Permanent Openness. The Urbanisation of London's Green Belt - Ben Taylor

Permanent Openness The Urbanisation of London’s Green Belt Ben Taylor

Permanent Openness: The Urbanisation of London’s Green Belt Ben Taylor Hughes Hall

Design Thesis A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the MPhil Examination in Architecture & Urban Design (2014-2016) 12,000 Words Approx.

Faculty of Architecture and History of Art May 2016

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to Barbara Campbell-Lange for being endlessly supportive in writing, design, career and life generally; to Ingrid Schroder for pushing me through and up walls (and for some difficult truths); and to Max Sternberg for kind and interesting suggestions out of the blue.

This thesis is the result of my own work and includes nothing wehich is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text.

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Contents

Introduction

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The Ideal of Openness

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Openness as an Urban-Rural Opposition

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The Urbanisation of the Green Belt

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Conclusion

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Bibliography

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Figures 1

The London Metropolitan Green Belt

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London defined by GLA

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London defined by M25

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London defined in opposition to openness

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Yard

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Verge

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Infrastructure

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Agriculture

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M25

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Unwin and Abercrombie Plans

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Fields

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Golf Course

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Reigate

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London defined as a density of urbanisation

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Rights to all figures belong to the author unless where otherwise stated.

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Introduction

London’s edge is ambiguous. While its administrative edge is the border of the Greater London Authority, this tends to have little impact on the everyday lives of those within. A more meaningful marker is the M25 motorway. Unlike the border of Greater London, it exists physically, stabilising a territory around it: a Ballardian hinterland of storage depot, service station, industry and fringe woodland. For writers such Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Peter Ackroyd, this range of landscapes around the M25 has become part of contemporary folklore: engendering a frontier between the familiar and the unfamiliar. However, it is the London Metropolitan Green Belt, through which the M25 runs, that defines the threshold between London within and non-London without. The green belt is an area of land encircling London in which building is prohibited as a measure to control urban growth.

This land is designated by green belt policy to remain ‘permanently open’. Indeed, as the National Planning Policy Framework emphasises: ‘the essential characteristics of Green Belts are their openness and their permanence’ (DCLG, 2012). It is therefore to protect this fundamental openness that building in the green belt is prohibited. In this sense, the edge of London becomes defined by the difference between space that is open, and space that is not.

However, quite what actually characterises openness is unclear. It has no firm legal definition, despite it forming the basis of green belt policy. The policy seems to rely upon general phenomenological connotations relating to landscape and place. The “open countryside”, in particular, conjures a nebulous image of green, rolling hills and expansive horizons. It evokes an idea of an unspoilt English heartland: a “great outdoors” and a simpler, purer life outside of the city. As a concept too, openness hints towards social democracy, bringing to mind suggestions of accessibility and freedom. As such, openness seems to be an ideal of what the countryside should be in explicit contrast to the city. Perhaps it is for this reason that the notion has largely evaded critique, despite constituting the edge of London itself.

As this essay questions, just what characterises openness after all? And what quality does the green belt possess that can be described as fundamentally open? Even a cursory glance at it – 76% of which is monocultural farming, golf course and infrastructure – reveals the green belt’s claim to openness to be problematic. This calls for a closer examination of what defines openness and what makes it an apposite criterion for urban containment.

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Greater London

Green Belt

Figure 1: The London Metropolitan Green Belt

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M25

Moreover, just what makes openness such an irreproachable ideal that it must be retained ‘permanently’?

The question of openness, its origins and its consequences, thus forms the focus of this essay. By looking to what spatial conditions qualify as open within green belt policy, this establishes what the policy of maintaining ‘permanent openness’ serves to preserve. Then, by tracing the history of the ideal, openness is unpacked and revealed to be far more than just a politically expedient umbrella-term for a general prohibition of building. Indeed, it is deeply intertwined with phenomenological notions of nationhood that can be traced back to the enclosure acts in Britain and the advent of the Picturesque. The thesis put forth is that this historical reference underpins a perception of an idealised English countryside as a bucolic idyll. This establishes an opposition to the perception of an industrialised city which became, in contrast, a pit of poverty and disease. It so followed that the city must be contained at all costs by keeping the country open. However, the spatial project of separating the city and the country was simultaneously a social project of separating the poor from the rich. In this sense, the imperative of keeping the countryside open is embroiled with processes of social exclusion. And, by constraining London’s expansion, the permanent openness of the green belt perpetuates this legacy through the economic barriers of land values.

The argument of this essay is therefore that through the notion of openness, the green belt is underpinned by a preindustrial vision of an idealised countryside cleared of the working poor. Then, through political and economic means of socio-spatial separation, openness serves to realise this ideal in the present. This is divided into three chapters. The first examines precisely what constitutes openness within green belt policy, and the spatial conditions this produces as a result. This traces the history of openness to consider the origins of the notion and why it is perpetuated through the green belt. This establishes a revised, critical understanding of the term to examine how it affects the green belt as a place, as opposed to simply a concept. The second chapter looks in greater depth at how openness both relies upon and propagates an ideological opposition between the city and the countryside. This discusses the process by which this opposition takes root and how the green belt serves to realise this spatially by creating socio-economic barriers between the urban and the rural. In this way, openness can be understood as precursory to the commodification of the very rural it serves to protect. Building on this, the third chapter aims to discredit this idea of a paradigmatic opposition between the urban and the rural, held by the green belt. This draws from Lefebvre and other spatial theorists to consider a more progressive understanding of urbanisation not simply as city-making but as a spatial system of governance. From this position it argues that the green belt itself can be thought of as urban. Finally, this calls for a reconsideration of the ideal of openness as a premise for containing the city.

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Figure 2: London defined by the boundary of the Greater London Authority

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Figure 3: London defined as the interior of the M25 Orbital Motorway

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Figure 4: London defined in opposition to the openness of the green belt

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The Ideal of Openness

‘The fundamental aim of Green Belt policy is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open’ (DCLG, 2012). The government is not unclear in the purpose it holds for the green belt, the area of land around London defined by its ‘permanence and its openness’. What is unclear is quite what characterises ‘permanent openness’: the green belt’s defining characteristic. This is a highly pertinent question as it is the concept of openness that determines the edge of London by defining the land around the city that cannot be built upon on the grounds that it detracts from this same openness. What then defines openness and what qualifies it to be the basis of containing London? In order to understand the connotations and consequences of the term, it is first necessary to recognise what characterises the landscapes that lay claim to the term “open” and what openness sets out to achieve.

The green belt has five main objectives defined within the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the government’s guidance document for local authorities to devise development plans and decide planning applications. These are:

1. Check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas; 2. Prevent neighbouring towns merging into one another; 3. Assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment; 4. Preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and 5. Assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land.

(DCLG, 2012) The means by which these objectives are achieved is by prohibiting building within on the basis that this constitutes ‘inappropriate development’, thereby ‘detracting from the fundamental openness’ of the green belt. These objectives have changed very little since the

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green belt’s political implementation in 1947 (which were to ‘check the further growth of a large built-up area’, ‘prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another’, and ‘preserve the special character of a town’; Collins, 1957) and serve to enact a general agenda of urban containment within planning policy. In this regard there is little dispute that the green belt is highly successful (Hall, 1974). Indeed, it is the green belt’s very success in this matter that makes the question of its future – in light of the social and economic pressures of London’s expansion – so controversial.

These objectives are achieved by keeping the land designated as green belt permanently open. Any act of building in this area is generally prohibited on the basis of being deemed ‘inappropriate development’, in that it detracts from this fundamental openness (ibid).

