Since the industrial revolution began in these islands, the history of most of its cities has been one of desertion by people with choice and money. The cities are where our wealth was created, where the middle class was formed and grew. But even as their populations exploded, as they sucked people from the land into their stinking, lethal centres, most of those who succeeded in life were getting out. With them went their standards, money, children and talents.
We are still fleeing the city. The population of Britain's eight largest conurbations fell by 2m between 1961 and 1991. In six of these eight, it continued to fall through the 1990s and they are projected to shrink throughout this decade. Each day they suffer a net loss of 300 people to smaller towns and the countryside. People see the big city as a place of crime, congestion, sink schools and immigrants (many of whom have lived here for generations).
Meanwhile, the debate about where to build the more than 4m new homes Britain is forecast to need over the next 25 years rumbles on, exacerbated by soaring house prices and the impossibility of low and middle income families getting on the housing ladder in large parts of the country. What chiefly excites the pressure groups, the press, the public and the politicians is the threat this pent-up demand poses to Britain's countryside. How much of the new development can be squeezed into existing towns and cities instead of obliterating woods and fields? The answer is only a little more than half. The stock of existing suburban, rural and small town homes is nowhere near enough to satisfy the demands that arise from a rising number of households combined with our distaste for big cities. So new suburbs spread into the countryside, while urban abandonment continues.
Britain's house builders and planners, the defenders of the status quo, see things in a more positive light. They point out that for 50 years we have had a complex, democratic system that negotiates and plans the growth of our towns and cities. It is not just the prosperous who have escaped from the cities; the system has decanted millions of working-class families from overcrowded centres into suburban council housing on the urban fringe or new towns in the countryside. People aspire to more house and garden space, household sizes are shrinking, the population is slowly growing; all of these things make massive greenfield development inevitable. For more than a century, the flight to the suburbs has played an important part in our national story of rising living standards and, it is claimed, it continues to today.
But 40 or 50 years of urban decline have changed some of the terms of this debate. The link, for example, between density and wretchedness was broken decades ago. Some of Britain's most deprived people live in spacious, grassy council estates on the edge of cities, while some of its richest live in high density apartments at their heart. (The most deprived ward in England is in Wythenshawe, supposedly England's third garden city, a leafy, medium density suburb of council semis built on Manchester's southern edge between the wars.) Industrial decline has left swathes of derelict land and buildings within the big cities, and the abandonment of entire streets and neighbourhoods in Scotland, the north of England and the midlands is adding to the urban wasteland.
People are pulled to the suburbs partly because they can purchase more house and garden space there. But what is pushing them away from the cities is as important and that, primarily, is the presence of poorer people. The greatest shortages in the city are not of space and greenery, clean air and quiet but of trust and security, of earned incomes and self-esteem. Each decision to leave further concentrates the population who lack money and choices, which makes the inner city an even less desirable place to live. Here is a classic case of rational, self-interested behaviour by individuals having a damaging impact on society as a whole. It increases car dependency; it amplifies poverty. The costs to the taxpayer, as the state tries to deal with the resulting problems, are large.
It is true that the core of most of Britain's big cities enjoyed a revival in the 1990s, thanks to growth in the service economy and a wave of National Lottery money and public spending. People with money still want to work, meet, shop and play in city centres and by and large they have become better places for these activities. Their great squares, public buildings and railway stations have been refurbished. That most wonderful of things, the tram, is making a comeback.
Each year thousands of new homes are completed in the core of our cities, by converting warehouses and shops or building new flats and town houses on canal banks and factory sites. But this inflow is tiny compared to the outflow. When young, prosperous loft dwellers plan babies they almost always get out of town. The city centre housing boom does not spread out into the tatty, sad badlands of the inner city which lie just beyond, into the council estates and the remaining rows of small pre-1914 terrace houses. In a sane world, this belt, lying one to two miles out from the centre of Glasgow, Birmingham or Manchester, should be where their more prosperous citizens lived. These would be the most desirable addresses, with the highest house prices. Work and play in the city centre would be only ten minutes away. The rest of us, with less spending power, would have to live in cheaper property further out. (Which is what happens in London-a very unusual British city.) Instead, the inner city is a doughnut of deprivation, where the poorest citizens predominate.
