In more detail
Planning professionals concerned with planning places are commonly called ‘town planners’ or ‘urban planners' or just 'planners'. Most work for local councils. Their professional body in the UK is the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI).
The need for planning the use of land (and a profession of people to do it) came up first in towns and cities because:
- there were generally many more competing ways of using land in urban places than in the countryside
- there is, in particular, the need to ensure there is land set aside for socially desirable uses which might not be privately profitable – roads, parks, government and public buildings etc
- the social effects of the way private land is used are concentrated in cities so that how land is used in one location can affect the potential for how it can be used in neighbouring properties.
History
The origin of urban planning is said to date back to Hippodamus who, in the 5th century BC, designed the orthogonal ‘grid’ pattern for urban streets (round about the same time as the catapult was invented and before the invention of gears).
After the Great Fire of London in 1666, King Charles appointed surveyors Wencelaus Hollar and Francis Sandford to produce a plan of the city as it stood. After which, controls on future development were announced:
- minimum widths for thoroughfares and distances between the overhanging rooves of the buildings that lined them;
- materials for new buildings restricted to brick and stone;
- the construction of a new quay at Blackfriars.
Various masterplans for the reconstruction of those parts of the city destroyed by the fire – including one from Sir Christopher Wren influenced by the boulevards of Paris - were considered, and rejected. So, the City of London was rebuilt along the lines of the rather haphazard street pattern which continues to define it 350 years later, but with the stone buildings which likewise have come to characterise it. The new Blackfriars quay was never built. Which, perhaps, illustrates an enduring fact: you can use planning to impose constraints on what people build (like those on building materials and road widths); but you can’t use planning to force people to build things.
Modern Town Planning
In industrial Britain, planning – alongside public health - became an essential part of enabling cities to grow. By the beginning of the 20th century, however, the conditions in industrial cities led to calls for greater regulation of space in them, so:
- the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) was formed by Ebenezer Howard in 1899 and the first conference of the garden cities movement took place in Bournville, Birmingham in 1901
- the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 (influenced by the garden cities movement) allowed local authorities (under the guidance of the Local Government Board) to prepare schemes for land in course of development, or likely to be developed; and the first academic course on urban planning was developed - at Liverpool University - in the same year
- in 1910, Thomas Adams was appointed the first Town Planning Inspector at the Local Government Board; and in 1914 Adams and others set up the Town Planning Institute which become the professional body for planners.
Further laws extending and defining the responsibilities of local authorities for town planning were passed in 1947 and 1990. By 2014, the RTPI had 22,000 members in the UK who were employed by local authorities and by government and other public bodies, businesses, charities and voluntary organisations and as independent consultants.
The video above was published by Spelthorne Borough Council in Surrey to explain what a planning officer does.
| Key Facts:
Urban planning dates back two and half thousand years. The modern town planning profession is just over 100 years old and was developed in England as the need for cross-diciplinary professionals to oversee development grew. Nowadays, professional planners work for local councils and for developers and consultancies. |
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BIRMINGHAM COMMUNITY PLANNING TOOLKIT DEFINITION SHEET This sheet may be reproduced in paper or electromic or any other form but please mention it was made by Chamberlain Forum Limited for Birmingham City Council supported by Department for Communities and Local Government.
| created: 2016-06-03 11:11:26 | by: admin | status: f published |