"Guides and manuals of 'better practice' as an aid to planning in England"

The quality of design has played a key role in the debate which has taken place in England over the last few years. The debate has engaged in particular the Government and some professional groups, entailing a common reflection on the design of the physical town and on the need to renew tools for orienting building and regeneration processes in the urban environment. More and more often, normative devices focusing on policy and guidance, functional and quantitative issues – planning tools aimed both at orienting development policies on a territorial scale (Structure plans) or at managing land uses on a local basis (Local plans and Unitary development plans) - are accompanied by texts which control the formal and qualitative aspects of design of built-up areas and open spaces. What is unique to the English experience is that these texts, and in particular those concerning urban design (a term which refers not only to the design of the physical-morphological lay-out but takes on a wider meaning), represent a non-prescriptive supplementary apparatus; a repertoire of guides and manuals drawn up at national level, but mostly on the scale of counties, districts, cities or neighbourhoods, which contain principles and examples to be adapted locally starting from a detailed analysis of the context. In the British system land use planning tools have not a strictly prescriptive value; they assume instead the role of reference for negotiation phases with private operators. Taken together, planning tools and supplementary planning guidance are in line with a conception of planning that is negotiable and process-based, in which the definition of orientation procedures, the control of interventions’ spatial aspects, the monitoring of results and the revision of technical equipment, define a sequential and reiterated series of operations. Such a conception, having has a back-ground a reflection on structure and strategic planning that has lasted more than 30 years, intends not to loose attention for the pragmatic nature of spatial outcomes and their morphologic, aesthetic, functional aspects, and at the same time it insists on the need to act both at project and action planning levels. A number of manuals and guides of “better practice”, in line with a search for more open and flexible planning tools, have been produced in the last few years. There emerges an approach that abandons restrictions, and proposes requisites for the formal quality of urban projects. The solutions proposed risk at times becoming too rigidly bound to models, but this approach originates in a long tradition of reflection and debate on aesthetic control issues, that has lasted for almost 100 years. Following these general observations, the first part of this research focuses on the debate about the quality of urban design, which has involved in the last few years the Blair Government and other representatives of the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) and Royal Town Planning Institute (Rtpi), in particular the Urban Design Group (Udg). The second part offers a first exam of planning tools and levels in England, both of those dealing with programming and land use planning, and of those dealing with design process control. Finally, the third part, contains the analysis of texts wich exemplify various types of Planning guidelines: good practice guides (at national level); design guides for the design of new expansions (at county level); design strategies (at urban level); guides for the drawing up of design briefs and of strategic regeneration area frameworks (for specific places or specific parts of town). The aim is to highlight recurring themes and contents, with reference to their specific applications and to their relation to other planning tools. PLANUM, rivista on line http://www.planum.net (http://www.planum.net/the-quality-of-urban-form/guides-and-manuals-of-better-practice-as-an-aid-to-planning-in-england), ISSN 1723-099