Build on brownfield sites in cities

[PoliteCritic]

This is the cry of people fighting against the building of new homes in the countryside. I think they are wrong.

I live in a City. Over the last five years lots of green areas have been built on. I went to Surrey at the weekend and they have lots of green spaces in between houses as well as proximity to green belt space. It felt leafy and green. In my City with all the odd bits of green spaces being built on, the City feels more and more concrete like.

There has to be a limit to building in cities. If you build on every green space except small parks serving enormous populations, then you make cities very unpleasant places to live. Why should places like Surrey live in far greener surroundings with access to large green spaces, and yet call for ever more building in Cities?

We need to build on these green spaces as well and in pretty ordinary fields to expand villages. You can't keep your view and expect those in cities to be left with virtually no access to any green space.
AIBU?

@Swisscave have you lived in a very small space? DH and I lived in a bedsit when we first got together with a separate bathroom. It was too small to have people round. Most people want space for their children to play indoors and to have friends round. Flats are already small. Just googled and the median floor space of flats is just 43 sqm, about 4 car parking spaces. We already have some of the smallest houses and flats in Europe.

I agree.

I also agree with "grey" belt development.

And then alongside that we need to look at

empty houses
second homes
holiday homes
overseas investors
occupancy eg one person in a 4 bedroom house (more difficult nut to crack, I certainly wouldn't want to move from a nice detached house into a flat with zero noise insulation)
WFH/remote working so people don't have to live in the SE
decent broadband everywhere so people don't have to live in the SE of England

That explains what is happening. We need cities and towns to be places where people want to live.

@IcyKoala

Of course I’ve stayed in a small flat. Who hasn’t?

We aren’t going to get flats or houses any bigger when we already have a large population. So we have to make do with what we have and spaces need to be better designed.

And if families have kids in flats, then it’s even more important that we keep our green space for them.

@Swisscave but the argument is that we should be building flats even smaller. They are already very small.
And where I live there is already not enough green space. On days like today the local parks are heaving.

@IcyKoala

To be fair, the UK has a large population that lives on their own. I think there were nee figures just published.
Yet one bed flats aren’t really seen outside of cities. So there is a case to built smaller flats elsewhere in the country.

The one bed flats where I live are full of people coming out of prison or with substance abuse issues or student flats. You would not want to live there.
There are a few blocks of two/three storey flats built in the 1920s that sell for a decent price because the rooms are larger than normal, and they are very solidly built so there is no noise issue.
Flats on the continent are often very well built, unlike here. And communal areas and the lift are maintained. That is why people do not like them here. I spent too many weekends in the piss stinking lift leading to my gran's flat.

Cities also need to be reclaiming areas for green-space. Less concrete and more plants can lower ambient temperatures. Building denser and denser cities comes at a cost.

God that sounds bleak.

The selfishness of a lot of planning objections really get to me - I feel sometimes homeowners think because they've bought a rural home they have got the divine right to freeze time and progress and if you're urban and poor, well, fuck you.

The empty office blocks need demolishing and turned into well designed eco flats, with storage, daylight, balconies etc. Plus, enough parking all with electric chargers.

Not the current craze of turning office blocks into cheap studio flats for cash only landlords.

Where I live all the one bed flats are occupied by the elderly. They are lovely flats and work well for the residents. These are private flats, not social housing.
In my area there are no one bed social housing flats and the only one beds are in the elderly complex.

There are many reasons why building in towns and cities is preferred to countryside, i will voice just 3. My biggest reason against building in countryside is the lack of infrastructure. I live near a new built estate near village and it's been up for sale for over 14 months now - nobody is buying because of lack of infrastructure, schools, and generally poor quality building nowadays. It's certainly better to convert disused office spaces and brownfields in the cities into flats, which are affordable and better quality, than sell poorly built new homes for 400k+ without infrastructure. No brainer really.

