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The Thinkhouse Review: how good placemaking can play a role in addressing the UK's ‘productivity puzzle’

A report outlining the connection between placemaking and productivity was music to my ears, writes urbanist Kerri Farnsworth, in the latest Thinkhouse Review of research

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Research outlining the connection between placemaking a productivity progresses a more robust justification for good placemaking to be embedded in all aspects of development, writes Kerri Farnsworth in @Thinkhouseinfo review of #UKhousing research

It has been another great month for submissions to the Thinkhouse editorial panel, with 24 publications to read, digest and evaluate. As well as the first tranche of annual reviews of 2020, there was a broad and varied range of topics covered, including:

  • The ongoing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, with Place Alliance’s collaborative report Home Comforts particularly recommended as a focused and succinct snapshot of the lived experience of 2,500 people across the UK since March
  • The RTPI’s response to the recent UK government planning White Paper Planning for the Future
  • Two great reports on the re-use of brownfield land – a topic in which I have long had an active professional role, but which seems to have slipped in visibility and priority of late
  • A fascinating review of Northern Ireland’s Affordable Warmth Programme 2014-2018, by Ulster University, which provides a baseline methodology for social costs-benefit analysis that could be adapted for any organisation looking to improve their Social Return on Investment through housing stock improvement

But the publication that most grabbed my attention was that of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Building Communities. This summarises the response to a call for evidence made in spring 2019 for the connection between placemaking and productivity, made with the support of the Association for Consultancy and Engineering, which also led on the evaluation and production of the final report.

As someone who practices as an urbanist and ‘placemaker’, and who has been endeavouring for a number of years now to progress a more robust and empirical justification for good placemaking to be embedded in all aspects of development for both public and private stakeholders, this was music to my ears.


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The report starts from the factual basis that there is a 44% difference in levels of productivity in the UK between the most productive and least productive cities.

This figure is all the more stark in the context that the UK has had an entrenched low level of productivity compared to its G7 counterparts for several decades, and the fact that the speed of this decline has got worse over the past decade – with the UK having dropped to 31st out of 35 OECD countries in productivity growth between 2008 and 2017, despite being near the top of the league table for ICT-intensive employment where productivity growth has been the strongest.

This ‘productivity puzzle’ has confounded economists for decades, with a range of factors on the supply side and the demand side being postulated as the cause.

It is interesting that a very recent survey of the UK top economists by the Centre for Economics and Business Research found a consensus view on the proactive policies that the UK government should adopt to address this productivity puzzle – which was investment in human capital and infrastructure.

In other words, there is a growing recognition among economists that it is not just supply-side factors such as workforce skills and investment in R&D (in which the UK does lag behind its peers) that adversely affect productivity of a society, but an understanding that the environments in which that society lives, moves, connects and interacts plays a critical role, too.

Good placemaking is fundamental in the latter.

The APPG’s call for evidence was made to a wide range of stakeholders in the public and private sector around questions on the importance of infrastructure in facilitating community interaction and cohesion, and the interrelationships with policy and practice. The full report is fact-filled but, at only 32 pages, very readable, and covers everything from planning policy, economic development, community engagement, fiscal and real estate incentives, health and well-being, and the role of empirical macroeconomic indicators. The six key recommendations reflect this broad range of factors. They include straightforward ‘quick wins’, such as:

  • A call for the National Planning Policy Framework to have more robust ‘people-centred’ policies and requirements around the implementation and long-term management of components of good placemaking: for example access to open green space and high-quality public infrastructure (or, as they are referred to in much of mainland Europe, ‘common goods’ – a term which better encapsulates their role and value). I was heartened to see the concept of ‘stewardship’ so prominent in the report – a concept that is thoroughly embedded within the approach and thinking of many of my non-UK clients, yet feels underappreciated in the UK
  • A request that the Office for National Statistics develops a methodology so that the contribution of placemaking to GDP can be measured and monitored. The report doesn’t touch on it, but there are good precedents and research on this that could be built upon
  • Replacement of the Community Infrastructure Levy with a tax which better reflects localised infrastructure deficits and more equably reflects ‘land value uplift’ at the point of realisation, similar to the property sales levies used in the state of New York in the US
  • Development of more sophisticated financial appraisal techniques for longer-term, non-linear urban regeneration than currently exist in standard templates

The report recommendations also touch on more complex, longer-term, multi-stakeholder interventions, for example a call for greater active public sector intervention in the market to reduce land-banking and ‘site flipping’, and associated land price inflation, in areas of high demand for affordable housing, and greater use of joined-up local economic strategies and joint venture vehicles to incentivise the private sector to better involve communities in urban redevelopment.

The APPG report concludes that the UK needs a shift in the way it thinks about and delivers urban development – and that the pandemic has made that need more urgent. Thinkhouse has amassed a body of evidence on this, all aligning behind this call for a shift in approach. The APPG report provides a comprehensive contribution to how the UK can achieve that.

Kerri Farnsworth is an urbanist with placemaking and regeneration experience in the private and public sector

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