Fringe Belts and Fixation Lines. is the Urban Jigsaw the best way of meeting contemporary planning needs?

Abstract

Conzen’s early Post War work on urban morphologies (Whitehand 1988, 2007) remains relevant, but the process it describes deserves more criticism than evident in most current attempts to reform or evaluate the performance of Town and Country Planning in the UK. Simple mapping of urban change shows that blocks of land are often developed or redeveloped together, creating and over time adapting a complex urban mosaic. This tends to incorporate adjacent countryside and to change the use of large sites previously occupied by transport, industry and other activities that no longer use this land (schools, hospitals, playing fields, allotments, retail parks, military facilities…). Where such sites are in effect abandoned, and not made available for alternative uses for some years or decades, this process may be critically described as ‘urban fallow’ (Clark 1985, 2001).

Changes to the UK’s long established Planning system under New Labour and Coalition administrations emphasise a few favoured rhetoric goals (sustainability, localism, climate change), but offer limited opportunities for popular engagement with, or criticism of, the planning process. This tends to facilitate or require most residential and other larger scale new construction to fit into the big blocks of land allocated for particular types of development. Resulting in a jigsaw pattern with urban morphology characteristics similar to those identified by Conzen, Whitehand and others.