18 September 2023. Cities | Capitalism
Building homes and buildings on the ‘road belt’ // Anti-capitalism is rife, and here’s the research. [#497]
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1: Building homes and buildings on the ‘road belt’
The design site Dezeen has a short piece about a new proposal from the policy and practice thinktank Create Streets that suggests we can build effectively on urban space that is currently occupied by unnecessarily wide roads.
The numbers don’t look trivial, either.
In a new report, Create Streets describes these roads as “road belt”, which I liked as a piece of framing:
"We could create proud boulevards lined with beautiful, sustainably located new homes on space currently given over to needlessly, indeed counter-productively, wide roads," said Create Streets in the paper.
The report is written by Create Streets’ deputy director David Milner, and he suggests that this can achieve two desirable policy objectives at the same time:
This policy and the broader point of how we could better invest in transport and cities strikes me as a real win-win... I felt there was a real crossover in this initiative between our crippling housing crisis, UK cities' poor productivity compared to its European neighbours (outside London) and our collective race to net zero – all are time-sensitive to solving many of the country's ills.
The paper argues that Britain still continues to widen roads to reduce travel time, but that “speed efficiency” has plateaued since the turn of the century.
(Some of this road-widening is driven by the way cost benefit analysis of new road schemes is calculated, which has very little to do with the actual transport and congestion outcomes of road-widening schemes).
In addition:
unnecessary road building is often prompted by the placement of new schools, shops and leisure facilities. Building these facilities at the centre of new developments will minimise the need for new roads and encourage people to walk or cycle, saving the developer and council money, according to Create Streets.
Create Streets is working on a proposal in Rochdale that would show how this type of building will work in practice. Taking out a ‘turning lane’—effectively a fifth lane on an existing four lane urban highway—creates the space to build 400 homes while leaving the existing four lanes as they were.
(Source: Create Streets)
Similarly in Bedford, planning permission has already been given for a scheme that redesigns a vast urban roundabout and in doing so creates space for 105 homes and some commercial space.
(Removing an urban roundabout in Bedford. Source: Create Streets)
The report has more examples of possible schemes—one in Southend, would take a seven lane elevated highway and roundabout down to four lanes at ground level and create space for more than 1,700 homes. It’s well-known that the amount of land take in cities that goes to cars is disproportionately large, so if this thinking catches on there’s probably opportunities to be seen everywhere.
So this is an argument about the priorities of public space, but it’s also an argument about how transport works:
To deliver growth confidently and consistently we must accept that not all fast roads deliver growth. Some are malign. Some achieve little at huge cost. We should dispense with the obsession with speed in all circumstances and instead find projects that enable the most people to access the most jobs and services possible.
This reminds me of ‘Triple Access Planning’, which I learned about form Glenn Lyons, which emphasises the importance of both spatial proximity and digital connectivity as well as physical mobility in thinking about urban mobility design.
(Source: https://www.tapforuncertainty.eu)
At the moment, public policy isn’t there yet. In the Dezeen article, Milner talks about the barriers:
"There are still many hidden levers holding these kinds of development back, primarily around traffic modelling and the need to move towards a vision-led approach," he said. "Many projects... are still held back by the primary concern being traffic flow. No one ever asks to see the model of how many more people would cross the road when you propose these schemes."
If anything, I suspect that Create Streets might be being a bit cautious here, perhaps to make sure that they don’t collide with the noisy motorists’ lobby. While I was looking at the Dezeen article I noticed another piece from earlier this year, also in Dezeen, by Phineas Harper of Open City.
Harper turns on its head the familiar idea of ‘induced demand’—that building more road space creates more traffic. He points to research that says that reducing road space reduces the amount of traffic, and suggests that congestion is quite an effective strategy to change modal behaviour:
Though shrinking road space may initially appear to drive up congestion, Paris Metropolitan Region senior urban planner Paul Lecroart reports that research spanning 60 cities shows removing lanes from inner city highways quickly reduces traffic by 14 per cent without "deterioration in traffic conditions". Congestion, though impossible to alleviate by building new roads, can, if controlled strategically, be a powerful tool for reducing car use.
What I like about the Create Streets proposal is that it trades road space to address some real needs—both for more housing and for better spatial design of cities. This changes the politics involved by making the social trade-offs involved in having a lot of road space much more visible.
2: Anti-capitalism is rife—and here’s some research on that
I noticed an article published recently in the article Economic Affairs about attitudes to capitalism. It’s based on a survey of 34 countries: “Representative samples of 1,000 respondents were surveyed in each country”.
This is not my normal research stamping ground. Economic Affairs is the journal of the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), which is a right-wing think tank that exists to promote market solutions to pretty much every area of public policy. But reading the article, it was clear that despite the research methodology (more on that in a minute), the research was telling us something about current views of capitalism. It just isn’t what the author’s article thinks it is telling us.
