Non-Plan: An Experiment in Freedom

If we set to one side the current glut of house make-over programmes on television, it is fair to say that planning and architecture do not often make it into the popular media. But about every decade or so, something breaks through, for example The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), From Bauhaus to Our House (1981), or Edge City (1991), all, notably, written by journalists.

This issue’s classic text is from the 1970s: Published in 1969 in the magazine New Society, ‘Non-Plan: an Experiment in Freedom’ was a collaborative article written by journalist Paul Barker (also deputy editor of the magazine) architect Cedric Price, urban geographer Peter Hall and architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham.

Admittedly, the instalment came a little early, but by 1969, as many said, the sixties had already ended. Nixon was in the White House, Labour was on its way out and the Summer of Love and solidarity of the student protests was breaking up into the shards of the Weathermen, the Angry Brigade and Baader-Meinhof gang. Within architecture and planning, the reaction against CIAM orthodoxy by Team Ten and others had become mainstream. In 1966 Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi had completed the key texts of what would later be dubbed Post-Modernism (Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, and The Architecture of the City), and by 1969 the UK and US were immersed in Pop Culture, a preoccupation wonderfully codified in Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott-Brown and Izenour).

Non-Plan paid tribute to Las Vegas for its unabashed vitality but was more radical in its interpretation of what the city represented. The central proposition of the article is clearly stated in the title: do away with the planning system and let people build what they want, where they want. The underlying questions are, would things really be any worse than they are if we didn’t have a planning system? Why do we need to impose ideals, particularly aesthetic ideals on people?

These are questions worth asking any time but it was particularly pointed in Britain in 1969. To understand why, it is useful to recall the deep and rich seam of discontent with contemporary development going back to the fifties, in particular embodied in the ‘Townscape’ movement. John Betjeman, Thomas Sharp, Gordon Cullen and most excoriatingly, Ian Nairn voiced a collective despair at the creeping banality of modern development – overseen by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act.

In caricature, ‘Townscape’ and ‘Non-Plan’ were two opposite responses to the problem: more control on the one hand, less on the other. But that caricature sweeps away the important question that ‘Non Plan’ posed: is planning really doing what we want it to do? Clearly the answer for Barker et al was a resounding NO and their response was to ditch it altogether. Well, perhaps not altogether: they acknowledge the need for economic planning and opted for limited ‘zones’ in which planning regulations would be removed – an experiment that clearly foreshadowed Michael Heseltine’s 1982 Enterprise Zones, which applied the idea, only on a much smaller scale.

In describing how development might pan out in the Non-Plan zones, the authors provide shockingly accurate predictions, hammering home the central premise that we seem to end up with the same thing with or without the fuss of planning.

Re-reading Non-Plan you can hear chimes of recognition: campaigns for design guides to preserve local distinctiveness, promotion of public participation in planning, and the hope that information technology (cybernetics) will help solve our problems. Non-Plan also seems to chime with the underlying ideas of the Localism Bill. One is tempted to think the authors of Non-Plan were naive about who would be in a position to exercise the freedom in their experiment. By the evidence of virtually all development since 1969, you would have to be cripplingly jejune to think it was Parish Councils or individuals, except in the most affluent areas. And you get the sense that while Barker et al might have underestimated the extent to which Pop Culture would become the self-combusting fuel of corporate interests, they knew who would be in control and didn’t care. In fact, it was the care and fuss of planning they wanted to eliminate. They didn’t feel the need to worry because they saw unplanned, ordinary environments of whatever period as a positive alternative, fascinating and pleasurable because they just work – spontaneous, local and imperfect, a particularly English/ British version of the Japanese idea of wabi-sabi.

There remains much to chew over from Non-Plan, as the maniacal vibrancy of the Las Vegas strip is compressed into the non-place realm of the interwebs, and where the corporate culture of the LARGE leans in mutual support against institutions addicted to endless reports, consultations and strategies. We might reflect, too, that the demographic bulge in ‘69 wanted to see progress but they – and many others – now prefer the peace of their quiet garden undisturbed by development. That is the radical sequel to Non-Plan. It is not planning, but NO DEVELOPMENT AT ALL.

In the end, if I were to come up with a new experiment in freedom, it would be to give real control to Parish, Town and City Councils – not merely planning powers but fiscal and financial freedoms. Like Non-Plan, the focus should be on the economy to give the incentive for local action and co-operation to build regional infrastructure and a broad-based mix of activities from forestry and energy production to manufacturing, services and tourism. Let people get on with making a living. Trying to instil vitality in a place by design alone, as is the current orthodoxy, is window dressing in a shop that has nothing to sell.