Town & Country Planning, May 2012
It is a strange experience to drive through floods, or staunch leaks in your bathroom ceiling, and know that there is still a drought warning in place. As I travelled back from Newcastle by train last week (on election day), whole swathes of the nation seemed to be under water.
But after Coleridge’s memorable phrase about there being “water, water everywhere”, he added “nor any drop to drink”. Just so.
I found myself musing as the train rattled along about whether this is also a metaphor for the centralised state – all these resources, lying about in puddles so uselessly, because the local mechanisms do not exist to put them to use.
But then, of course, as I had realised by the time we glided into the new Kings Cross Station (thrilling, by the way, if only because you can enter the station platforms by walkway above the trains), that it is more than a metaphor.
The rain falls locally but all we have is centralised water plants and infrastructure, huge reservoirs and treatment plants. Any rain that falls elsewhere lies in great ponds across the fields or pour down my street into the drain. It’s all wasted.
The same is also true of potential renewable energy, in the form of sunshine and wind. It beats down on our roofs, sweeps across our pocket handkerchief gardens, and is wasted too.
This is actually quite a hopeful analogy. In these days of austerity, we have become so used to the idea that resources are incredibly scarce – and all the debate about fossil fuels and global warming suggests the same. Yet every square metre of the nation is awash with resources and energy, if only we could access it.
Perhaps any localism worthy of the name could reverse the current order of things, especially when it comes to water. At the moment, we rely in an overstretched grid for our basic needs and fill in the gaps by what we manage to collect at home in water butts. You can imagine a far more efficient system which puts those priorities the other way around.
Put like that, our future homes are going to be a little bigger, but they will collect rainwater and treat waste water onsite. We will collect the energy from the sun and use what we can, and send the rest off to the grid.
We are held back, as always, not just by centralised infrastructure but by the mindset of centralisation. For a generation, we have believed that was the efficient way forward. Our economists and planners believed in the economies of scale. Now they are not so sure, and neither am I.
Unfortunately, for the time being at least, we are stuck with capital-heavy, resource-heavy and wasteful centralised infrastructure to tackle water, energy and waste as well.
Equipping every home in this way is certainly going to be expensive, maybe more expensive than the old-style centralised infrastructure – which will still be needed as well. But then so was equipping every home with a computer, a lawnmower and a Black and Decker drill. The responsibilities for that investment were rather different.
The mindset is more difficult to shift. The old guard remain in charge, agonising about how to provide the nation with another generation of nuclear reactors in the same old mould, the very symbol of centralised thinking.
I remember the futurist Francis Kinsman, a contributor to this and many other journals, describing a lecture he had given for managers on the rise of the ‘inner directed’, the people who were motivated primarily – not by consumer one-upmanship but by independence, health and education.
He emphasised their independence of mind. It was an exciting and vision which exercised us a great deal in the mid-1980s.
At the end of the lecture, he was collared by a representative of the Central Electricity Generating Board, the apotheosis of the giant centralised monolith. “How can we identify these inner directed people?” he asked.
Pleased that the CEGB were interested, Kinsman asked him what they were planning to achieve. “Because we want to root them out,” he said.
Nearly here decades on, our political language, our policy assumptions and so much else remains rooted in the old world of obedience, central dictat and huge capital intensive infrastructure.
At the same time, back in the 1980s, we were all wringing our hands about the state of dilapidation of so much private housing, and wondering what kind of government Whitehall institution might be capable of wielding the resources to sort it out.
In the end, it was a combination of rampaging house prices and the DIY movement that did it. The house prices were a disaster, but the solution was emphatically local.