The stated purpose of the research in the article is:
to discover what people in different countries think of capitalism and to explore their attitudes in relation to differences in political views, age, education, gender and income. In addition, the items were designed to allow us to determine to what extent negative perceptions of capitalism stem from the negative connotation of the word itself and how much is really related to people's rejection of or support for the basic principles of the capitalist economic system.
The article’s author, Rainer Zitelmann,
hypothesised that some people are repelled by the word ‘capitalism’ itself, even though they essentially hold pro-capitalist opinions.
To try to work out whether there are negative associations with the word “capitalism”, the survey also asked questions which substituted the phrase “economic freedom” for “capitalism”, and then contrasted the results:
Respondents were presented with a total of six statements, three of which favoured economic freedom and market economics. The other three statements advocated restricting economic freedom and according a far greater role for the state.
Here’s the result of the “economic freedom” version of the question.
”(Attitudes towards economic freedom in 34 countries (average of statements in favour of a liberal economic system divided by the average of statements in favour of a state-controlled economic system – without using the term ‘capitalism’). Note: The lower the coefficient, the stronger is the anti-capitalist attitude.)”
Just to explain the classifications of countries where people ‘support’, are ‘neutral’, or ‘reject’ economic freedom: Zitelmann did a ratio of pro-economic freedom and anti-freedom answers. Countries that scored between 0.9 and 1.1 were regarded as neutral. Above was defined as ‘support’, below as ‘reject’:
Only in seven of 34 countries – Poland, the USA, Japan, South Korea, Argentina, Sweden and the Czech Republic – does a positive attitudes toward economic freedom clearly predominate.
The second two banks of questions mentioned capitalism explicitly.
In the second set of questions, we wanted to find out what respondents associated with the word ‘capitalism’. This set of questions used a list of ten terms, namely prosperity, innovation, greed, coldness, progress, corruption, freedom, pressure to perform, a wide range of goods, and environmental degradation... In our third set of questions, respondents were presented with a total of 18 positive and negative statements about capitalism.
There are examples of these questions in the article. But for example, the negative statements included, ‘Capitalism entices people to buy products they don't need’, and the positive ones included, ‘Capitalism means that consumers determine what is offered, and not the state’.
Here’s the country chart for the ‘capitalism’ version of the responses:
(Overall coefficient on attitudes towards capitalism in 34 countries. Note: The lower the coefficient, the stronger is the anti-capitalist attitude.)
Attitudes towards “capitalism” are generally less positive than attitudes to “economic freedom”, although there are some exceptions. A chart in the article shows that the countries for which this appears to be significant are, in increasing order, Romania, Pakistan, Vietnam, Russia, and Nigeria.
Readers who do this kind of international survey work may be wondering if there is a translation effect in some of these countries, and this is possible, although it is not discussed in the article. The English versions of “economic freedom” and “capitalism” seem to be taken as read.
But I think that what’s happening here is that in most of these countries people do not associate “capitalism” with “economic freedom”, and broadly these days you’d have to share the IEA’s worldview to have that belief. Actually existing capitalism is about agressive market concentration in many sectors, oligopolistic behaviour, and extraction.
And fortunately, the researchers asked some questions that allow us the check this view. They tested 18 statements about the effects of capitalism. There’s a section in the article on “the most common positive and negative opinions of capitalism”.
In the chart (which I have trimmed down to the top ten responses) these are ranked by the number of countries which listed this description of capitalism in the top 5 responses. Looking at the top two on the list, the statement that “Capitalism is dominated by the rich, they set the political agenda” was in the top 5 in 33 of the 34 countries. Likewise, in 31 of the 34, “Capitalism leads to growing economic inequality”.
(Number of countries in which the 16 listed statements ranked in the Top Five of 18 statements.)
It’s only by the time you get to #6 and #7 on the list that you start to see positive statements, and these make the Top Five in only 6 of the 34 countries. In short: people are pretty clear about the effects of actually existing capitalism and they don’t like what they see.
There’s a short analysis of who is more positive towards capitalism across the survey. Mostly, though, there are variations by country. Generally, men are more likely to be positive than women, and the better-off are likely to be more positive than the worse-off, although there are countries including Britain where these difference barely exists.
The research also includes a couple of loaded questions designed to test whether anti-capitalists are more prone to conspiracy thinking that pro-capitalists, and it turns out that they are, except in Albania. Here’s one of those questions:
In reality, politicians don't decide anything. They are puppets controlled by powerful forces in the background.’ Would you agree with that or would you disagree?
Of course, you could believe versions of this without being a conspiracy theorist—for example, the excessive influence of fossil fuel companies on governments, the role of secretive legal treaties that privilege corporations, the way the World Trade Organisation works, and so on.
I think that what these ‘conspiracy’ questions are actually testing is a version of public trust in politics. As with Edelman’s Trust Barometer, it is telling us that trust is low. Talking about “economic freedom” rather than “capitalism” probably isn’t going to change that.
Surveys like this aren’t cheap (even allowing for the fact that they have asked a small number of questions). Although the questionnaire is included as an annex to the article there’s there’s no disclosure as to who has paid for the survey. But call me a conspiracy theorist.
j2t#497
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