Authors: Tom Campbell
‘Now do you remember why you avoided doing public consultations for so long?’ said James.
‘At least when they’re being racist, they’re not behaving like customers. There’s a bit of community sentiment going on. That’s something.’
James went through the yellow comment cards. It was as he’d expected. There was a problem with the masterplan, and it had nothing to do with the building materials or traffic projections. It wasn’t insurmountable, and once upon a time it wouldn’t have counted for anything at all, but it was there – a gnawing, intangible, pervasive problem that made all the other ones much more difficult.
The project was unpopular
.
It wasn’t just the public art, it was the whole thing. True, it was difficult to get the public to express a cogent opinion – but when they did, it was unambiguous. People didn’t like it.
In a way, this wasn’t such a surprise. James knew that humans can get nostalgic for pretty much anything: brutalised childhoods, major wars, discredited education systems, uncomfortable and inefficient forms of transport. It was just the same with the houses they lived in. For, incredibly, most of the residents of Sunbury Square actually seemed to like where they lived. They
liked
the totalitarian housing units with their grey walls and poor insulation, they liked the cramped doctors’ surgeries and the tarmac playground that their children were always breaking their arms on. Or, at least, they didn’t want anyone to change it.
‘You mustn’t let it get to you. So what if they don’t like what you’re trying to do. It doesn’t mean that you’re wrong.’
James had stopped listening. He was looking at his poster again. Yes, it had been made on a computer and none of it was real and yes, he had spent so much time with it that what he saw were now largely his own projections. But did that matter? The main thing was that there existed a vision for London, or at least a small part of it, and they could always extrapolate from that. An orderly, sunny, energy-efficient vision of how things should be.
‘You’re doing that thing again,’ said Rachel suddenly. ‘You’ve been doing it all morning.’
‘What thing? What am I doing?’
‘That staring-into-space thing. You might think you’re being mysterious, but it just makes you look gloomy. And women hate gloomy men. Moody and melancholy: yes. Gloomy and grumpy: no. If you’re not careful, you’ll succumb to self-pity, and then you’ll really be fucked. It’s only a shopping centre. It’s not like we’re working in an African coal mine.’
She was right, of course: it was only a shopping centre. Although James often thought that he’d be perfectly happy working down a coal mine provided Adam, Carl and everyone else he knew was working there too.
‘You’re right,’ said James. ‘It’s only a shopping centre.’
James had a vision for Sunbury Square, but did he have one for himself? Well, yes – and it wasn’t so very gloomy. He was thirty-five years old and he lived in a pleasant, if distant, suburb in West London, or possibly Nottingham. It was a Friday night and he had just gone with his pretty girlfriend, who looked a bit like Rachel, to the cinema. The film wasn’t as good as they’d been led to expect but they’d quite enjoyed it all the same. Afterwards, they had had two drinks each at a pub and then they had travelled back on the last train, followed by a short walk to their flat, which they were able to afford because they had a joint income, and which had maintained its value despite the prevailing market conditions. It had, in short, been a satisfactory evening in what was generally a satisfactory life. And what was so wrong with that? His job wasn’t as well paid as Carl’s, his home wasn’t as big as Adam’s and his girlfriend was less socially confident than Alice. But that was only a problem if he made it one, and besides – nowadays, he rarely saw any of these people.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘You’re right. I need a girlfriend. And I also accept that in order to get one of those, I’ll need to go on a date. Do you think you can get me one?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ll get you one.’
6
The 2,000-year history of London has been one of constant change. It has grown from a port and river crossing point into a bustling centre of national government.
–
The London Plan
, Section 1.2
‘I suppose you must have chosen this place for its competitive pricing strategy,’ said Laura.
James smiled bravely. The main thing was to concentrate on the positives, to learn lessons, improve his technique and not make a total fucking idiot of himself. This was, after all, the first date he had been on for some time and he shouldn’t expect either of them to enjoy it.
It should have been quite manageable – he was thirty-two, it wasn’t as if he could claim youthful inexperience. But the big challenge was that he hadn’t been expecting Laura to be anything like this clever or pretty. This should have been a dry run, an evening in which he got to experiment on a guinea pig, someone with whom he could make mistakes, safe in the knowledge that he would be able to hurt her more than she could hurt him. On paper, on email, on the web, Laura had sounded ideal. She worked in economic policy for the public sector, she had a degree from nowhere to get worried about, and the only picture he’d seen, admittedly a small low-resolution image on Rachel’s Facebook page, had given him no cause for anxiety. But the photo had been highly misleading, in fact he was now almost certain that it actually
had
been Rachel. Laura had a Masters from Cambridge, and although it was true that she did economic policy, she wasn’t one of those well-meaning dumpy girls who worked in regeneration or international development or something. No, it turned out that Laura worked for the fucking Treasury.
In the light of all this, James had, he conceded, selected a poor venue. He had offered to meet round the corner from her office. That seemed to be a determining factor in why she’d agreed to this, and so his main consideration had been to choose a place that didn’t run Friday evening drinks promotions and where sales teams wouldn’t turn up and play drinking games. And so they were in the White Lion, one of those low-ceilinged Whitehall pubs with dark over-varnished furniture and a dun-coloured carpet that looked like it could keep secrets. It was a plotters’ pub, a civil-servant pub, intended not for entertainment but rather to allow melancholy deliberation, the replaying of the day’s events and for planning future ambushes and betrayals. It was a place where things – air, heat, light, words – could be relied upon to stay put, but not a place to take a highly attractive professional on a date. It was almost six years since cigarettes in pubs had been banned, but smoke still seemed to circle mysteriously around their heads.
