GIS and Evidence-Based Policy Making - Chapter 9

9 Residential Property Utilization: Monitoring the Government Intensification Agenda Peter Bibby CONTENTS 9.1 Introduction............................................................................................... 177 9.1.1 Policy, Evidence, and GIS ........................................................... 178 9.2 Patterns of New Construction: Accommodating Housebuilding within Urban Areas...................................................... 181 9.3 Accommodating Housebuilding: Urban Areas and Beyond ............ 185 9.4 Using Grids to Characterize Dispersal of Housebuilding................. 191 9.5 Using Grids to Explore Structural Effects and Market Relations..... 194 9.6 Within the Urban Areas: Intensification of Units of Occupation 1998—Reconstructing a Grid Using PAF.............................................. 214 9.7 Within the Urban Areas: Intensification of Utilization of Existing Property.................................................................................. 217 9.8 Constructing a Fine-Grained Settlement Geography to Identify Development Contexts......................................................... 220 9.9 Conclusions................................................................................................ 229 9.9.1 Development Patterns and Policy Objectives.......................... 230 9.9.2 Methods and Representations.................................................... 230 9.9.3 Relation between Policy, Evidence, and GIS ........................... 233 References ........................................................................................................... 235 9.1 Introduction The Government is committed to promoting more sustainable patterns of development, by: . concentratingmostadditionalhousingdevelopmentwithinurbanareas; . makingmoreefficientuseoflandbymaximisingthereuseofpreviously developed land and the conversion and reuse of existing buildings; 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. . assessing the capacity of urban areas to accommodate more housing; . adopting a sequential approach to the allocation of land for housing development; . managing the release of housing land; and . reviewing existing allocations of housing land in plans, and planning permissions when they come up for renewal. (Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions; DETR, 2000c, para 21) It seems peculiar to her suddenly that they should be living in this space: a hundred years ago it would have been a garment factory, where immigrants from eastern Europe stitched fabric into human shapes and practised getting their tongues around the muted diphthongs of English. This is what Lily loves about London, that every building, street, common and square has had different uses, that everything was once something else, that the present is only the past amended. (Maggie O’Farrell, My Lover’s Lover, London, Review 2002, p. 41) 9.1.1 Policy, Evidence, and GIS In the opening years of the twenty-first century, planning policy in England and Wales was clearly directed to conserving undeveloped land and to the intensification of use of urban areas. DETR’s Planning Policy Guidance Note 3 of 2000 (PPG3) encapsulated this emphasis. The term intensification denotes ‘‘a combination of changes in built form and activity’’ and focuses attention on the capacity of urban areas both to accommodate extra dwell-ings and to adapt to new economic roles. At the microscale, the term implies development of previously undeveloped pores within cities; the redeve-lopment of existing buildings and previously developed sites at higher densities; and the subdivision, conversion, and extension of existing build-ings. All contribute to the intensification of use of existing buildings or sites and changes of use allowing increases in the numbers of people living in, or working in an area (Williams, 1999, p. 168). Policy has focused on amending the past in a manner which provides for more sustainable development and which celebrates—perhaps in the manner of O’Farrells’s Lily—the values of urban living. Over the same period, across government, there was a reinvigorated interest in founding policy upon evidence. It therefore seems plausible that there might be some potential role for GIS (and indeed for Geographic Information Science (GISc)) in developing and monitoring policy for reshaping of the physical environment. This chapter explores some of that potential. Its focus is on monitoring urban growth and the conservation of undeveloped land, on monitor-ing the mediating influence of urban land recycling, and on the reuse of existing buildings. It attempts to contribute to debate at three levels. Most immediately, it attempts to use GIS to draw some inferences about development patterns in England and Wales which might be pertinent to 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. the assessment of policy. Second, it considers how particular techniques, including the use of natural language processing (NLP) with GIS, can contribute to the exploitation of data for policy purposes. Third and most fundamentally, it is concerned with the overall relationship between policy, evidence, and GIS and with the manner in which GIS use is and might be embedded within policy processes. A prerequisite of addressing the first of these concerns is a broad under-standing of aspects of relevant government policy in 2000 and immediately afterwards, while engagement with the third concern demands someexplicit consideration of how the term policy itself is to be understood. The emphases of the 2000 revision of PPG3 reflect a commitment to regeneration and intensification, which suffuses popular planning thought and rests in turn on underlying concerns about sustainable urban living and broader notions of environmental sustainability. The 2000 revision of PPG3 must, therefore, be understood alongside a welter of other documents (including, for example, the urban and rural white papers of DETR, 2000a,b) and Prescott’s (2003) statement on sustainable communities which depend upon the broader discourse of sustainable development. It must be emphasized, how-ever, that other discursive currents influence present policy set out in the Communities and Local Government’s Planning Policy Statement 3 (PPS3; CLG, 2006). CLG is the successor department to the Office of the Deputy PrimeMinister(ODPM),DETR,DepartmentofTransport,LocalGovernment and the Regions (DTLR), and the Department of Environment (DoE). The concept of policy pertinent to this chapter should neither be reduced to the text of PPG3 (or PPS3) nor bloated to include the sum of concerns about sustainability. In the tradition of Heclo, policy might be regarded as a ‘‘course of action or inaction’’ (Heclo, 1972, p. 85). The policy process might thus be seen as centering on the articulation of commitments intended to guide subsequent action. From this perspective, the prime significance of texts such as PPG3 is that they potentially allow such commitments to bind actors such as local authority planners who may be distant from central government policy making both in space and time. The policy process