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'The best way to solve some of our global problems is breaking them down analytically into local ones,' he wrote. 'Not because local is easier; not at all. But because disenfranchisement, hate and misery always have local roots.'
His comments were made in the foreword to the report of the UK's Urban Task Force, Towards an Urban Renaissance. A decade on, the message of local action has been reinforced with the publication last week of World Class Places, the UK government's strategy for improving the quality of place.
The phrase 'world class' is perhaps unfortunate. By definition, only a few places can be world class if what's meant by that is that they are of a quality that is internationally recognised as the best - and the strategy, rightly, is about improving the quality of all places. I prefer the concept of 'great places' used in Yorkshire: all places can, and should, strive to be great in their own way. It's the antithesis of the equally comprehensible concept of the 'crap town'.
Hyperbole aside, the strategy makes important recommendations. A lot of them restate the case for good design, for sustainable transport, for lifetime homes, for high quality green space and sensitivity to heritage - points made by the Urban Task Force and a multitude of others over the last decade and more. They're no less essential for being obvious, and there's still a huge job to be done in educating planning and property professionals about some of these issues. In that respect, the strategy is timely.
More interesting, though, is the way it makes the connection with two central issues: climate change and poverty. A nod in the direction of climate change, a greener economy and changing transport habits may be expected, but there's more than that. The strategy recognises the concept of 'green infrastructure' as a central issue in planning - not just individual parks and green spaces, but the totality of parks, landscaping, waterways, green roofs and more. If this is now becoming part of the vocabulary of placemaking, we should begin to see a different balance of judgements in decision-taking.
The biggest challenge in the strategy, however, is the connection it makes with poverty. It deserves praise for not shying away from a conundrum that has foxed policymakers for centuries, but at the same time it could do more to explore the issues it raises. If you're going to open a can of worms, you might as well have a good look at them.
Here's the key paragraph on poverty, right at the beginning in the section headed 'Why quality of place matters': 'Poverty in this country is not just about poor education, unemployment or low wages, and lack of opportunity. It is typically associated with poor housing and poverty of place - badly designed housing estates or low quality neighbourhoods, with dysfunctionally designed, energy inefficient homes, unsafe passage-ways and poor public spaces.'
Further on, it echoes the leitmotif of the government's new regeneration framework, which is that regeneration is about improving economic prospects in areas of market failure. What's interesting in the context of placemaking is the link between poor design and poor economic prospects.
But the link isn't explored far enough.
Last year I attended a dinner organised by BURA - the British Urban Regeneration Association. I spent some time talking to planning professionals. All of them had once worked for local authorities, but now worked for Asda. Their job was to get planning permission for superstores. They proudly explained to me how the money was better in their current role, and how easy it was to influence the decision-making of stressed-out, overworked municipal staff.
The point about placemaking and poverty is that we don't live in a world where the odds are even. Poor places are poor not only because they are badly designed, but because they are trapped in a self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing cycle.
The Asda planners are just an illustration of how it works. Money, investment and talent drains is hoovered from the poorer places to the wealthier as surely as water flows downhill. We begin with places and societies that are unequal, and as people's prospects improve they move to where the buildings are nicer, the homes are larger, the schools achieve better results and the neighbourhood is perceived as safer.
As the better-off move out, poorer areas become reception centres for the worst-off. East London is a case in point - there's a well-trodden path from Stepney to Southend-on-Sea that echoes the aspirational movements first of white East Enders and more recently of the new Asian middle classes. The Bengalis are now beginning to move east too, and will be followed by the next wave. It's called social mobility and politicians see it as a good thing: in face they think we don't have enough of it.
Investment decisions follow these movements. High quality investments are made in better-off places, and these are reflected by the investments made by individuals and households in their own properties and lifestyles. So the wealthier the place, the more care is taken of it. The empirical evidence is there for us all to see in the look and feel of neighbourhoods, their social makeup, property prices, the proportion of children attending private schools, and more.
The World Class Places strategy fails to identify and address this self-reinforcing cycle. Had it done so, it would have gone on to point out the need for disproportionate investment in the most challenging places to countervail the way the economic lifeblood of society is trawled from the poorest places by the best-off. It would have pointed out that whatever the evidence for a trickling down of wealth from the rich to the poor, it's more than outweighed by the sucking out of investment from poor areas to wealthy ones.
Perhaps that would have been a bit too radical for the current government. But radical or not, it's what's needed if our poorer neighbourhoods are even to achieve standard class, never mind world class.
