his book and my review of it for The Critic, which will be published in their next issue, takes it to task in a way I applaud its necessity and through discussion of its implications, find something profound to agree with him on. I think the conclusion we arrived at in our conversation here, Rowan and I, is one which I emphatically do agree with. Like Rowan, I stand outside architecture. I found myself in moments thinking exactly as he has done here. Come on architects, let’s see it.

Anyway, this was Superurbanism, a Machine Books podcast. My name is Tim Abrahams. Having listened this far, you are now morally bound to like, subscribe forward, tell all your friends about how great it is. See you in a couple of weeks. Bye-Bye.

 

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