It seems I find myself in the role of Ellsworth M. Toohey, though my opponent is no Howard Roark. As if to make real the abstractions of my last post, I’ve since become aware of a campaign to preserve another of the West End’s few remaining green spots from rapacious developers who know the price of everything and the value of nothing: this time on the charming Otago Lane, just round the corner from this little beauty.
In this case I’m in the strange position of being friendly with one of the architects involved, a fellow clubman. His view is that he is only obeying orders: that as an architect he is merely responding to the developer’s wishes, that the developer in turn is merely responding to market forces, and that the Council will surely follow correct procedure in determining the outcome of the application. We could counter that not every profession thrives on inflicting stress on individuals, communities and small businesses; but the wider point is that the buckpassing inherent in the system makes the angry local response inevitable. The reasonable perception is that the planning process is opaque and extremely complicated (would it be that hard for the Council or the developers to put plans online, or to make them available in person outside office hours?), that money talks (developers can appeal and resubmit indefinitely, objectors get one go at it), and that the views of residents and locals are therefore routinely ignored.
The nimby gets blamed for a lot of things: top of the list these days is helping global warming by opposing wind farm developments. I don’t mind the sight of wind farms myself; they aren’t beautiful, and the companies proposing them might have fewer enemies if they worked a bit on their aesthetics, but they aren’t that bad. They might play a useful though minor role in our conversion to clean energy, and unlike almost all other development they could be easily removed with no permanent damage, but I can understand country folk not wishing to see their own natural environment further bespoiled to feed the power-hungry urban beast. I wouldn’t object if someone wanted to build one near me; but attacking nimbies because of wind farms is missing the point: if community opposition were as effective against Tesco and Scottish Coal as it is against Vestas, we wouldn’t need wind farms to reduce our CO2 emissions, because the out-of-town shopping centres, motorway extensions and coal-fired power stations which have brutalised our environment would never get built in the first place. It’s not enough for environmentalists, or leftists, or David Cameron, to say they support localism and community-based decision making and want to shift power away from Whitehall, then ignore the views of those communities if they happen to be inconvenient. Thankfully the Scottish Government have recently taken a small step in the right direction.
I’ve not yet had a chance to see the plans in question in this case (other than a very blurry cameraphone shot) but by all accounts they are not sympathetic to ‘the Glasgow style’. By contrast, have a look at these new flats at the top of Great George St -
Nothing spectacular – perhaps the rooms are a bit pokey – but nothing offensive or out of place either: and no community backlash, disproving the developers’ cliché that people are instinctively scared of change or against all development. As for the other local campaigns I’ve followed for the last couple of years: Save the Botanic Gardens Garage has been successful in rescuing the fine art nouveau façade of Britain’s earliest garage; local godfather Stefan King will not be able to build a nightclub in those same Botanic Gardens thanks to determined grassroots activism; but the campaign to Stop Tesco Owning Partick seems doomed to failure sooner or later.
