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participation. The 1980 Local Government, Planning
and Land Act created these enterprise zones along
with urban development corporations (UDCs), the
non-elected bodies to run them. Money to spend on
cities was then taken away from local governments
and given instead to these urban development corpo-
rations (Hall, 1998: p. 911). Changes were then
made in 1982 to capital gains and corporate taxation
that dramatically increased the attraction and prof-
itability of property development. With the designa-
tion of 15 enterprise zones around the country,
the stage was set for a new era of fast-track urban
development.
London’s Docklands is a case in point. Control
over more than 5000 acres (2000 hectares) from
Tower Bridge to the Royal Docks, several miles
downstream on the River Thames, was taken from
the mainly left-wing local governments by the right-
wing national government and given to an urban
development corporation entitled the London
Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC). The
main concept was one derived from American
practice of the period. The development corporation
had broad powers to acquire land and build build-
ings, and compliant public investment would
provide the infrastructure that would attract private
investment. The focus would be on working with the
business community rather than local politicians and
residents.
The theory of enterprise zones had been set forth
by British planner (Sir) Peter Hall in 1969 and again
in 1977. In the face of what were perceived as the
failures of conventional town planning to solve prob-
lems of urban decline, Hall and others suggested that
certain parts of cities should be ‘thrown open to all
kinds of initiative, with minimal control’ (Hall,
2002: p. 387). Opinion was divided about the suc-
cess of the experiment. Many critics pointed out the
low quality of design of large urban projects that were
pushed through on a fast track, particularly in the
Canary Wharf area on the Isle of Dogs, the heart
of the early phases. Others complained about the
demise of local democratic control over development
and the heavily North American flavor of the devel-
opment and its architecture. (The main developer of
Canary Wharf, before the company declared bank-
ruptcy was the Canadian corporation Olympia and
York, and the largest buildings in the first phases were
designed by American architects, Cesar Pelli, HOK,
and Kohn, Pederson Fox) (see Figure 5.3).
Many people decried the sacrifice of traditional
community values to the boom and bust cycle of cor-
porate capitalism. More positive interpretations
argued that this process, rough and ready as it was,
made old discarded brownfield sites as attractive to
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developers as greenfield ones, and thus supported the
emerging agenda for sustainable urban form. It can
also be argued that the standard of architectural and
urban design improved in later projects. Ironically,
only after the demise of the LDDC in 1998 has the
urban vision come to some level of fruition with
the completion of the extension of the London
Underground’s Jubilee Line, which did much to
improve the transportation infrastructure of the area,
and provided some exemplary civic architecture in
the design of the new stations.
Elsewhere in the UK, the city of Salford, part of
the Greater Manchester metropolitan area, success-
fully revitalized its derelict docks, not least with
showpiece buildings like the Lowry Center by
Michael Wilford, honoring the city’s most famous
artist, L.S. Lowry, and the northern branch of the
Imperial War Museum (see Figure 5.4). This latter
building was designed by Polish American architect
Daniel Libeskind, now best known for his winning
competition design for the rebuilding of the World
Trade Center site in New York City.
This period of ‘Americanization,’ of minimal plan-
ning and maximal private enterprise, drew to a close
with the 1991 amendment to the Town and Country
Planning Act, which established once again that
planning decisions must accord with the commu-
nity’s development plan. Once again, at least rhetori-
cally, the emphasis was upon the importance of local
and regional development plans, and controlling sub-
urban growth. With the departure of Margaret
Thatcher, successive governments, first Conservative
and subsequently Labour, gradually rebuilt parts of
the planning system, with a special emphasis on the
national need to increase the sustainability of urban
development. Of particular note is the reintroduc-
tion of urban design concepts and criteria into plan-
ning policies, either nationally in terms of Guidance
Notes, or locally by means of detailed ‘planning and
development briefs’ for sites. These planning briefs
comprise the public authority’s expectations for sites
deemed particularly significant in their urban setting;
they establish performance requirements to be met
by private development and highlight particular con-
textual or programmatic factors to be incorporated
(see Figure 5.5).
Planning Policy Guidance Note 1
, for example
(DETR, 1995) promotes ‘high-quality, mixed-use
developments such as ‘urban villages’, characterized by
compactness, mixed uses, affordable housing, employ-
ment and recreational facilities, access to public trans-
port and open green spaces and ‘high standards of
CHAPTER FIVE
●
GROWTH MANAGEMENT, DEVELOPMENT CONTROL AND URBAN DESIGN