Beyond Portmeirion: The Architecture, Planning and Protests of Clough Williams-Ellis

2018 ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
Nigel Harrison ◽  
Iain Robertson

Clough Williams-Ellis is famous (or infamous) for his preservationist activities, leading the Campaign to Protect Rural England and the Design and Industries Association and writing that most famous of protests against interwar development, England and the Octopus (1928). This chapter argues that Williams-Ellis’s preservationist campaigning was not the expression of backward-looking nostalgia, but of a progressive, modernizing quest to convert the nation to orderly planning. In pursuit of this quest, he advocated adoption of new towns, national parks, motorways, and town and country planning; the culmination of all this work was the comprehensive planning legislation of the Labour government formed in 1945. Nigel Harrison and Iain Robertson seek to move beyond Williams-Ellis’s best known creation, the village of Portmeirion, typically dismissed as an unfortunate experiment in retrograde rural vernacular, to consider Clough Williams-Ellis’s activities in their totality and to position him as a key theorist of rural modernity.

Author(s):  
Brian Lund

This chapter explores political conflicts over the land issue. It examines the role of land value in house prices over time, the thinking underlying Henry George’s land tax proposal, the fate of the various attempts to tax betterment value and Lloyd George’s challenge to the landed aristocracy. The politics of planning controls are reviewed with particular reference to the influence of interest groups such as the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. The fortunes of Green Belts, New Towns, Eco-towns, Regional Development Agencies and the local use and national responses to development control are investigated. The connections between planning control and the containment of urban Britain are examined as are the electoral politics of land release in the 2010 and 2015 General Elections.


2016 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-110
Author(s):  
Qi Chen ◽  
Pearl Ann Reichwein

A new ski resort village plan proposed for Lake Louise in Banff National Park triggered intense opposition at public hearings in 1972. Local proponents, backed by Imperial Oil, had entered into agreements to expand services at Lake Louise, which led to federal public consultations. We investigate Parks Canada’s early public consultation process and how it was institutionalized in federal policy making from 1964 to 1979. Public debate was significant and influenced political decisions in the Village Lake Louise controversy. The National and Provincial Parks Association of Canada, Bow Valley Naturalists, Environmental Law Association, mountain clubs, academics, and others advocated for protection as conservation lobbyists and the Government of Alberta also objected to the proposal, leading Minister Jean Chrétien to halt the plan. It was a win for citizens, environmentalists, and ecological integrity as Village Lake Louise debates became Canada’s town hall. Past environmental protection is relevant to civil society and public space in a moment of new approvals for massive ski hill industry expansions in national parks. Precedents in civil society and governance can inform understanding of public consultation and a new environmental politics.


Author(s):  
Alison K Smith

On 11 November 1796, only five days after the death of Catherine II, her son and successor Paul released a decree naming two of his villages, Pavlovsk and Gatchina, towns. In an odd way, given their fraught relationship, this act echoed his mother’s past practice. She founded several hundred new towns to serve as new administrative centers for her newly formed provinces. Paul’s actions are more obscure, tied not to administrative needs but perhaps instead to a desire to glorify his own landholdings—or if not to glorify at least to increase the economic prosperity of his lands. The end results, however, followed a similar path: new towns needed new courts and new schools, new town seals and new town plans, and above all new townspeople. This article examine the process by which Gatchina, the village, was transformed into Gatchina, the town. In particular, it will focus on the establishment there of new merchant and meshchanin corporations, and of a town ratusha to oversee their management. Many of the new town’s new townspeople came from elsewhere to register there; as a result, they not only built up the town in numbers but also created a Russian space within what was an imperial periphery. This transformation shows both an effort at social organization and engineering and also the limits of those efforts when faced with individual desires.


2015 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
TONY FITZPATRICK

AbstractThe connections between social and environmental policies have a longer and more fertile history than is often appreciated. Ignoring that history is not just unfortunate in its own terms but may mean that we deprive ourselves of resources that could be useful in the future. Unfortunately, social policy histories avoid discussion of the natural environment, just as environmental histories avoid discussion of welfare services. This article therefore seeks to open up new debates and a new field of research. It focuses upon one of the key periods in the development of UK state welfare, the Labour government of 1945–51. It argues that Labour displayed an ambivalence toward the natural environment. Land nationalisation had long been an aspiration, but Labour drew back from its more radical ambitions. In policy terms, this gave rise to a dualism. Town and country planning became one of its enduring legacies, but more socialistic, redistributive measures fell by the wayside.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-68
Author(s):  
Hendricus Lembang

