GoKawiilWestern 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. Sign up
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 Facebook
Ugliness and NIMBYism
Most 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.
... continue reading