In order to better understand what constitutes openness, it is first necessary to consider what landscapes make up the green belt, and therefore what can be considered open.

Compositionally, the green belt is 59% agricultural land, 18% woodland, 13% park land, 10% utilities and infrastructure and 7% golf course (note, this does not add up to 100% as there is some overlap between categories; Quod, 2015). Only 2% is considered “built upon” (CPRE, 2014). Although differing hugely in terms environmental quality, this range of landscapes can invariably either lay claim to openness or be considered “not detracting” from, openness. Yet this breakdown does not give a full account of London’s peripheral environment. The green belt is not a clear band around London. Rather it is meandering and pocketed, enclosing enclaves of development: the ‘historic towns’ of ‘special character’, referred to in the NPPF, the setting of which the green belt exists to preserve. That is, although the green belt itself is only 2% developed, it is full of “holes” of development, making London’s periphery more complex that simply “green”.

Indeed, London’s periphery is a constellation of towns and villages, separated from each other by openness. As such, London’s edge becomes a blur of urbanism, agriculture and industry, making it yet more unclear what characteristics relate these landscapes as being open. This is problematic as it is this notion that defines the edge of London itself, yet ‘openness’, and even ‘inappropriate’ development (as those acts that allegedly detract from openness) have no firm definitions despite being at the core of green belt policy (Timmins and Lynn v Gedling Borough Council, 2015). In conventional parlance one might associate openness with public accessibility, but according to planning consultancy Quod (2015), only 22% of the green belt is accessible to the public. And indeed, although the green belt is heavily networked with infrastructure connecting London to its exterior, with an area of 554,670 hectares (DCLG, 2011), through sheer scale, little of the green belt can be reached. Openness is therefore no synonym for accessibility.

Some disambiguation comes from the planning portal – the online presence of the UK planning system – which defines ‘open space’ as: ‘all open space of public value, including not just land, but also areas of

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Figure 5: Yard Abandoned and neglected spaces - even those that have been paved - can be characterised as open, such as this near the Dartford Crossing. Although these may have little social value they can often provide rich habitats for wildlife.

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water (such as rivers, canals, lakes and reservoirs) which offer important opportunities for sport and recreation and can act as a visual amenity’ (Planning Portal, 2016).

Aside from tautologically defining open space as ‘open space’, this definition associates the public value of open space with leisure and recreation. This is clearly problematic given the limited accessibility of the green belt. It also raises the question of who stands to benefit from the recreational amenity it provides, given the green belt’s high proportion of golf courses which tend to operate as private clubs. The above definition also emphasises ‘visual amenity’, suggesting that openness is primarily an aesthetic quality. [8d]This is an association Patrick Abercrombie (the town planner and founder of the conservationist lobbying group Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) who was key in instigating the green belt) himself made, stating that the value of the green belt was in ‘keeping open large tracts of land for the visual solace of man’ (Abercrombie, 1944; Scalbert, 2013). However, there is a radical disparity between this romantic vision of the countryside and the reality of a green belt that is so heavily agricultural. While farming still conjures idealised feelings of being one with a bucolic countryside in the English national psyche, the reality is predominantly an industrialised and heavily conditioned monocultural landscape that inhibits the biodiversity and natural variety celebrated through such bodies as the CPRE (Monbiot, 2014). While this might have its own visual impressiveness, it is unlikely to conform to the idea of ‘visual amenity’ suggested above. The same could be said for the other landscapes that comprise the green belt, such as the quarries, motorways and depots, etc.

There are of course parts of the green belt that more genuinely conform to the ideal of open countryside which tend also to be designated as Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, such as the South Downs and Surrey Hills. These may be publically accessible (though, like the green belt, there is no statutory obligation for them to be) but hold a higher legal protection premised on ‘beauty’ in addition to openness (which in itself could be heavily critiqued). The visual commonality between these landscapes therefore seems only to be that they are all, in a literal sense, unenclosed: that they are open to the sky and therefore present an unobstructed view of a horizon, regardless of what kind of skyline produces that horizon. If openness can be understood as an aesthetic then, it appears limited to an abstract principle relating to distance rather than a particular visual characteristic.

Openness therefore has no discernible appearance: it implies only a spatial quality from a particular visual subjectivity and so does not ‘look like’ anything. This was a point for celebration for Lowenthal and Prince when writing on The English Landscape: ‘The English landscape not only is varied; in most places it looks varied because it is open and can be viewed at a distance: foreground contrasts with middle distance and background.’

(Lowenthal and Prince, 1964)

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Figure 6: Verge Despite one of the stated purposes of the green belt being to provide visual amenity, most of the landscapes within do not conform to any traditional notions of the term.

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This reveals a more prosaic problem with openness as an aesthetic ideal. With 78% of the green belt inaccessible to the public, the benefit of having visible horizons it is not clear; less clear still is the benefit of mobilising this as the basis for defining London’s edge. As such, the political definition that equates openness with visual amenity and public access is discredited by the reality of a green belt that is predominantly neither of these things.

Is openness then simply a politically expedient catch-all: one that encompasses a range of social and ecological environments, thus enabling a range of forms of protection? Certainly, the government outlines a series of objectives for the use of space in the green belt which emphasise the importance of ‘retaining and enhancing landscapes near to where people live’, ‘improving damaged land around towns’, and ‘secure nature conservation interest’ (DCLG, 2006). This suggests less a visual imperative to openness than an environmental one of preventing building. After all, the act of building is destructive as well as creative: creative insofar as an artefact of human culture is made; destructive insofar as its footprint must, in general, be cleared of the natural landscape that sits within it (as well as the extraction of resources required for construction and running). Yet paragraph 1.7 nullifies any commitment to enforce any of these: ‘The extent to which the use of land fulfils these objectives is however not itself a material factor in the inclusion of land within a Green Belt, or in its continued protection. For example, although Green Belts often contain areas of attractive landscape, the quality of the landscape is not relevant to the inclusion of land within a Green Belt or to its continued protection’ (ibid).

If the quality of the landscape is not relevant to its continued protection, then any claim that green belt policy champions environmental or ecological welfare is undermined.

Pressed on this in an interview, Guy Davies – planning officer at Mole Valley District Council, a local authority situated heavily within the green belt – disclosed that the practicable meaning of openness is simply ‘the absence of development’ (Davies, 2016). But this definition of development is specifically limited to the erection of buildings, and denies the fact that the green belt is an entirely “made” landscape. The agriculture and golf courses that make up the majority of the green belt are intensively conditioned in order to maintain their particular environments. Degradation of ecosystems as a result of contemporary farming practices has been extensively documented (see Lal et al., 1997; Benton, 2007). So too has that of golf courses, the construction and maintenance of which widely entails loss of habitat (such as wetlands and forest) and wild species, water depletion, chemical contamination of soil, water and living organisms, as well as excessive runoff and soil erosion (Terman, 1997). The areas of woodland too are predominantly arboricultural plantations, with only 13% of the green belt’s woodland (which in itself only makes up 18% of the green belt’s total area) possessing environmental designations. Moreover, other forms of industrialisation in the green belt are deemed ‘not inappropriate’, such as mineral

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Figure 7: Infrastructure The green belt is not an unambiguous ring around London but a mesh of utilities and infrastructure, punctuating agriculture and golf course.

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extraction (DCLG, 2006), despite constituting an intense form of land development.

