Even allowing for the fact that it's August the Prince seems to be getting quite a lot of column inches for his views on architecture. Following Chelsea Barracks, we saw a report of his threat to resign as patron of the National Trust unless his architectural views were followed. The Times reports here that he is calling for more democratic planning laws to allow the public to shape the design of new building developments. All this actually amounts to is Enquiry by Design (though I have never understood why it isn't Design by Enquiry as I hope the object is a design rather than a report). The Prince is seriously off the pace here. Consultation in planning is generally reckoned to be overdone. The Killian Pretty report recognises this.
“People feel very disenfranchised by the planning system,” said Hank Dittmar, chief executive of the Prince’s Foundation. But there is little evidence that the extensive consultation and enfranchisement under the local development framework process is producing a sense of widespread popular ownership of the resulting plan. Developers report that the usual suspects turn out to charettes and Enquiry by Design and it doesn't mean their opposition goes away.
I thought one of the more mature remarks about planning came from the unlikely quarter of Ed Miliband, commenting when the owner of the wind turbine factory on the Isle of Wight cited the way planning laws deal with energy projects as a reason for closing the factory. The Energy Secretary hinted on the Today programme that it had something to do with our national antithesis to change. Or as Kate Fox puts it in Watching the English, our approach if we went to a demo would be summed up with the chant "What do we want? Gradual Change. When do we want it? Not just yet".
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