Architects are notoriously bad communicators. They have a tendency, while attempting to stride the multiple disciplines of construction, philosophy, sociology and art, to speak an opaque private language that is legible to none. Countless are the exhibitions where visitors are confronted with indigestible word salads of materialities, typologies, morphologies and phenomenologies, garnished with a good sprinkling of liminal palimpsests. It makes you want to run for the nearest the permeable threshold.
Planners can be just as bad. They casually throw around meaningless subjective terms like “in-keeping” and “overbearing”. What should be a transparent process of giving people a say over how their neighbourhoods are shaped has become a labyrinthine system of impenetrable complexity that would make Kafka jealous. In the tangled muddle of local plans, neighbourhood plans, masterplans and planning applications, it is almost impossible to find out what’s going on – and how your voice can be heard.
