Greater Cambridge Local Plan Preferred Options

The vision and aims are laudable, however it will be obvious to the majority of readers that the best way to achieve them is NOT to build more developments as in the plan, but to focus funding on the enhancement of existing communities, green spaces, places, and infrastructure. Transition to net zero is best achieved by limiting the cause of emission (the consumption economy), not by expanding the consumption economy and then attempting to mitigate the harmful effects.

Quite clearly the aims are better represented as meeting the appetite of the UK for economic growth, and for continued concentration of that economic activity in specific areas, whilst making efforts to mitigate some (but not all) of the negative ecological and social effects.

Hence, it is unrealistic to suggest that the primary aims are those stated. A true and honest description of the aims might help citizens give more meaningful feedback, and potentially enable a better-informed political debate around the planning process.

If the proposals really aim to improve wellbeing and social inclusion, biodiversity and green spaces and create “great places”, they will need to be much more specific and prescriptive about the determinants of those outcomes, over and above the specification of the homes and locations.

Placemaking, for example, involves the structuring of access, facilities, open areas, and activities: not simply the sum of a number of housing units. It is clear to anyone familiar with modern development practice that developers care little for such aspects, since they focus on sales on individual housing units.

The same is true for the design of communities which foster wellbeing and social inclusion: these require much more than a minimum house price and access to a play area. In fact existing segregated developments only serve to worsen social inclusivity.
Leaving these critically important aspects to the discretion of the developer, to meet policies and targets framed as “should”, “take account of ”, “address”, “enhance” etc, will lead to communities where these aspects either don’t exist or are treated as afterthoughts.

The dominant metric for developers is sale value and profit. A core principle of Doughnut Economics is that society will only pay due attention to enhancing quality of life and to reducing harm to the ecosystem if it sets and measures against specific metrics for key aspects and objectives. Many of the policies have no specific metrics, so they simply have no teeth, and are valueless as a result.

The plan is based on job “needs” in the area, translated into housing “needs”. However, these are based mostly on projections of previous growth rates, with insufficient challenge as to whether similar continued growth is either “needed” by the citizens of Cambridge, or indeed feasible without very significant worsening of the following factors that are already acknowledged to be key problems for Cambridge:
* transport infrastructure
* housing affordability
* water scarcity
* social and economic inequality
* access to shared civic spaces
* access to green spaces
* ecosystem pollution and the generation of waste products
Endless growth is of course not theoretically possible in a physical world of limited resources. There are always factors which increasingly make further growth more unattractive, costly, and dangerous to the entities living in the growth system. What models does the Planning Service have to determine likely limits to growth of the Cambridge economy?