Some people argue (see Paul Ormerod, Prospect, February 2002) that urban areas are bound to become divided into residential zones defined by class, income and-in some places-ethnicity, because people prefer to live amongst like-minded people. But although public policy must take account of this inclination, it must also lean against it. For it is the flight of the middle income majority from the larger cities that is sabotaging Britain's chances of becoming a better and fairer country.
The education system is, of course, central to this argument. Schools are in the front line of urban decline, both its victim and its cause. Despite the many changes in policy in recent decades, what still usually decides whether a pupil enters any particular state school is the proximity of her or his home to it. Parents who care about their child's education want to move into the catchment area of a good school. Wealthier, owner-occupier parents have a better chance of making this move than poorer ones. This pushes up house prices around the good school, meaning you have to be wealthier still to make the move needed to get your children into it. Middle-class children whose parents expect them to obtain a clutch of qualifications come to dominate the intake. Most teachers prefer to teach in this kind of school, so head teachers find it easier to pick the best of them.
The process moves in the opposite direction for schools serving declining inner city neighbourhoods or big, postwar council estates further out. The intake is dominated by children from households where there is often little encouragement to learn. The government struggles to improve such schools with a mixture of extra help and threats. But they are swimming against the tide. Low achieving schools and poor neighbourhoods drag each other down. New Labour's latest ideas-city academies, more specialist schools and high-achieving schools taking over low achievers-will not change these fundamentals.
In a democracy that craves new talent, some people escape from bad neighbourhoods to make their fortunes. But for every such child who succeeds, there are dozens who will sink into shorter, emptier, lives than most of their peers raised in wealthier homes.
I became interested in these issues for many reasons. Like most Britons, I have lived in cities all of my adult life and wondered from time to time about moving to the country. I have struggled with school choice, moving from inner to outer London in the hope of finding a better state school for my children. As the Independent's environment editor, the loss of countryside to new housing (the largest source of greenery-consuming development) was a stock-in-trade-I came to realise how much we could reduce the strain on the environment if we got urban living right on this crowded island.
The history of intelligent worrying about cities is long and rich. After the 1997 election, it moved briefly into the limelight as references to an urban renaissance project cropped up in ministers' speeches. In 1998, a government-appointed Urban Task Force, chaired by Richard Rogers, produced a report with dozens of sensible recommendations. At the same time, the New Labour government pushed ahead with its policies on poverty, the regions and the environment. There were big initiatives in these fields during the first term. The first white paper on urban policy in over 20 years was published in 2000.
But, apart from the patchy revival of city centres, there is little sign of our cities undergoing the fundamental improvements that would constitute a renaissance. This is not a case of the government having set out the reforms and developed the policy framework in the first term and now having to deliver with increased public spending and good management in the second. It is, rather, a case of the forces acting against big cities being too entrenched and too powerful for the policies and planned spending to work.
A further difficulty is London's domination of national life. London suffers from all of the urban afflictions found in the other big conurbations, save for pockets of total abandonment and collapsed property prices. It has large numbers of poor people and is, for many Londoners, an unpleasant and an expensive place to live. But because it is a world city, where careers are launched and consolidated, it exerts a magnetic pull and has experienced successive waves of gentrification. The affluent middle classes live in huge numbers in inner London, uneasily cohabiting with the poor, on a scale unlike any other big British metropolis. And after decades of decline its population is growing, fuelled largely by immigration.
Despite its ills, London flourishes. In doing so, it makes the London-based establishment less able to appreciate the plight of the rest of urban Britain which lacks the capital's advantages. Delivering a renaissance which embraces most of the great cities will require broader policy changes and more political pain than the government has been willing to offer so far. Yet the potential reward is great-a reduction in environmental damage and a narrowing of the widening gulf in prosperity between different income groups and different regions.
People will argue forever about why individuals are poor. There is the view of government and liberal society which assumes that poverty is something you have the bad luck to be born into. Then there is the conservative view that some people are bound to end up poor. In the 1960s, the Harvard sociologist Edward Banfield argued that the urban poor were characterised by "radical improvidence." Its members found a work routine difficult to settle into and could not make present sacrifices to secure a future gain.
Whether the liberal or conservative view is correct, it is undeniable that poor people get lumped together in poor neighbourhoods. Successive waves of poor incomers (the rural poor and the Irish in the 19th century, asylum seekers and economic migrants today) have gravitated to areas where they will find cheap accommodation. The rest of society then dumps extra problems on such neighbourhoods. The inner city is where people go to buy drugs or sex. If you want to build something anti-social, say a garbage incinerator, it is easier to do so in a poor neighbourhood, where jobs are needed and your local opponents are likely to be less organised. So problems come to be amplified in such neighbourhoods. Ormerod's belief that "geographical segregation... is not a problem in itself" is profoundly untrue.
