My heart sank when I read the Labour manifesto on housing. A litany of proven past failures is presented as the shining future. For instance, the party wants to build high-density housing on brownfield sites – which has meant erecting tower blocks set in open spaces. This kind of housing has proved a social nightmare outside cities as various as Paris and Seoul; elderly people suffer from isolation, the middle-aged spend long hours commuting to work, and adolescents are more prone to the ills of drug use, depression and lack of exercise than in inner-city neighbourhoods.
The manifesto also recommends building entirely new towns, as though the way to fix a problem is to start over from scratch. The new-towns impulse has deep roots in Britain, going back to the garden city movement, but, since their beginnings, these places have struggled to become proper towns. It takes generations for a town to put in place schools or social care homes, develop a local economy of pubs or shops, and weave the complex web that is a neighbourhood. A town cannot be conjured into life with the stroke of a pen.
