My Inbox has been exploding as usual (the London Rd station CPZ is clearly a matter of great concern to residents, and again, more to come on that soon).
As well as receiving emails from residents and council officers, I'm also signed up for daily updates from trade and industry media, and this story from the Planning Blog really caught my eye:
The Glastonbury festival has been and gone. With just a few weeks preparation, the festival site is transformed from bare fields to a veritable metropolis. For the space of a weekend, once bare fields become the site of a large town.
Can you see where I’m going with this?
Assuming the majority of tents are occupied by two people, that’s 75,000 dwellings springing up over the course of a few days. In other words, almost 75 percent of the affordable homes Gordon Brown has pledged to deliver in the next two years. And you don’t get much more affordable than a tent.
All this is achieved without a regional spatial strategy, a core strategy, or any other strategy than making a shed load of money by charging people to live in a field for a weekend.
The most amazing aspect of this phenomenon is that the festival seems to work. Throughout the course of the weekend nobody died, everyone on television appeared to be having fun and if there were any major disasters then they slipped well under the radar.
Infrastructure provision copes, there’s mixed-tenure (see the contrast between the hospitality field and the man who pitched up next to the toilets) and plenty of green energy provision. The perimeter fence means there’s no chance of any urban sprawl.
Having said that, the flood risk planning policy might need a bit of work…
Is it possible that planners have got it all wrong? Maybe people should just be left to get on with it?
Then again, creating a town for three days then leaving while someone else cleans up the mess isn’t exactly ‘sustainable development’…
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This article really struck a chord with me. My colleagues will attest to the fact that I am a bit of a broken record when it comes to holding up the Glastonbury Festival model of a sustainable community as a beacon which local authorities can learn from (particularly when it comes to dealing with waste and recycling).
The general Planning arguments outlined above are very thought-provoking, but one thing's for sure: Glastonbury regularly achieves recycling rates of 50% plus, something which councils in the UK can currently only dream about.
I have been progressing recycling and waste management at events in Brighton & Hove since I was first elected, and the local authority is now seeking to achieve the new British Standard BS8901 (guidelines surrounding sustainability at large-scale events) thanks to Green calls for action on this, but we could learn from the Glasto model for our household and commercial operations too...