If we truly want to reduce poverty, then we must stop the geographical concentrations of poverty which are so characteristic of big city Britain from forming and persisting. There are two ways of doing this; to disperse the poor into more affluent neighbourhoods or to dilute them by attracting more prosperous people into living in their neighbourhoods. Dispersal is difficult and expensive. Dilution is a better bet, and it has sometimes happened unprompted by the state. This is what we usually call gentrification and a genuine urban renaissance would see it take place on a very large scale-of which more below. In Britain there have been policies for both dispersion and dilution. The postwar new towns were an attempt at dispersion. The ongoing attempt to use the town and country planning system to make housebuilders mix some low income housing into new private housing developments is an attempt at dilution. So, too, is Gordon Brown's stamp duty rebate on house sales of up to ?150,000 in the 2,000 poorest wards. It's a move aimed at getting new home owners to move into these down-at-heel areas.
But such policies have made only a modest impact, because the underlying tendencies for residential segregation by income, class and ethnicity-and therefore for isolation of the poor-are so powerful.
There are several reasons why it is worth trying harder. Perhaps the most obvious is that when poor people are mingled with the rest of society they won't face the weight of prejudice in getting employment, credit and services which arises merely from their address. Moreover, better off people tend to be effective defenders of the things that a good neighbourhood requires, from good schools to clean pavements and well-maintained parks. They may also put up more effective resistance against crime. They know how to lobby authorities such as the local council and the police in order to defend their interests. Poorer people who live in the area can benefit from this.
It may also be that socially mixed neighbourhoods promote beneficial contacts between different income groups. Contact with the better off brings poor people out of a hopeless world in which all those they meet are also poor. It might provide them with role models. Having a wider network also gives them a better chance of hearing about job vacancies.
One flaw in this argument is that the prosperous can isolate themselves efficiently from those at the bottom of society, even if they live close by. In inner London boroughs, like Islington and Camden, affluent professionals inhabit the same street as jobless, low-income families or live next to council estates while having no connection with them. (The overall proportion of inner London children in private schools is double the national figure of 7 per cent.)
But even if the better off and the poor do avoid social contact, their close proximity can benefit the poor through the operation of what I call the "money-go-round." If people with low skills and a reliance on state benefits are lumped together, their neighbourhoods can have only the most sickly of economies. If there is not enough money to support a local service sector of any size there will be fewer local jobs. People are more likely to have to leave the area to buy the things they need, so more of what little money is coming in as wages and benefits leaks out instead of circulating. Hardly any money is invested in property because only a minority of the housing is in the hands of owner-occupiers, and most of them are badly off. The money-go-round isn't turning.
Contrast this situation with a mixed neighbourhood in which most households have an earned income and most homes are owner-occupied. Their presence will create and sustain numerous jobs within a few minutes' walk of their houses. There will be shops, restaurants and pubs, leisure centres, home maintenance and improvement firms. Some of the earners living in those houses will also use their skills and knowledge to found small businesses. (I estimated that across one large, prosperous English town roughly a third, and perhaps as many as a half, of all the jobs existed to serve people living there.)
It follows that creating a local housing market, bringing in new residents, persuading existing residents with jobs not to leave and ensuring that people can meet most of their day-to-day needs in the immediate area are the essentials of urban regeneration. This is what makes neighbourhoods and cities flourish. If these goals are unachievable, it is not even worth trying to turn a neighbourhood around.
Conditions are so bad in many neighbourhoods that no one wants to buy. Such places require extensive public sector investment to create a housing market. Taxpayers' money must be spent on improving schools, reducing crime, clearing derelict sites and refurbishing the area's streets, buildings and parks. All of which would encourage developers to build homes for sale and gentrifiers to refurbish existing houses. Some buyers relish the edginess of the inner city, its old industrial buildings and canals, ethnic diversity and nearness to the centre.
The conclusion from all of this is that a kind of state-sponsored gentrification should become a key weapon for urban regeneration. This is not gentrification as it has come to be understood since Ruth Glass invented the term nearly 40 years ago. Conventional gentrification is a spontaneous, undirected process in which prosperous, professional people start to settle in a run-down urban area, raising property values and eventually displacing the poor-who suffer as a result. Neighbourhoods change from being uniformly poor to uniformly affluent-when what whole cities and individual neighbourhoods need is a range of people with varied skills and earned incomes, including key public service workers.