This was made evident in recent legal proceedings concerning building in the green belt, in which the question of openness was brought into question. In 2014, a court case was brought against Gedling Borough Council over the decision to grant planning permission to a cemetery on green belt land. Gedling defended its decision on the basis that the change of use of land to create it would not result in adverse visual impact of green belt land so complied with the NPPF. The judge however quashed the council’s decision, ruling: ‘openness and visual impact are different concepts; yet they can nonetheless relate to each other. The distinction is subtle but important… Any construction harms openness quite irrespective of its impact in terms of its obtrusiveness or its aesthetic attractions or qualities. A beautiful building is still an affront to openness, simply because it exists.’

(Timmins/Lymn v Gedling Borough Council, 2014) This again problematises the notion of openness. If it is possible for building to not affect the visual amenity of the countryside but still detract from its openness then openness is framed as an ideal in and of itself, separate from any spatial characteristic. This was further emphasised in a subsequent case in 2015. Here, the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority challenged the Epping Forest District Council on the lawfulness of the decision to award planning permission to a 92,000 m2 glasshouse in Epping Forest, an area of green belt land bordering London and Essex. Epping Forest argued that as an agricultural building the glasshouse was an exception to the general prohibition of buildings in the green belt; Lee Valley argued that it nevertheless ‘caused actual harm to the openness of the green belt’. The court decided in favour of Epping Forest, establishing that ‘openness means the state of being free from built development, the absence of buildings – as distinct from the absence of visual impact’ (LVRPA v EFDC, 2015).

This reveals that although the green belt is extremely developed, it is buildings in particular that cannot be tolerated. Openness in this sense seems to rest on the premise that the city is inherently unstable, prone to spilling ever outwards into the countryside. Buildings are thus singled out as the one form of development that inherently detracts from the green belt’s openness. This is evident through the protectivist language of such phrases as ‘to safeguard the countryside’, ‘to check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas’ and ‘to preserve the setting and special character of historic towns’ within green belt policy (NPPF, 2012). These are not neutral terms. Building is held as a corrosive and homogenising force from which the rural must be protected. This demonstrates a more ideological basis to openness: that it is underpinned by the principle that the urban and rural exist in opposition to each other and must, therefore, remain separate. But this does not explain

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Figure 8: Agriculture 59% of the green belt is used for monocultural farming. These widely inaccessible environments arecan be viewed as relics of enclosure.

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why this separation must be imposed, as it is through green belt policy. In order to understand the basis of this opposition it is necessary to locate the historical roots of openness to recognise how the concept is intertwined with an idealisation of the countryside as the cradle of an English cultural genealogy.

This idealisation of the rural can be traced back to the advent of romanticism in the mid-eighteenth century. Setting the specific national or regional significance of folk cultures against the universalizing principles of European Enlightenment thought, the Picturesque celebrated the regional idiosyncrasies of traditional buildings as the product of place and a more innocent folk culture (Brown and Maudlin, 2012). Before this cultural transition, the countryside and the traditional buildings within were perceived either as pieces of pastoral scenography or with disgust (Macarthur, 2007). Romanticism however wove them into a vision of the country as a bucolic, Arcadian idyll (Maudlin, 2010). The reverence and representation of traditional rural English things, places and people has since persisted as a form of cultural idealism, embodied by the open countryside (ibid).

Yet it would be misleading to think of this as simply the coming appreciation of a previously disenfranchised culture. The onset of romanticism coincided with the enclosure of the commons, which saw the transition of common lands into private estates, heralding modern methods of agricultural production1 (Bogart and Richardson, 2011). There is little dispute among historians that land enclosure was a more efficient agricultural model, but it is recognised too that the acts served to entrench ownership (and so too economic power) in the hands of a financial and political elite. The land was therefore not only transformed into private property to be exploited for agricultural improvement; it was also to be transformed into vast pastoral pleasure parks, ideologically shaped to resemble idealised rural in which labour stewarded a transcendent nature. The effect of this was to obliterate the “real” working commons and alienating those who previously worked them (Olwig, 2005). By ‘retaining attractive landscapes [and] land in agricultural, forestry and related uses’ (DCLG, 2006), the enclosures can thus be viewed as the historical reference point that openness alludes to. There is a historical irony here. ‘Enclosure’ had a specific legal definition, meaning land held in severalty, falling completely under the power of one owner to do with as they pleased. This was in explicit contrast to ‘open land’ which bore common rights. Thus, the openness of the green belt today harks back to the very point at which the land ceased to be open.

However, it was through the Industrial Revolution, that the perception of an urban-ru1 Prior to the enclosure acts, the rural population generally shared rights to communal assets such as water, pasture, and woods. Villagers also managed collective assets, sharing rights in large open fields that served as pasture during fallow periods and as cropland during the growing and season. The acts replaced this collective ownership of common resources with individual ownership of particular plots of land and replaced collective management through village institutions with individual management of personal estates (Bogart and Richardson, 2011; Wordie, 1983).

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Figure 9: M25 The green belt is full of roads and other infrastructures that facilitate London’s expansion while the pursuit of openness seeks to contain it.

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ral opposition and the imperative of their separation became entrenched. With the cities industrialising faster than the country (in addition to the the historical decline in rural labour resulting from the enclosures), London experienced a surge in inward migration of rural poor. This population, although better off than they had been in the country, concentrated in slums in closer proximity to the rich, creating a new set of social relationships and perceptions (Davoudi and Stead, 2002). This created a perception among a rich rural elite of London as a pit of pollution, noise, crime and the perceived threat of the working classes (Walker, 1981). Urbanisation so came to be seen as a destructive process, one that led to over-crowded, impoverished and diseased slum-cities and the breakdown of social cohesion. The rural, in contrast, was romanticised as a cleaner, purer and morally-superior heartland – the well from which Englishness itself flowed – and held as a stronghold against the social evils of industrial capitalism (see Gottdiemer, 2002). This stoked an attitude within the landowning classes that industrial production should be contained within the city. The country and the city must therefore be kept separate in order to protect the country from sprawling urbanisation and the sinful way of life within. In this sense, it was not only industrialisation that must be contained, but the urban masses as well.

But with London continuing to grow a political measure was required to contain the city.

This led to the first suggestions of a band of land around London that would protect the “open countryside” from the expansionist force of the city. Protecting the countryside was not just the protection of a series of landscapes; it was the protection of the ideal of cultural purity harboured within the rural, which must at all costs remain unspoilt by the industrialised city and the working poor within. As such, the pursuit of ‘permanent openness’ in the green belt today is an echo of the anti-urban prejudice held by a preindustrial elite. The ideal of openness therefore conserves an established order in which the rural is prioritised over the urban (Hall, 1974), which the green belt reinforces spatially in the present.

The modern history of the green belt can therefore be understood as a history of socio-spatial separation and containment of the urban population. This is not to emphasise that the green belt was actively used as an instrument of oppression, but as a means of procuring an idealised rural it inescapably furthered an inherited separatist agenda between the country and the city (and therefore also between the rich and the poor). One of the earliest proponents of a metropolitan green belt in its modern form was Lord Meath. In 1890, Meath advocated an encircling parkway to link suburban parks and open spaces around London with ‘broad sylvan avenues and approaches’ (Thomas, 1964). The first suggestion of an actual unbroken ring of open space around London, however, came from the MP William Bull at the outset of the twentieth century. Bull’s suggestion was for a half-mile wide band of open space running a little beyond the outer edge of built up London (ibid).