‘So Rachel tells me you’re another town planner,’ said Laura. ‘One of those types that likes to go around distorting the market for his own opaque purposes?’
James looked at her anxiously. Something else that had become quickly apparent was that, as well as everything else, she was right wing. He should have guessed. It was well known that almost everyone who worked in government at a senior level didn’t actually believe in government. That wouldn’t make for an easy evening. All the right-wing people that James knew, and as he got older there seemed to be more and more of them, were so exhausting, so relentless and harassing to be around – in a way that, once upon a time, left-wing people probably were. The problem was, he was on a date. It was just the two of them. He could hardly
ignore
her. It wasn’t as if someone else – Felix, for instance, would have been good – was going to pop up and answer questions on his behalf.
‘Planning isn’t about distorting the market. It’s about bringing order, avoiding urban disruption, and ensuring that land resources are used as effectively as possible.’
As he said this, it occurred to him that he was quoting directly from the introductory chapter to one of his old textbooks, and that he almost certainly sounded like a moron.
‘Land prices determine the most productive uses of land – is there really much more to it than that? And are you sure that what you call disruption is not just people getting on with their lives in enterprising ways that you don’t happen to particularly like?’
‘No, of course not. We don’t just impose rules on people for the sake of it. We do things in order to make everyone’s lives better. Better for everyone – we have to think about what’s best for the whole community, the whole city.’
Laura paused to consider this. It was clear that she wasn’t satisfied, and none of what he was saying actually sounded very plausible, even to him. Was that really what he did for a living? He couldn’t remember Lionel ever saying that.
‘I think that the problem with planning, as always with government, is incentives. Either they don’t exist or else they’re the wrong ones. You have strategies and targets and those are intended to motivate you to do certain things. But what you really need is customers.’
‘Well, yes,’ said James. ‘But these things aren’t arbitrary. Targets aren’t just made up for no reason. They’re intended to improve things, to do things like reduce pollution or traffic.’
‘But those targets don’t relate to people’s lives in a direct way. For instance, you’re incentivised by things like reducing traffic on the roads, but why? People want to drive to work. And you’re told to put people close together, high up in small spaces, when in fact most people want the exact opposite. They want to live on the ground, in big houses and gardens.’
‘Yes, but without some kind of order and planning, all you’ll end up with is endless sprawl. You wouldn’t want to live in a city like that.’
‘Actually, I’m not especially snobbish about sprawl in the way that you lot are. Just because it doesn’t meet your density targets it doesn’t mean that people don’t like living there. They can do their shopping, they can park their cars easily and have barbecues in their gardens. Those are things that people care about.’
Like everything else other than work, the evening was proving to be incredibly hard work. And yet, this was the strange thing,
she wasn’t leaving
. He had been careful to give her plenty of opportunities, but no – she was still there, in fact, she was now going to the bar to buy some more drinks. Could it really be possible that she was having a good time? It was difficult to tell. Laura certainly didn’t seem very happy. Then again, she wasn’t going to hang around with him unless she wanted to. He’d met these Treasury maniacs before, he knew the kind of cost-benefit analysis they brought to every decision, every discretionary purchase and social interaction. But maybe she was lonely? After all, they lived in just about the loneliest city in the world.
Laura returned from the bar with two large glasses of white wine. There was no getting away from it – she was very pretty. She was tall and blond, but that was actually beside the point, and nor was she in the least what you’d call striking. Rather her face was an organisational triumph – the collective effect of a standard-shaped mouth with even teeth, set apart at a reasonable distance from a moderate nose, light-blue eyes and average-sized ears. As with her analytical reasoning, there were no mistakes or irregularities in her appearance.
‘You’re wrong,’ he said, trying hard not to sound as if the argument had already been lost. ‘About planning – I think you’re totally wrong. There wouldn’t even be a functioning market if it wasn’t for planners. We’re the ones that make things work, that tackle all the market failures.’
‘Well, of course – it’s not as if I’m an anarcho-libertarian or anything. I’m an economist and I think I understand the concept of market failure better than most. I’m just not sure how much we really benefit when people like you go around trying to fix them.’
‘But the market failures in London are endemic. Congestion, poor housing, urban poverty, pollution, unemployment, crime. It’s the job of planners to sort all of these things out. Imagine what it would be like if there wasn’t any planning.’
James wasn’t entirely sure if these were really market failures or not, but no matter – Laura was now beaming at him. That was the way with these Treasury types. They thrived on conflict, on being impertinently questioned and intellectually challenged – as long as in the end they won, which they almost always did. In fact, what he should probably do now, if he really wanted her to become affectionate, was to escalate, to manufacture an ill-tempered argument, and then try and insult her in some way.
‘The problem isn’t market failure,’ said Laura. ‘It’s easy enough to identify those. The problem is
government
failure. Just because you’re not pleased with something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the state’s solution will make things any better. And, quite often, it ends up making something else much worse.’
‘You’re not a Conservative are you?’ asked James.
‘Oh God, probably, though of course I don’t vote for them. I’m not like you anyway – I’m not a planner. I have a strong and healthy sense of the value of personal freedoms.’
James swallowed some of his pub white wine, and ate a handful of peanuts to moderate the aftertaste. Professionally he had been taught to distrust most types of freedom, and personal freedoms were usually the very worse. Developers, architects, graffiti artists – they were the champions of personal freedom, of economic liberty and self-expression, and they were all his enemies.
‘Put it this way,’ continued Laura, ‘I trust the people to screw things up for themselves in ways that are more enjoyable and less costly than when people like you and me try and do it for them.’