Patrik Schumacher, director and principal of Zaha Hadid Architects, has called for the abolishment of social housing, scraping prescriptive planning regulations and the wholesale privatisation of London streets, squares and parks.
These were the main messages he put across in his address to the World Architecture Festival in Berlin last week. He said London’s housing crisis was the result of “intellectually bankrupt” planning departments and said only the free market can provide “housing for everyone”.
He claimed that social housing tenants in gentrifying inner city areas should not expect to be able to carry on living in central London when their council estates are demolished and should be replaced by more “productive” residents, such as his own staff.
He said the real “tragedy” was that social housing tenants have rights to “precious” city centre properties.
Schumacher, who worked alongside Hadid since 1988 and took over the firm following her death last March, said: “The fact that somebody has enjoyed the privilege of a subsidised central location for some time in my view does not and should not establish ownership over this public resource.
“Is it not fair that now it’s somebody else’s turn to enjoy this central location? Especially if it is those who really need it to be be productive and to be better able to produce the support required for those who have been subsidised all along and will continue to be subsidised.”
He added it made more sense for his own employees “who are working very hard and generating value, having to commute and having flat shares” to occupy central London areas that are currently “left to people who are free-riding and backed by the police for decades and supposedly for decades to come”.
The comments sparked an angry response from London Mayor Sadiq Khan who described them as “out of touch” and “just plain wrong”.
However, Schumacher later reiterated his points on his Facebook page, but said the views were his own and did not represent the policies of the practice he leads.
His eight demands are listed as:
- Regulate the Planners: Development rights must be the starting point, then tightly define and circumscribe the planners’ scope and legitimate reasons for constraining development rights: access/traffic constraints, infringements of neighbours’ property utilisation (rights of light), historic heritage preservation, pollution limits. Nothing else can be brought to bear – no social engineering agendas.
- Abolish all land use prescriptions: The market should perhaps also allocate land uses, so that more residences can come in until the right balance with work and entertainment spaces is discovered. Only the market has a chance to calibrate this intricate balance.
- Stop all vain and unproductive attempts at “milieu protection”.
- Abolish all prescriptive housing standards:Planners and politicians should also stay away from housing standards in terms of unit sizes, unit mixes, etc. Here too the market has the best chance to discover the most useful, productive and life/prosperity-enhancing mix. The imposition of housing standards protect nobody, they only eliminate choices and thus make all of us poorer. Stop all interventions and distortions of the (residential) real state market. (All subsidised goods are oversupplied and thus partially wasted.)
- Abolish all forms of social and affordable housing: No more imposition of quota of various types of affordable housing, phase out and privatise all council housing, phase out the housing benefit system (and substitute with monetary support without specific purpose allocation).
- Abolish all government subsidies for home ownership like Help to Buy: This distorts real housing preferences and biases against mobility.
- Abolish all forms of rent control and one-fits-all regulation of tenancies: Instead allow for free contracting on tenancy terms and let a thousand flowers bloom. Here is a recipe for the creation of the dense, urban fabric that delivers the stimulating urbanity many of us desire and know to be a key condition of further productivity gains within our post-fordist network society.
- Privatise all streets, squares, public spaces and parks, possibly whole urban districts.
Comments
Comments are closed.
I hope that this statement will have some consequences like no more public contracts, as they are also funded by the people who are not rich
Great, Central London for those that have great jobs and can afford the hugely inflated rents making the fat cats even fatter. No more nurses, teachers, paramedics, fire fighters anywhere in London because they can’t afford the rents and can’t afford to commute. People will just have to hope that they don’t get ill, have an accident, catch fire or want their children educated.
Schumacher has placed effective urban environment creation (and regeneration) for London where it needs to be- at the very forefront of socio-environmental priorities. The market should decide the efficient allocation of resources but beware- there will be a cost. Schumacher’s highly productive staff will be protected by police that cost premium rates, their children educated by teachers that cost premium rates and fed from supermarkets that charge market-related prices. Healthcare will be delivered at eye-wateringly high rates, but then these super-workers will have to be able to afford these services on their earnings… There will be no place for low-cost services as these will simply disappear and the green belt will become dormitory precincts.
Here is an architect who wants to take London back to the dark ages! Housing standards were the most important development in protecting workers from fat cats who built housing that wasn’t fit for animals and we are still paying a heavy price for it with billions being spent on housing refurbishment to bring it up to the very same standards he wants abolished.
I can’t believe these are serious suggestions, unless Schumacher is just trying to be deliberately controversal to attract attention. These ideas are totally groundless, 100 years of free market failure in house building tells us that deregulation means poor quality houses which are only available to only those with vast wealth.
Presumably privitising streets and parks is a way to ‘remove’ poor people and enforce social cleansing. It would be like returning to the times of the enclosures when the poor were thrown off their land.
It appears we really are entering an area of public policy, in which the policy is not evidence based but instead based solely on one’s ideology.
Hopefully Sadiq Khan will consign this idea to the dustbin, where it belongs.