This idea was taken further by architect and town planner Raymond Unwin who, in 1933, proposed a radial ‘green girdle’ to provide a belt of parkland around London. Unwin’s plan was intended ‘to provide a reserve supply of open spaces and of recreational areas and to

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Figure 10: Department of the Environment comparison of Unwin’s ‘green girdle’ with Abercrombie’s Green Belt Ring (1980s).

Source: The Building Centre (2015)

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establish a green ring of open lands that would be as readily accessible from the completely urbanised area of London as practicable’ (Unwin, cited in Manns, 2014).

Unwin’s suggestion, like Bull’s and Meath’s, focused on the idea of a radial open space that functioned as a public park, providing an injection of health and cleanliness into the city. In effect, the intention of these early green belt proposals marked a brief shift in urban-rural attitudes in that these option favoured an approach in which the state purchased land for the free access of all. Openness here thus did imply “open to the public”.

Yet they remained fundamentally measures to contain the city to ‘break the outward sporadic spreading of London’ (Greater London Regional Planning Committee, 1933), and therefore served still to separate different socio-economic groups. There is another historical irony here in that a countryside historically purged of the working class was now preserved so that same class could benefit from their own exclusion.

The final and closest precursor to the adopted green belt was to come from Patrick Abercrombie in 1944. Abercrombie proposed a ten-mile wide ring of protected land around the entirety of London, within which London’s ‘overspill’ population (those displaced in the blitz and slum clearances) would be channelled into a series of new towns (Cherry, 1996; Hall, 1988). This principle formed the foundation of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, through which the green belt and national planning controls were implemented (Toft, 1995). This is somewhat surprising given that it was the immediate post-war Labour government, commonly associated with urban welfare and the widespread implementation of modernist high-rise public housing schemes, which first worked toward the legal preservation of the countryside and the English village – the heartland of Englishness (Brown and Maudlin, 2012).

It is more surprising still given that the premise of openness was at the core of the adopted plan, but that it jettisoned the commitment to public accessibility held by its precursors (although Abercrombie had hoped that tracts of land within the adopted green belt would continue to be acquired by councils for public amenity space). The basis of the plan was therefore that land would be protected by controlling the behaviour of landowners and leaseholders to prevent building, rather than through public acquisition of land for open park spaces (Thomas, 1964). On this basis, the green belt was to effectively become a protected ring of agriculture around London, forming a buffer between the capital and its satellite towns and villages. Rather than benefiting the urban population, it became only a means of excluding it. It therefore embodied only the class-based separatist values of the nineteenth-century, and none of the more egalitarian values of the twentieth-century that enacted it.

Openness came represent a range of values and ideals embodied within the rural, framing it in opposition to the city. It became, in this sense, both the means and the end of achieving socio-spatial separation. It so followed that the essential openness of the country-

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side must be protected from the city’s perpetual threat of consuming the rural. Openness therefore became a shorthand for all the virtues of a simpler, purer life in the country - everything the city was not – despite the ambiguity of the term. In this sense, the preservation of ‘permanent openness’ in the green belt realises a desire of a landowning class for social containment in the present. The countryside protected by the green belt thus becomes a space of temporary occupation, whether for work or for recreation; London and the towns enclaved within the green belt in contrast becomes spaces of permanence: namely, for dwelling (Smith, 1982). This reveals that the green belt is not only a spatial concept but a temporal one: open to the possibility of change. In terms of the green belt’s ‘permanent openness’ then, the issue of permanence is as questionable as that of openness.

On one hand, the idea of a temporal openness suggests that this space is in a perpetual process of transcendence, of becoming. This seems a geographically enlightened view. As Doreen Massey has written, ‘a conceptualisation of space as open, multiple and relational, unfinished and always becoming, is a prerequisite for history to be open and thus a prerequisite too for the possibility of politics’ (Massey, 2005). But this would further suggest the green belt as a space beyond the city that is not programmed towards a predetermined function, wherein spatial transformation is possible.

However, if the green belt is permanently open to change then the possibility of actual difference is precluded. The paradox here is that green belt policy effectively serves to impose the permanent rejection of permanence. Although the green belt retains the physical possibility of temporal change, by denying permanent difference, the possibility of spatial politics that Massey refers to is negated. The green belt therefore becomes less a space of ‘permanent openness’ and more one of permanent temporariness. This was made evident by the story of Robert Fiddler who made national news by building a mock-Tudor ‘castle’ on green belt land. Fiddler built the dwelling without the knowledge of the council by hiding the construction process behind a stack of hay bales over several years (Buchanan, 2015). Doing this, he hoped to exploit a caveat within planning legislation that allows structures that have stood for over four years without being disputed to be granted planning permission retrospectively. Although bordering on farcical, this situation highlights the conflict between permanence and temporariness in the green belt. Although the hay bales stood for longer than the building, the bales were considered temporary whereas the building was permanent. In effect, the permanent transformation of green belt space is not tolerated, but temporary transformations are tolerated permanently. For this reason, the green belt can be used for agriculture indefinitely, but such use would not be considered to preclude the green belt’s continued openness. For example, structures that enable quarrying are permitted in the green belt as this is considered a temporary activity. The subsequent permanence of the quarry itself is thus acceptable as it does not countermand the specification of spatial openness.

The green belt thus embodies a very specific temporality. That is, people can be in the

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Figure 11: Fields Openness could be understood as an aesthetic of emptiness, whereby constructs that enable permanent inhabitation are prohibited.

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green belt, but they cannot stay. This is reflected in the various building typologies that constitute exceptions to the general prohibition of building: agricultural and forestry structures, buildings that facilitate sport and recreation, and the various structures that serve industry, infrastructure and mineral extraction DCLG, 2006). All of these can be seen to facilitate only a temporary occupation of the green belt rather than a permanent one in that none enable the permanent presence of people. It could be deduced from this that the primary intolerance of openness is permanent inhabitation. Openness is therefore the absence of permanent inhabitation; it is fundamentally a process of social exclusion.

The only buildings permitted within are those that serve this exclusion.

If openness, the green belt and the countryside that both protect is defined by absence, then it is framed in explicit opposition to the city which, in contrast, embodies the presence of permanent inhabitation. To an extent, this is a view long-held by both planners and architects: space is regarded as unfixed up to the point of intervention. Building is seen as some kind of dénouement to space, leading to the conclusion of a certain socio-spatial narrative within (Taylor, 2014). In this sense, the green belt is “open” because the city is “closed”. Yet the city is arguably far more permeable and accessible to far more people than the country through its greater density of roads and public spaces. Through parks, greens, malls and even tall buildings, London is arguably no less open aesthetically than the rural beyond. Temporally too, London exists in a process of virtually perpetual reinvention, in contrast to a green belt which, through its permanent openness, is defined by stasis.

The call for openness is therefore both the product of an idealised vision of a rural English heartland and an attempt to realise it. A form of morality can then be viewed within the ideal of openness (see Matless, 1994), which the green belt seeks to reproduce in the landscape: that only certain people and practices – those which conform to a narrow ideal of rural existence are permitted within. From this we can deduce a flexibility within openness. The term is both an aesthetic and temporal principle, underpinned by an internalised anti-urban ideology. As such, it could perhaps most accurately be understood as an aesthetic of exclusion within the English countryside, deployed to perpetuate a conceptual opposition between the city and the country. It is both the premise and the process of urban-rural separation. Yet this spatial separation can only be realised through social separation.