The countryside is needed for the air quality and for water draining when it rains a lot. The new builds are all tarmac and shoddy houses. Why not build in towns to use up the land that is derelict. Save the fields for nature and farming. Leave the woods for the environment. The rainforest is felled and people say how awful but here trees are torn up to build rubbish housing and that’s ok.

@NotAlexa there is a limit to infrastructure in towns and cities as well. They can not just absorb ever more people without improving infrastructure. Its really not the gotcha you think it is. And those houses are probably not selling because they are too expensive.

There's lots of developments in Surrey. The massive developments as Wisely & Ash for a start.The road infrastructure would struggle to cope with more traffic eg M25
There's parts of Surrey that are Green belt & also surrey hills national landscape (formerly AONB) where development is more restricted but it is very sought after so development still happening.
Most people can't afford somewhere decent & not sure families crammed in the high rise flats in woking would say it's lovely & green.

Woking tower blocks will include more than an acre of public space.

Houses are being built everywhere, including countryside. There are currently 3 separate developments in my village and a further 3 in nearby villages. I’m not actually aware of any new developments in the nearest city but I’m all for building more houses - people need somewhere to live.

Well you'd think so wouldn't you, but apparently an empty factory is better than housing for some.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/significant-victory-small-somerset-village-141527780.html?guccounter=1

Not far from where I am. Also the nearest town to me has been trying to develop an old factory site for the last 30 years but every application has been refused.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-67133419

I completely agree - a cohesive strategy is needed that marries up housing with employment opportunities and well thought through infrastructure.

True, but given the same area of land, flats enables more floor space than houses because you are literally building additional floor space. In Tokyo, floor space per person has increased a lot over the past 20 years even while the Tokyo population has increased, basically because we’ve been knocking down small houses and replacing them either with taller three-storey houses or apartment buildings.

The UK has Europe’s smallest houses, and part of the reason for that is that people tend to insist on houses and dislike taller buildings. English speaking countries do seem to dislike flats and prefer houses - we see this in Oz, NZ, USA, Canada. The difference is that these other English speaking countries are all thinly populated and are OK with cities spreading to very large sizes. The UK’s issue is that on the one hand, it is fairly densely populated and very reluctant to release any land for building on, but on the other hand, it is also reluctant to do the things that the Netherlands or Japan do to get dense populations housed (taller buildings, more apartments, restrictions on cars in cities). The result: very small homes.

(Very simplified image, obviously, but this tries to give an explanation of why adding more floors, all other factors remaining equal, creates more floor space per person)

Building 20 houses here and 30 there is all nonsense. Brownfield, greenfield is all a red herring.

We don’t need houses, we need whole new towns. When was the last time a town was purpose built in this country?

But given that our politicians are thickest, brain dead morons who couldn’t run a bath, they will not be able to build Jack.

we also need a lot more investment in the north. Rather than millions crammed into the south because it’s where the jobs are.

Which "north" are we talking about here?

If it's places like Manchester and York, these places already have similar issues to the SE in terms of locals complaining about any housing being built.

If it's decaying seaside resorts and mining towns, no amount of central planning and industrial strategy is going to turn these into powerhouses.

What is more, the gap between north and south has got wider, not narrower, in the past 20 years. Reversing that trend and then reducing the cavernous gap that has developed is going to take years and years. We need housing in high-demand areas now.

Closing the north-south gap is essential....for other reasons. I can tell you right now that NO amount of "levelling up" crap is going to enable the good denizens of Tumbridge Wells and Oxford from the indignity of having some housing in their neighborhoods.

New building is unfortunately shoddy and profit driven on the whole, in the countryside or cities. Little attention is paid to the overall aesthetic and I can't help visualising the slums of the future with some of them.

I found this example of how a formerly grim city in France was transformed into somewhere more beautiful, where people actually wanted to live. I wish we could do the same sort of thing here.

That's encouraging Giggorata, well for the French at least. It makes such obvious sense that people's surroundings have a huge impact on well being and behaviours - if the place you live is beautiful, well planted, with lovely street furniture, I'm sure you'd take more care to keep it looking that way which influences everyone else in the neighbourhood.