Today, if gentrification does take place-be it spontaneous or the result of policy-it is less likely to harm the poor. This is because far fewer poor households rent from private landlords than was the case a few decades ago; they are now much more likely to be owner-occupiers or tenants in social housing. Consequently, far fewer of them stand to be evicted by landlords in search of higher rents or a sale. Indeed, those of the original residents who are owner-occupiers can benefit from the uplift in property values. Another change of context is that there are, for the most part, no longer the great shortages of living space within our cities that there were a few decades ago. Decay, failed housing and de-industrialisation have left much land available for new housing within them.
So the time is ripe for policies which stimulate a new wave of gentrification-and the dispersal of the concentrations of poverty that it will bring. All new housing developments, whether green field or urban land, should provide a social mix, with a minority of social housing mingled among a majority of housing for sale. At the same time, all redevelopment of social housing estates-and there is going to have to be plenty of that in coming years-should be used to introduce a substantial quantity of owner- occupation.
There is now discussion in government about curtailing the right to buy council homes in the southeast where the demand for social housing is highest. Ministers should proceed with caution; there may be a case for reducing the incentive to buy, but one of the best things about the right to buy is that it can increase the social mix on poor estates.
There are other ways for the state to encourage this mixing of classes and income groups. Spending per pupil in schools serving poor areas ought to be even higher than it is already, helping to attract affluent parents into enrolling their children. Crime and security is another critical area. Even more use could be made of technology-such as CCTV cameras-which could make local people feel safer.
But improving the safety and quality of urban environments is never going to be enough to turn most of Britain's big conurbations around. As well as pro-urban policies, we need more powerful regional policies to spread growth. The government acknowledges the need for more balanced regions, but it won't reject the argument that London and its sphere of influence must grow as fast, if not faster, than any other region because it is the powerhouse of the economy. The business lobby, plus Ken Livingstone, imply that to check growth in southeast England is to risk killing the goose that lays the golden egg.
But they are wrong. There are already plenty of checks on growth in this region-high land and house prices, traffic congestion and increasing environmental stresses to name a few. These problems are likely to worsen, but they are insufficient to overcome the capital region's economic magnetism.
We should not pretend that the urban renaissance can be achieved entirely through carrots, without any sticks. We also need to make it more difficult for people to leave the city. The town and country planning system already restricts the supply of greenfield land for new houses outside of existing towns and cities, and thereby the total number of new homes built. And since coming to power in 1997, Labour has, rather courageously, moved further to restrict the release of greenfield land in the hope that this will focus development within towns and cities. Despite the spin which surrounded John Prescott's July statement on planning and housing, which seemed to promise vast numbers of extra homes in the south-east, the fact is that he has held the line on restraining greenfield development.
However, these restrictions have not only gradually lifted house prices, especially in London and the southeast. They also hugely inflate the price of greenfield land that the planners designate for housing, making new estates the farmers' favourite cash crop. What is clear, even so, is that there will continue to be massive greenfield development with more than a quarter of new homes being built outside of existing urban areas. All of these greenfield homes should be built in new urban areas on the edge of existing towns and cities-plumbed into their parent towns in terms of transport links, schools, health services and so forth, rather than being little increments of suburbia. The city-fringing greenfields in question should be compulsorily purchased at farmland prices-that's the way in which the state built the post-war new towns. This policy would blow smallish holes in a few green belts. But that is a price worth paying for an improved form of urban growth.
If an urban renaissance ever comes, it will mostly be financed by private-sector money-by individual house buyers, pension and property funds, developers, retailers: a variety of enterprises. Yet to start those billions of extra private pounds flowing in each year will very likely require more public sector pump priming than is currently available, even given the increases announced in the Chancellor's spending review. So why not raise some of this money through a tax on vacant urban land, and by making the owners of empty homes liable for full council tax-both measures recommended by the Rogers task force, but rejected by government? Why not introduce a capital gains tax on private house sales and hypothecate the revenues for urban regeneration? The prime minister's declared goal of a nation "where no one is seriously disadvantaged by where they live" is an honourable one. But without more ambitious reforms the prospects for a genuine urban renaissance are bleak.