It is this separation – the containment not of the urban but the urban population – that the green belt primarily serves to realise. This is particularly evident through the constraint over the practices permitted within. Agriculture provides a prominent example, but it is perhaps epitomised by the prevalence of golf courses. Golf courses, as by far the greatest area of allocated recreational space, perhaps best represent the ideal of an open countryside detached from the toil of the working poor, reframed as a domesticated outdoors for the physical enjoyment of a socio-economic elite (Hebbert, 2008). Through intense land-

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Figure 12: Golf Course Golf courses often epitomise the ideal of an open countryside, purged of the working poor. Source: Addington Palace (2016)

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scaping and conditioning, golf courses offer a vision of a tamed and harmonious natural openness: an Eden in which the labour of maintenance is unseen. Yet it is unescapable that through such labour and expense, golf courses cater primarily to a wealthier sector of society – those who can afford to access and enjoy this openness. As such, the social and political barriers to the rural have given way to economic barriers – yet raison d’etre of the permanent openness as a force for excluding the urban poor remains. This reveals the somewhat schizophrenic nature to openness. The green belt was implemented to hold back London’s expansion, but the infrastructure and landscapes of production within simultaneously serve to deliver a shot of adrenaline to the very expansion it aims to prevent.

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Openness as an Urban-Rural Opposition

From the critical understanding of openness developed so far, this chapter looks more closely at how this ideal serves to reinforce a paradigmatic opposition between the city and the country in the present. This explores how this opposition is formed through a phenomenological dichotomy stemming from the historical perception of the English countryside, and how it creates economic barriers to the rural, furthering the project of socio-spatial separation. In this sense, openness becomes precursory to the capitalist appropriation of the countryside and the towns within, thereby debasing the very rural existence it aims to preserve.

It has been well established in the fields of planning, geography, sociology and economics that urban containment results in increased land values. By preventing expansion as an urban population increases, demand for space is pushed above supply, pushing up land values with it (Hall, 1974). As such, the green belt is highly complicit in this process. Many of these green belt towns – such as Oxshott, Cobham and Totteridge to name a few of the more famous examples – have resulted in becoming among the most expensive places to live in the UK2. The project of ‘preserving the setting and special character of historic towns’ and ‘preventing urban sprawl’ has led to soaring land values relative to the rest of the country, intensifying the process of social separation.

This process stems from the perception that the urban and the rural are fundamentally conceptually opposed. The notion of an idealised rural life in which a flourishing agricultural industry supports a socially cohesive and morally superior rural population has made the towns enclaved within the green belt highly desirable places to live (Davoudi and Stead, 2002). Given this and the proximity and accessibility to the capital of the green belt towns, inward migration has increased steadily through the twentieth-century to the present day. Indeed, their very accessibility aids in reinforcing the notion of the green belt as a picturesque idyll as it is the more attractive and affluent areas that transportation links tend to reach. The result has been a highly socially-selective gentrification of the 2 There are of course considerably less affluent towns bordering the green belt. However, this often stems from agricultural decline, limited economic diversification and crucially a lack of access to jobs rather than being a direct consequence of urban containment (Robertson, 2016).

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countryside driven by competition for scarce housing (Phillips, 1993). Indeed, Peter Hall has taken a hard-line view of this process, going so far as to say that urban containment has resulted in nothing less than ‘a civilised British version of apartheid… It hardly needs saying that in socio-economic terms this group is higher, and in material terms is richer, than the average’ (Hall, 1974).

Demographically characterised by their proximity to London, the populations of the green belt towns tend, socio-politically, to be more urban than rural, choosing to live in rural areas as a lifestyle choice rather than for work opportunities (Davoudi and Stead, 2002). Towns within the green belt are consequently reduced to dormitory suburbs serving London, held in orbit around the capital by the M25 and other infrastructures. But this has been more than just a demographic transition within the rural. It has resulted in not just the appropriation of the rural by a socio-economic elite, but the appropriation of the very claim to the rural’s historical roots. Through the romanticisation of the rural, these towns preserved by the green belt have become reframed as the cultural iconography of a socio-economic elite that appropriated it, rather than the culture that produced it. This is explained by Bhabha as occurring through a process of authentication: a specific cultural history is claimed as an authentic “past” and formalised as part of an “official” regional or national culture. This subsequently serves as a reference point for the continuation of culture in the present (Bhabha 1994). In this sense, the idealised rural existence alluded to by openness is adopted as the official genealogy of a national English culture. This is then recast as a singular history intended to provide a collective set of shared roots for society.

In contrast to this, the culture of the city is considered inferior and other. Through this process, the environmental and architectural product of a historically displaced rural poor (the ‘historic towns’ of the green belt) is reframed as the domain of a culturally-dominant social demographic. The historicisation of the countryside thus informs naturalisation in the present.

This line of thought holds a parallel with the work of Raymond Williams who argues that the romanticised idea of the countryside, rooted in a semi-fictitious understanding of what rural Britain has been historically, serves to further the interests of a socio-economic elite. As he expands: ‘in English, “country” is both a nation and a part of a “land”; “the country” can be the whole society or its rural area’ (1973). Thus for Williams, it is more than coincidence that the single term ‘country’ so closely ties rurality to statehood.

The drive to protect this openness is therefore a process of reinforcing established power structures. The defence of a vanishing countryside, the open air and the life of the fields, argues Williams, so become analogous with a defence of rigid, pre-modern socio-political power structures (ibid: 196). This process is highly conservative and exclusionary, operating through the ejection of alternative social narratives that deviate from the established genealogy of a place. Doreen Massey further explains this as the construction of a specific historical line from the past in order to confirm the views and convictions of the present.

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This serves to underpin and justify the construction of a particular future that reproduces the process (Massey, 1995).

The role of the green belt in defending the countryside, thereby reinforcing established power structures, is now evident. However, by preventing expansion both of London and its peripheral towns, the green belt renders than which it protects complicit in this process by suppressing the representation of alternative social narratives in space. Forming a corporeal link between the past and the present, the historic towns preserved by the green belt are clutched as the physical embodiments of the idyllic pastoral ideal. The imperatives of ‘preserving their setting’ and ‘preventing neighbouring towns from merging into each other’ is therefore the preservation of not just the openness of the countryside but also the idiosyncrasies within the towns, which are taken as evidence of a shared cultural genealogy. Representing the pure and archetypal origins of both a local and national culture, the significance of these towns is less what they are but what they symbolise. In this sense, the signification of the green belt towns is pinned to a romanticised notion of a perceived rustic origin (Brown and Maudlin, 2012). Associated then with other romantic (albeit problematic) notions of “authenticity” and “tradition”, these towns promise a form of salvation from the perceived insatiability of the city (Rykwert, 1972). They embody a simpler pre-industrialised world, safe from the homogenising force of urbanisation. In this sense they reinforce the opposition between the city and the country, as well as the other dichotomies within it – contemporary/historic, modern/traditional, etc. – bolstering the perceived imperative for urban containment (Upton, 2002).

However, dislocated from the cultures that conceived them historically, the green belt towns have come to represent the “legitimate” cultural supremacy of an affluent middle class by substituting in an idealised history of English sub-rural ascendency. As Raymond Williams (2011) further observed, such appropriation marks the transition from ‘culture as a way of life’ (ordinary people and ordinary work) to ‘culture as a form of signification’ (things called culture). This is reinforced by increasing land values within, establishing a barrier to economically-lower social groups. The result is the creation of enclaves of wealth amid the general underdevelopment of other rural areas. The preservation of these historic towns therefore constitutes the spatial division of socio-economic groups by spatially concentrating capital in some areas at the expense of others (Smith, 1982).