involves ensuring such attenuation, so that policy becomes a ‘‘stance which once articulated, contributes to the context within which a succession of future decisions will be made’’ (Hill, 1997, p. 7 ascribed to Friend et al., 1974, p. 40). The context reproduced by the policy process is sometimes referred to as the policy setting and includes an assumptive world of values, metaphors, and core narratives reflected in bureaucratic practices, operational definitions, and procedural rules. Evidence is always used to support or supplant a story. Policy rests upon particular understandings of the nature of the world. Given the nature of policy, its relation to evidence is less straightforward than might first appear. Context denies the possibility of transparent empiricism, thereby complicating the role of GIS in monitoring its effectiveness. Sustainability, moreover, should perhaps be seen as an ‘‘essentially contested’’ concept in the spirit of Gallie (1955–1956). Without elaboration of a particular narrative, 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. and of particular definitions, GIS, however useful, cannot provide a tool for distinguishing sustainable and unsustainable patterns of development. It, therefore, cannot somehow ground policy in evidence in an unproblematic manner. The evidence assembled using GIS is constrained by the data which it has been deemed worthwhile collecting and framed by particular narra-tives and images within the policy setting. Understanding the potential of using GIS in policy monitoring involves appreciating the character of the traditional narratives. One such narrative provides an account of urbanization which focuses on the construction of dwellings, leading from the idea of exogenous household growth to expan-sionofthecontiguousurbanareaandconcomitantreductioninundeveloped land. The number of dwellings in Great Britain has increased by 80% in the last 50 years (Matheson and Babb, 2002, p. 163). The traditional narrative has moved with images such as ‘‘a Bristol a year,’’ directly from increasing numbers of households to the expansion of the contiguous urban area, and this provides the imagery by which the press expresses the environmental consequences of household growth [see, for example, the transmutation of forecast changes in numbers of households into ‘‘twenty-seven huge new towns’’ (Daily Telegraph, 1996) or the invocation of ‘‘an area the size of Manchester’’(Observer, 2003)]. Theyconverge with imagesof urban growth, urbansprawl, and urban spread, whichlikencities to organisms, demanding responses such as CPRE’s Sprawl Patrol. Such images are reflected and sup-ported by familiar cartographic devices, which record the expansion of particular towns over time, which may be replicated within GIS. More recent narratives, however, qualify this story. Growth in numbers of householdsremainsatthecore.Althoughpopulationgrowthhasbeenmodest in recent years, household growth—and hence urban growth—has continued (sustained by rising real incomes). This growth is to be understood in relation to changing lifestyle choices that show themselves statistically as continuing falls in average household size. Variants of the narrative typically question how new households or dwellings are to be accommodated, but not the sustainability of those social choices that allow household size to continue to fall (DoE, 1996). Through the 1990s policy discussion became increasingly concerned with the extent to which development might be concentrated on brownfieldsitesandhencemitigatepressureforurbanexpansion.Thisinturn prompted GIS development including both small-scale analytic work under-pinning urbanization forecasts (Bibby and Shepherd, 1996) and development of a National Land Use Database (NLUD)—an inventory of brownfield sites. In the absence of strong population growth, by 2000, household growth had come to coexist alongside crude housing surplus at national level (Matheson and Babb, 2002, p. 164). In particular cities and regions, problems of low demand for housing had come to assume prominence (e.g., Bramley et al., 2000) and these issues had risen high up the policy agenda. Narratives of urban growth thus came to interact with rather different narra-tives of local housing market collapse. These emphasized the rapid, extreme, and essentially arbitrary nature of local market adjustment as withdrawal of key actors (such as particular social landlords), vandalism against empty 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. property,andoutbreaksofsocialdisordermightunderminethepossibilityof continued occupation. The specter of urban expansion running apace along-side the dereliction of redundant urban quarters had become evident. Policy, moreover, must be concerned not only with substantive goals but also to the manner in which they are to be pursued. In a climate where evidence is used to legitimize policy, where there is a lack of confidence in forecasts, and where there is uncertainty over the performance of local housing markets, monitoring came and remains to the fore (in principle at least). The 2000 revision of PPG3 introduced a ‘‘plan, monitor, and manage’’ approach to planning for housing in preference to the previous regime— somewhat disparagingly dubbed ‘‘predict and provide’’ retrospectively (Prescott, 2000). This provides the context in which this particular series of GIS applications is set. It is very different to one in which housing demand—driven by population growth—would inevitably be met by the construction of family housing immediately recognizable by remote sensing and easily represented on large-scale maps. 9.2 Patterns of New Construction: Accommodating Housebuilding within Urban Areas The introductory quotation from the 2000 revision of PPG3 (DETR, 2000c) focuses on three objectives: concentrating housebuilding on sites within urban areas, concentrating housebuilding on previously developed sites, and accommodating new dwellings within existing buildings. The remain-der of this chapter treats each of these objectives in turn, using GIS to explore how far patterns of housebuilding in the 1990s proved consistent with the intentions set out in 2000 and exploring some of the issues arising. In so doing it must have regard to the closely linked intentions to avoid developments which make inefficient use of land (those of less than 30 dwellings per hectare net) encourage housing development which makes more efficient use of land (between 30 and 50 dwellings per hectare net) and seek greater intensity of development at places with good public trans-port accessibility...such as city, town, district and local centres or around major nodes along good quality public transport corridors. (PPG3; DETR, 2000c, para 58) The location of new development in relation to existing urban areas would appeartobeanissuewherethereisaclearroleforGISandwheretheanalytic issues are trivial.Effective monitoring might appear to depend simply on the availability of information on the location of new housing sites on the one hand and the boundaries of urban areas on the other recorded with sufficient 2007 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. ... - tailieumienphi.vn