Beauty In My Backyard

Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern buildings tend to be ugly, leading residents to support rules that exclude them from their neighborhoods. If this is true, then designing beautiful buildings could lead to more development. Housing reformists have vigorously debated this theory. Many British reformists are sympathetic, whereas Australian reformists tend to be skeptical, and Americans come down on both sides.I do believe that ugliness plays a role in hindering development, but not in quite the way usually proposed. Ugliness is probably not a major driver of opposition to development by local people. Local opponents have many other concerns that are at least as important, like disruption from construction, loss of green space, pressure on local services, and diminished social exclusivity. But there is strong circumstantial evidence that ugliness is sometimes a major driver of opposition among people who live nowhere near the development in question. The first group are often called ‘NIMBYs’, for ‘Not in my backyard’. Let us call the second group ‘NITBYs’, for ‘Not in that backyard’. The Works in Progress Newsletter Get new articles from Works in Progress delivered to your inbox. While a few NITBYs are fervent campaigners, most are only casually interested. Their motives are faint but basically altruistic: their question is whether or not, based on a cursory assessment, a development is an objective improvement to its neighborhood. In certain contexts, the ugliness of a development can summon into being a huge cloud of NITBYs, whose interest in the scheme may indeed be superficial, but who can nonetheless be collectively potent.This model is especially compelling in the case of heritage conservation. Until the 1960s, the redevelopment of historic buildings was almost always permitted; today, it is almost always banned by conservation rules. Supporters of conservationism usually portray it as a response to the destructiveness of postwar planners, while opponents see it as a pretext for suburban NIMBYism. In fact, I shall argue, neither explanation is plausible. On the one hand, postwar planners were no more destructive than the Victorians or Georgians had been: the rate of demolition was historically normal, and cannot explain the wildly unprecedented policy response. And on the other hand, there was no need for NIMBYs to invent pretexts to ban new buildings, as they had already successfully prohibited the kinds of development they disliked in the first half of the century.What had changed, and what generated the host of NITBYs that bore conservationism to victory, was the ascendancy of modernist architecture, a style that most people demonstrably find relatively ugly. Conservationism was a reaction to postwar redevelopment, as its proponents claimed. But it was less a reaction to what the modernists destroyed, than to what they created. Many people who have never been to Innsbruck may nonetheless regret this development. Image Ugliness and NIMBYismMost debates about the policy significance of ugliness presuppose a certain model of how it affects housebuilding. On this model, local people resent the prospect of having ugliness inflicted upon them, they therefore oppose ugly developments, and politicians implement antidevelopment policies to placate them. This probably does happen sometimes: ugliness obviously does affect local people, and it would be surprising if this had no effect at all on their behavior. But a closer look suggests that ugliness plays only a minor role in motivating NIMBYism.One reason for skepticism is that the occasional beautiful developments that do get built still often encounter fevered opposition. I’On (pronounced ‘ion’) in Charleston, South Carolina is one of the loveliest neighborhoods in North America. It has grown gradually since its founding in 1995, occupying a largely empty site between several existing residential subdivisions. Despite its walkable urbanism, tree-lined streets, and exquisitely detailed houses, thousands of local people petitioned against it when first proposed. The town council initially rejected the scheme, and a tortuous legal battle was fought to downzone the site through a local referendum. The NIMBYs were defeated only after the South Carolina Supreme Court found that zoning decisions cannot be made by referendum. I’On, Charleston, South Carolina is obviously much more attractive than most developments, but still met with intense NIMBY hostility. Image Such stories continue to appear today. The present king of the United Kingdom is an architecture enthusiast, and while he was prince, he orchestrated the delivery of several unusually attractive developments in his official landholdings (which, confusingly, are called the Duchy of Cornwall), including the famous developments of Poundbury and Nansledan. The Duchy is currently proposing a third, at Faversham in Kent. Its proposals show what would be one of the most appealing urban extensions in modern Europe. Nonetheless, it has triggered hundreds of letters of protest, as well as opposition from Faversham Council, the neighboring councils, and the local Member of Parliament. South East Faversham, a development proposed by the Duchy of Cornwall in Kent. The Duchy is already building two attractive neighborhoods at Poundbury and Nansledan, and hopes to reproduce its success here. Local representatives are nonetheless hostile. Image Anecdotes like these are only weak evidence, not least because it is possible that the attacks would have been even more intense if the developments had been ugly. But they do suggest that beauty is not a panacea for NIMBYism.A more powerful reason to doubt the role of ugliness in generating NIMBYism is that it gets the timing wrong. It is true that land-use rules became far more restrictive in the twentieth century. It is also true that the dominant architectural styles became much more unpopular: visual preference surveys consistently find that most people prefer traditional styles to modernist ones. Viewed from a distance, it looks plausible that the two are causally related: new buildings became visually displeasing to most people, and as a result they started to push back against them.In fact, however, these changes happened in the wrong order. Restrictive zoning emerged in Germany and Austria-Hungary in the 1890s and spread quickly thereafter. Italian cities began introducing zoning plans in the 1900s, Britain created a national framework for zoning in 1909, and France followed suit in 1919. Zoning spread quickly across the United States in the interwar period. The restrictiveness of early zoning varied by country, but it could be very tight: in Germany and Austria most suburbs were capped at their existing densities well before 1914, and retain those densities today.Modernist architecture began at least a generation later. It emerged in the 1920s, chiefly in Germany, and spread in the 1930s as a minority style for clients who wanted something distinctively futuristic. In the United States, its impact was particularly faint, and famous American buildings of the 1930s and 40s, such as the Supreme Court Building, the Empire State Building, and Jefferson Memorial, remained resolutely Neoclassical or Art Deco. The global triumph of modernism came only in the 1950s.This means that the Great Downzoning happened in countries where most new buildings were still in the traditional styles dominant in the nineteenth century, with at most a minority in the novel but decorative styles we now call Art Deco. No switch towards styles perceived as ugly had yet occurred: the general picture was one of continuity with the past. The flats that were banned by early zoning would generally have had classical cornices, pedimented windows, and rusticated basements. In other words, NIMBYism triumphed long before it became true that, in most people’s eyes, the average new building was uglier than the average old one. This suggests that, though making development beautiful might palliate NIMBYism somewhat, the effect would be modest. This building in Berlin was constructed shortly before the city instituted its first zoning code in 1893. It is typical of Central European mid-rise during the years when zoning was introduced to exclude such buildings from affluent suburbs. Image Perhaps this should not surprise us. After all, even the most beautiful neighborhood only emerges after several years of extreme ugliness, while the buildings are under construction. And however beautiful buildings may be, development will still have its other well-known impacts on local residents, like loss of light and green space, pressure on infrastructure and services, increase in noise, damage to social cachet, and change in the character of the neighborhood. Removing the problem of ugliness may reduce NIMBY zeal a little, but the number of NIMBYs it satisfies entirely will be small.Was conservationism a response to modernist destructiveness?Ugliness is clearly not the main driver of local opposition to new developments. This does not, however, mean that ugliness is irrelevant to housing shortages in the West. Today, American prohousing advocates work to generate statewide or national support for development in order to override the locals, whose representatives control the strict zoning that slows down development and makes housing scarce and expensive. Prohousing advocates have secured some important victories. But one area where they have almost invariably failed is in enabling more development in historic areas. The same is true for reformist campaigns around the world. Old buildings are protected from redevelopment across the West, even when they sit on the most valuable central land. How did conservation become so powerful? The two most popular theories are