The impact of this is that, as cultural and architectural artefacts, these towns and the buildings within are severed from the cultures that produced them. As such, they are not so much preserved by maintaining permanent openness as embalmed: reduced to little more than images of themselves. This echoes the same historical processes that underpin the notion of openness. Enclosure sought to transform working commons (shaped by practice and custom) into idealised pastoral landscape scenes. In this way the landscape became an aesthetic and edifying artwork, legitimising the surveyed and planned space of the

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Figure 13: Reigate The ‘historic towns’ preserved by the green belt are effectively embalmed: reduced to aesthetics of themselves. Source: Move Revolution (2016)

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propertied by producing a perceived structure of society in scenic space (Olwig, 2005). In much the same way, the green belt towns and the buildings within are reduced to a series of aesthetic motifs of cultural processes that no longer operate to be appropriated and reproduced (Lefebvre, 1991). Then, in a bid to ‘preserve the setting and special character’ of the green belt towns, where new buildings are permitted planning is set up to favour the mimetic reproduction of these motifs, widely in conjunction with other political means of preservation such as conservation area or listed building legislation. Traditional building elements are cannibalised, becoming little more than a colour palette to apply to a building (Jameson, 1991). The result is the proliferation of hollow “archetypal” architectural imagery. Both the historic buildings that are valorised and the new buildings that ape them are consequently reduced to image-objects that visualise an idealised cultural self-perception in the present.

In this sense, while these rural towns may have fundamentally urban populations, aesthetically they continue to reinforce a conceptual opposition between an open countryside and a closed city. Moreover, by attempting to preserve the difference and idiosyncrasies of the towns within from the homogenising force of the city, the green belt serves only to facilitate this very process. As Neil Leach has remarked, such attempts to protect local identities hold within them an essential complicity in propagating the conditions of capitalist appropriation: the abatement of use-value of an object before the exchange-value of its signification. Although the preservation of the setting of historic towns is presented as an opposing force to the abstract space of late capitalism, it is arguably late capitalism itself that has sanctioned these developments. That is, as Leach continues, in a world dominated by all-consuming capitalism, ‘difference’ itself can be seen to be a product of the market (Leach, 2002). Although the green belt towns hold the promise of a deeper dwelling experience within – a reconnection to an “authentic” cultural roots – the imperatives of economic exchange preclude such a possibility (Dovey, 2008). This is because, as Brenner and Theodore explain, capitalist appropriation takes place through historically established patterns of socio-spatial organisation. As such, places themselves become mobilised as productive forces (Brenner and Theodore, 2002).

The green belt towns ultimately become simulacral allusions to a semi-fictitious phenomenology of place. This is driven by the interwoven imperatives of conservative aesthetic reproduction and the pressure to maximise financial return. Not only is just a singular dominant social narrative represented in space, the possibility of a rural architectural present is effectively suppressed. New architectural contexts, whether cultural or environmental, are inhibited by the general inability for towns to expand, precluding the emergence of newness in architecture. Meanwhile, the economic logic that has subsumed these dormitory towns reproduces itself through reproductions of the past. By looking to the green belt towns then, it would appear that architecture has broken from the artistic-political narrative that has historically supplied it with meaning. Architecture has instead, as Pier

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Vittorio Aureli has described, come to represent little more than ‘the victory of economic organisation over political judgment’ (Aureli, 2011).

The reproduced rural has thus become pastiche: an architectural characteristic that Fredric Jameson has described as ‘the imitation of a peculiar mask, speech in a dead language… thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs’3. The aesthetic pleasure in scenes of rural poverty and material decay celebrated through the picturesque (Brown and Maudlin, 2012) is thus perpetuated in the present, reaching its cultural zenith as a commodified image-object. The irony here is that the valorisation of a culture appears only to occur through the very process of capitalist abstraction that severs it from its historical roots.

Only once the physical characteristics of the buildings within the green belt towns have been appropriated as an aesthetic – their use-value having given way to the absolute primacy of their exchange-value – are they legitimated as a valuable cultural artefact. A self-perpetuating cycle results: the rendition of the rural towns into commodified image-objects reinforces their cultural romanticisation, thus intensifying the conditions that lead to their commodification. The green belt can be understood then not as preserving rural land per se, but as preserving this cycle. Indeed, from the critical understanding of openness developed in the previous chapter, the ongoing dialectic between valorisation and commodification is precisely how we could interpret ‘permanent openness’.

Openness, and its meta-narrative of a pre-industrial rural heartland as the basis for urban containment is therefore precursory to the capitalist appropriation of the rural – bringing about the primacy of exchange-value over use-value within. This has resulted in an exaggerated aesthetic opposition between the city and the country while any real cultural difference is subjugated. This perceived opposition therefore serves both to justify and facilitate the socio-spatial separation of the urban and rural, becoming both the reason and the mechanism for preventing London from expanding.

3 Written in 1991, Jameson was referring to the iconoclasm of postmodern architecture, yet this account is highly applicable to the historicist reproduction favoured by planners and propagated by architects. The difference however is that postmodernism had an ideological project within it. It was underpinned by a particular political and artistic logic that critically incorporated the iconoclastic deployment of architectural motifs. By favouring architectural mimicry in the pursuit of remaining “in keeping with local context”, rural architecture within the green belt towns has no such project.

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The Urbanisation of the Green Belt

Openness can now be understood to reinforce a conceptual opposition between the rural and the urban. Within, the country represents the idealised purity of an English heartland; the city represents the insatiability of industrial production capitalist accumulation.

Although this dichotomy is problematised by the actual composition of the green belt, it is paradoxically this same dichotomy that justifies the green belt’s existence. This chapter aims to further unpack this opposition. Drawing from more progressive theories of urbanisation, this chapter aims to discredit the idea that there can be such an opposition between the country and city by arguing that the green belt is fundamentally urban. This continues to consider how such an understanding could provide the opportunity tore-envision the relationship between the city and the country to allow the possibility of a new spatial politics through architecture.

By controlling London’s expansion, the green belt forms an integral part of London’s internal organisation, mediating the relationship between the capital and its exterior. But to consider it as such first requires a clarification of what defines urbanisation. The common understanding is perhaps that which is of, belonging to, or connected with the city (OED, 2016). Urbanisation, by extension, is the process of becoming urban. This classical definition of the urban is based on the assumption that the city is a clearly identifiable unit that provides the environment for a distinctively “urban” way of life (Schmid, 2012). It is this understanding of an urban realm diametrically opposed to a (prioritised) rural that planning policy, and especially green belt policy, propagates (Hall, 1973: 396). Through phrasing such as ‘to prevent urban sprawl’ (NPPF, 2012), the city is held as a delineated territory, albeit fluid in its capacity to spread. Yet the land that makes up the green belt itself discredits such a binary view. As a meshwork of agriculture, industry and infrastructure, enclosing pockets of urban- and suburban develop, as well as well as the towns and villages it encloses, the line between urban London and rural countryside is highly ambiguous.

