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From International Socialism (1st series), No.6, Autumn 1961, p.33.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Housing Needs And Planning Policy
J.B. Cullingworth
Routledge, 28s.
For twenty years the housing planners have argued that in a large scale dispersal of industry and population lies the only solution to the interrelated problems of urban sprawl and congestion, the Journey to Work, the existence of economically depressed areas, and the drift to the overcrowded but prosperous south-east of England. Successive governments have undertaken to redistribute, industry and housing away from the conurbations. But very little has happened, and Mr Cullingworth has accurately traced the large dimensions of failure. Where dozens of new towns were projected, a handful have been built. The declining areas have enjoyed no astonishing revival. Every year the conurbations get bigger, richer, and more crowded.
On the reasons for this rout of the planners, Mr Cullingworth is not so helpful. It is true that Conservative governments have refused to assume sufficient powers at the centre to override rural and small town hostility to the appearance in their territory of housing estates, new industries, and worse still, vulgar and probably communistic hordes from the big cities. But the Tories can plan when they want to, and Mr Cullingworth leaves uncharted the deeper currents of interest and doctrine that have put the planners on the rocks. Acute in diagnosis, the author is as weak on the underlying causes as he is in suggesting effective remedies.
The book is technically sophisticated and neatly written; but like most of its kind in the field of social welfare, it is fundamentally bad. Like the others, it is concerned with the ‘provision’ of this good and that service for sections of the population which are taken to exist only as problems of so much need of such a kind. Through the mazes of sources and statistics, and in the jargon of ‘Overspill’ and ‘Density’, the academic planner speaks only to the planning administrator. But, suppose incomes were equal, then most of the current welfare ‘problems’ would appear as quite unreal. It is sad that clever and humane men like Mr Cullingworth should operate within such constricted political categories.
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