Base on the Village Law No. 6 of 2014 concerning Village, namely villages have the right, authority and obligation to regulate and manage their own government affairs and community interests based on their rights of origin and local customs. In this authority, the village provides services to the community and conducts community empowerment. Sota village is a border region with Papua New Guinea. The location of Kampung Sota is relatively close to the seafront of the city of Merauke, has a population of 1,270 in 2014 and the resources of forests, rivers and swamps. This research use Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) approach and SWOT analysis. The results of the study found: Strength Aspects namely 1). Raw materials are easily available, 2). Strategic business location, 3). Product prices begin to increase, 4). The products produced are export products, 5). Availability of Village Land, 6). Commitment from the village government. Weakness aspects are: 1). The lack of business capital, small production quantity, 2). Transportation for raw materials, 3). Unattractive packaging, 4). Cooperatives in the village are controlled by individuals / traditional leaders who control the local land. Opportunity Aspect namely 1). Products that have a prospective market share, 2). Production capacity can be reproduced, 3). Increased consumer needs and public awareness to use local products, 4). Development of technology and information, 5). Additional workforce. Threat aspects, namely: 1). Still depends on the rainy and dry seasons, 2). Increased bargaining position of raw material suppliers, 3). The emergence of new competitors, 4). Government regulations on National Parks. So that the type of potential business that can be developed is the management of eucalyptus oil. While the alternative business sector is tourism, clean water, nine basic commodities and arwana fish.   Keywords: Development, Village Owned Enterprises, prospective


Author(s):  
Julia Deltoro ◽  
Carmen Blasco Sánchez ◽  
Francisco Martínez Pérez

Even if the urban experience of the British New Towns, created after the New Towns Act of 1945 as a solution to the problems derived from the superpopulation of great cities such as London, is already far in time it can still offer us some lessons. Lessons which could help us when intervening in current process of development and transformation of the urban form. This article analyses these experiences from its morphology, studying their formal characteristics and the organization of the several uses of the city, as well as the diachronic evolution of their criteria of spatial composition. The First New Towns mainly followed the characteristics stated in the Reith Report [HMSO, 1946 a] and the consequent New Towns Act [HMSO, 1946 b], which defined the scale of the new cities, their uses and zoning, location, areas, distances, social structure or landscape among other. Their urban forms evolved with time and were the result of many strategic and design decisions taken which determined and transformed their spatial and physical profiles. According to the Town and Country Planning Association [TCPA, 2014] New Towns can be classified in three Marks as for their chronology and the laws that helped to create them. But if we focus in their urban form, we can find another classification by Ali Madani-Pour, [1993] who divides them into four design phases, which give answer to different social needs and mobility. The analysis of the essential characteristics and strategies of each of the phases of the New Towns, applied to the configuration of the urban form of some of the New Towns, the ones which gather better the approach in each of the phases, will allow us to make a propositional diagnose of their different forms of development, the advances and setbacks; a comparative analysis of different aspects such as mobility and zoning, local and territorial relations, structure or composition. The conclusions of the article pretend to recognize the contributions, which come from their urban form and have them as a reference for new urban interventions in the current context, with new challenges to be faced from the integral definition of the city. References DCLG. (2006). Transferable Lessons from the New Towns. (http://www.futurecommunities.net/files/images/Transferable_lessons_from_new_towns_0.pdf.) Accessed: 14 january 2015. Gaborit, P. (2010). European New Towns: Image, Identities, Future Perspectives. (PIE-Peter Lang SA., Brussels) HMSO. Great Britain. New Towns Committee. (1946 a). Final Report of the New Towns Committee. London HMSO. Great Britain. New Towns Act. (1946 b). London Madani-Pour, Ali. (1993). `Urban Design in the British New Towns´. Open House International, vol. 18. TCPA. (2014). New Towns and Garden Cities – Lessons for Tomorrow. Stage 1: An Introduction to the UK’s New Towns and Garden Cities. (Town and Country Planning Association, London) Accessed: 15 december 2016. (https://www.tcpa.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=1bcdbbe3-f4c9-49b4-892e-2d85b5be6b87). TCPA. (2015). New Towns and Garden Cities – Lessons for Tomorrow. Stage 2: Lessons for De­livering a New Generation of Garden Cities. (Town and Country Planning Association, London) Accessed: 15 december 2016. (https://www.tcpa.org.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=62a09e12-6a24-4de3-973f-f4062e561e0a)


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