Recognising the shortcomings of such a binary definition, the fields of critical geography and urban theory understand urbanisation less as a product than a process. Specifically, urbanisation is analogous with the dynamics of capital accumulation. Urbanisation in this reading is not simply the process of unrolling city across the landscape but a spatial

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Figure 14: London defined as a density within a totalising system of urbanisation

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composition of diverse types of investment patterns, settlement spaces, land use matrices and infrastructural networks (Brenner, 2012). Although urbanisation is manifested in the expansion of cities and city-regions, it equally entails the socio-spatial transformation of less-densely agglomerated settlement spaces that are, through infrastructural networks, ever more tightly linked to urban centres. This is a view shared by Lefebvre, for whom urbanisation and industrialisation are analogous processes, whereby industrialisation supplies the conditions and means of urbanisation. In this sense, contemporary social reality cannot easily be categorised as either “urban” or “rural”, but must be instead analysed in terms of an emerging urban society (Lefebvre, 2003). From Lefebvre’s perspective, urbanisation is a totalising phenomenon in which every aspect of contemporary social reality is encompassed and connected. In this sense, there ceases to be any meaningful distinction between the urban and rural at all as both are fundamentally geared towards the accumulation of capital. The only difference therefore is density, that the country is a less concentrated form of the city. Urbanisation transforms historic cities into devices for capital accumulation, and it reshapes and colonises the rural as part of the urban fabric (Schmid, 2012). The green belt can certainly be viewed as evidence of this reading. The rendition of the ‘historic towns’ into dormitory suburbs for a commuter-class reflects the spatial division of labour and concentrations of capital (Harvey, 1991). The agriculture, recreation and mineral extraction can all be viewed as forms of commodity production, making up part of a global system of consumption irrespective of city or non-city.

Pier Vittorio Aureli, however, ascribes a more nuanced meaning to the term, tracing it back to its invention by Cerdà. For Aureli, urbanisation is the ‘“managerial” paradigm’ of social life: the ever-expanding apparatus that is the basis for modern forms of governance.

In this understanding urbanisation is distinctly separate from the city. Whereas the city forms the political dimension of coexistence, urbanisation forms the economic (that is, the distribution of resources, financial or otherwise) logic of social management (Aureli, 2011). Urbanisation is better understood then as a system of governance through mechanisms of spatial closure and containment. Yet Aureli is concurrent that urbanisation is not simply an emergent and passive set of organisational principles but a fundamentally capitalist process: ‘the very raison d’etre of urbanisation and its aspirations of control and discipline is the transformation of the whole of society as a productive force for the sake of capital accumulation’ (2008). In this sense, the 8.6 million people concentrated in the South-East of England, and whose existence is stabilised by a density of buildings, infrastructures and political frameworks, constitutes London as a city. London as an urbanisation is instead a density of continuities and disruptions in a global circulation of capital. As such, the green belt becomes fundamentally urban. It serves to organise the distribution of capital within London and determines the further development of the city. This is not only in terms of the infrastructure within the green belt – although the motorways, dual carriageways and railways, as well as the depots and storage yards that crystallise around them certainly accelerate urbanisation by distributing resources throughout the capital.

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Nor is it just in the landscapes of production that comprise it, although these too can be viewed as the spatial manifestations of capitalism that constitute urbanisation. Rather, the very space of the green belt can be understood as urban. Its presence around London serves to focus the accumulation of capital spatially within London. This serves to shape the city itself to further and more effectively exploit this accumulation (Lefebvre, 1991), intensifying its own capacity for further accumulation. The green belt is therefore a constituent part of both London’s spatial and economic organisation.

In Cerdà’s schema, from which Aureli builds his understanding, the task of urbanisation was to expand infrastructure as much as possible to establish human habitat beyond the symbolic frame of the city, singularly ruralising the city and urbanising the countryside (Aureli, 2008). This was certainly the principle of the green belt when it was first mooted at the turn of the twentieth-century. And so it remains, even if fewer of the envisaged social and environmental benefits ultimately emerged. On this basis it is misleading to refer to the project of the green belt as ‘urban containment’ as it serves only to intensify urbanisation. It should instead be considered a means of “city containment”. This is not just a case of semantics. Whereas the green belt is urban, it resolutely is not city. Through its ‘permanent openness’, the green belt creates a buffer zone of programmatic (as well as predominantly spatial) homogeneity around London and its peripheral towns. It is in specific contrast to this homogeneity that the aesthetic difference between the green belt towns is both actualised and reinforced. It is therefore this very homogeneity that facilitates the capitalist appropriation of this difference.

This could be understood as an urbanisation of absence. By preventing London from expanding, the exclusionary principles of openness contribute in driving the soaring land values in London and the crisis of affordability that has arisen (Marvell, 2007). Of course, there are numerous factors that operate in conjunction here: the increase in multiple property ownership; a shift away from ‘traditional’ family units and increase in single-occupancy housing; the growth in London’s population from both domestic and international migrants; people living longer; the continued sell-off of public housing through schemes such as ‘Right to Buy’ (Oxley, 2016)4. All of these have served to push up the demand for 4 It is estimated that London will require over one million new homes to accommodate a growing population by 2030 (Manns, 2014) putting pressure on the green belt as a possible site for future housebuilding. For many, the preference is to build on brownfield land first; certainly, this is encouraged by central government, but it is disputed as to whether there is sufficient space here to accommodate present demand. There is also argument that some of this land might better be used as outdoor recreation spaces rather than simply urban densification. Others, such as Danny Dorling (2015), argue that the housing crisis is largely one of availability and allocation, and that positive redistribution could be achieved through tax incentives. In general, however, there is consensus that more housing will need to be built in London, making the green belt an extremely contentious issue with the debate over its future polarised between neoliberal calls for more housebuilding and protectivist appeals to protect the countryside.

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space in London relative to supply. But these are compounded by a green belt that creates a barrier to London’s spatial growth. The result is the steady increase in the value of property while real incomes have stagnated (see Manns, 2014; Quod, 2015; Barker, 2014), leading to the average cost of a home in London and the South-East reaching over nine times the average income (Dorling, 2015) .

The green belt has consequently become highly controversial. Its very ‘openness’ is a tantalising prospect for volume housebuilders. This has had the affect of polarising arguments regarding its future to either conservative appeals to protect precisely the openness of the countryside and the practices within, or neoliberal calls for increased housebuilding. For those who already own property, the green belt has helped to drive up the value of their assets by keeping demand high (Oxley, 2016). As such, although the green belt impedes London’s spatial expansion, it nonetheless facilitates the economically expansionist logic of urbanisation. The implications of this are not only economic but architectural. Architecture is increasingly forced to justify itself as a maximum return on investment by extracting the greatest “value” from its site. The impact of this phenomenon on the culture of architectural production has been discussed by Reinier De Graaf of OMA (2015), for whom the primary objective of architectural practice has become to create assets to both facilitate and profit from this process. The situation was concisely summarised through the title of an article he penned for in the Architectural Review: ‘architecture is now a tool of capital, complicit in a purpose antithetical to its social mission’. He explained within, ‘the logic of a building no longer primarily reflects its intended use but instead serves mostly to promote a ‘generic’ desirability in economic terms. Judgement of architecture is deferred to the market. The ‘architectural style’ of buildings no longer conveys an ideological choice but a commercial one: architecture is worth whatever others are willing to pay for it’ (De Graaf, 2015). This is a position shared by Aureli, who sees this condition as responsible for the rise of the ‘architectural icon’: buildings operating as singular landmarks inscribed entirely within the logic of urbanisation, shaped entirely by capital flows and the imperative of individualism (2011)5. In this sense, the green belt’s capacity in suppressing the political reinvention of architecture in the country (if we can still hold such a notion) is 5 This was made clear through a personal anecdote of a director of well-known London-based architecture practice working on a residential construction project in Holland Park.

The architect was dismayed by the fact that, despite her position, she would never be able to afford to live in one of the flats she was designing. Yet this was inconsequential as the flat would never be lived-in. This did not simply reflect cynicism at the number of unoccupied properties in London bought simply as investments. This flat was intended not to be lived in. It followed instead the market logic of buying a new car, whereby the moment it is driven off the forecourt it has lost its premium as having “never been used”. Thus, by retaining the tag “never been lived in” the property can change hands without any loss in capital value. This perhaps epitomises the capitalist abstraction of architecture. Although it would be misleading to forward this extreme situation as exemplary of all architectural production, but equally such a situation could not have occurred without a collective faith in architecture as a reliable vessel for wealth.

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intensified in the city. That is, a schism has formed in the artistic and political narrative that has historically determined the new within architecture. Architectural production has become the production of the abstract difference of the commodity, as opposed to the programmatic difference of a politically engaged building.

From this point of view, what conclusion should be made of the green belt and ‘permanent openness’ as a means of containing the city? On one hand, if openness constitutes the reproduction of propertied interests in the present then can the notion be defensible in a multicultural democratic society? Is it not more appropriate to allow people to live in the green belt, thereby eroding the social separation that it imposes? However, exposing the green belt to “housebuilding” – which is, by-and-large, the economist’s course of action (Oxley, 2016; Mann, 2015; Cheshire, 2014) – is liable to result in the further severalty and individualisation of land. The project of enclosure, begun in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-centuries, would thus be concluded through the neoliberal compartmentalisation of the rural. On the other, without a boundary containing London, is the city liable to dissolve into an endless expanse of urbanisation – a post-political manifestation of capital dynamics, stripped of any meaning other than economic performance (Aureli, 2011)? It could be argued of course that if the green belt is urban then London could already be considered solute. And of course there are many examples (Rio de Janeiro, New York and Venice to name just a few) in which urban containment, whether political or environmental, has formed a fundamental part of the city’s dynamism without solely being a driver of social inequality.

It is the premise of ‘permanent openness’ as the underpinning principle for urban containment that is problematic, rather than urban containment per se. The blanket socio-economic exclusion it enacts serves above all to impose a morality over the green belt, tolerating only certain “temporary” behaviours and practices within, through which this social separation is realised. Meanwhile, the practices that are tolerated under openness predominantly result in inaccessibility and environmental degradation (particularly agriculture, golf courses and mineral extraction). The significance of considering the green belt as urban then is that it separates this preserved land from its own mythology. The green belt both relies upon and reinforces a dichotomy between city and country. But whereas the city tends to justify its reproduction by calling for certain ends in the future, the country legitimises its reproduction by appealing to the past (Arendt, 1970). The green belt therefore refers to its own authority as a precedent for legitimising its own preservation. But if this perception of the green belt could be shifted to think of it as a place with a future – as opposed to an historicity be defended at all costs – debate surrounding it might be able to move away from the misconceived framing of a “modern” city and “traditional” countryside as geographic and temporal opposites (Abu-Lughod, 1992). That is, by rejecting the notional opposition between the city and the country, the terms by which containment occurs could be changed. This in turn could allow for a new set of strategies for resolving

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London’s future expansion in conjunction to the rural rather than in opposition.

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Conclusion

As the underpinning principle of the green belt, it is the ideal of ‘permanent openness’ that defines London’s periphery. Questioning this ideal, the essay found openness to stem from and reinforce an idea of urban and rural as paradigmatic opposites that must be kept separate. Openness itself could perhaps most aptly be understood as an aesthetic of emptiness – albeit distinctly separate from the picturesque vision of the rural that the notion appeals to. However, it remains unclear what makes openness a valid premise for containing the city, which might lead us to conclude that openness is simply an ideal in and of itself. That is, it is fundamentally a phenomenological quality - one that represents an idealised set of cultural roots inherited from the picturesque movement and is underpinned by an anti-urban sentiment cultivated through the Industrial Revolution. The city in contrast is perceived as an unstable pathology, ever-liable to spill out into the surrounding countryside. It is this pathology that that the green belt was established to contain through the prohibition of building within. However, by looking to the environmental quality of the landscapes that are ‘preserved’, it is not so much the countryside that is preserved by the pursuit of openness, but openness itself. The project of containing the city is further revealed as a process of social exclusion from the rural. This social separation has rendered the ‘historic towns’ within the green belt into a series of dormitory suburbs for a commuter-class, reducing the buildings within to commodities valued only in terms of exchange. Simultaneously, the prohibition of London’s expansion has facilitated the inflation of land values within. Besides the well-documented socio-economic ramifications of this phenomenon, the consequence of this situation is that architecture, both new and old, is reduced to an instrument for extracting maximum value from a site.

This study stemmed from the increasing controversy surrounding the green belt today. With widespread consensus that London is facing a housing crisis, the green belt is increasingly targeted as a site for new housebuilding. As such, the green belt has been discussed extensively within the fields of economics, housing policy and sociology. As mentioned previously, this has served to polarise arguments concerning the green belt’s future between conservative appeals to protect the countryside and neoliberal calls for its deregulation. This essay has tried to avoid either camp, instead looking to what openness both serves to preserve and produce in a spatial and architectural context. In this sense,

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openness has been found to be extremely problematic as a means for containing the city.

Resting on a discredited understanding of the urban and rural as distinctly separate entities, the green belt holds the countryside as a vestige of historical authenticity which must be preserved. This precludes any political discussion of the green belt as a place with a future as opposed to simply a past. Moreover, the limited practices that adhere to the narrow meaning of openness tend to be environmentally degrading, thereby further distancing the landscapes that comprise the green belt from the idealised rural they seek to reproduce. Yet it would be misleading to suggest such attitudes only persist through planning.

Much of the UK population are still firmly in favour of the green belt, and certainly the current government have promised that the green belt will remain protected. This raises the question of why such attitudes remain so ardent given the disparity between the perception of the green belt as an Arcadian idyll and its reality as a patchwork of depots, golf courses and industrial agriculture. Possibly, it is precisely the green belt’s inaccessibility – the reality that it is generally not open – that its perception as open countryside remains entrenched.

It is important to recognise that as this essay has focused on the premise of openness itself, it has been necessary to consider the green belt from a reasonably broad perspective.

This should not however be viewed as an attempt to reject the nuance of a complex and multivalent set of landscapes by grouping all as a single universalising phenomenon. For instance, the ‘historic towns’ preserved by the green belt that has been discussed through this essay have largely been viewed as having become enclaves of affluence. This is not to deny the simultaneous existence of disadvantaged areas, but rather an attempt to explain a broader phenomenon. Further interrogations of openness from the viewpoint of critical social theory would benefit from examining a magnified cross-section of the green belt, focusing on particular typologies or regions to consider the more acute effects of openness. This would also benefit from a cross-disciplinary approach. Studies of the impacts of maintaining openness from ecological or biological perspectives could shed light of the relationship between openness and the natural world, tying in to its cultural implications.

Finally, while this essay found the ideal ‘permanent openness’ to be wholly discredited as the raison d’etre of the green belt, this should not be interpreted as unbridled advocacy for unregulated development within. Rather, the premise of the city and country as paradigmatic opposites – that the city is in a process of metamorphosis, whereas the country is in a permanent state of stasis – should be rejected. By perpetuating this fallacy through the planning process, openness preserves the countryside as an inaccessible and ecologically degraded enclosure. London within subsequently becomes a pressure-cooker of inflating land values, in which architectural reinvention has stalled. By breaking from the view of an urban-rural dichotomy (and the planning policy that actualises this separation) architectural production might be reclaimed as a form of political engagement, rather than a tool for extracting maximum value from a site. Then, a new relationship between the city

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and the country could be constructed architecturally, rendering London’s periphery into a place, and not just a fringe.

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Interviews

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