The Urbal Fix

The film opens with shots of an eccentric but beautiful Victorian tweed mill- music.

Tom Bliss: This is Bliss Mill in Chipping Norton. It was built in 1872 by my Great Great Grand Father, William Bliss. Here he made some of the finest cloth ever produced in England - they called it 'Silken Leather.'

William was an enlightened employer, much influenced by reformers like Robert Owen, Titus Salt, and the other Utopian Socialists, so when the original building on this site burned down, he constructed not only this magnificent edifice, but also workers’ cottages, reading room, hospital and so on, because he was concerned for his workers.

One thing he almost certainly wasn't concerned about was the amount of CO2 coming out of that chimney.

As a former Landscape Architect, I've long understood the importance of the environment, but even so, when I first heard about Global Warming, like a lot of people, I assumed this would be a problem for my Great Great Grandson, not me. I feel very differently today.

Chipping Norton is small market town, and in William Bliss's time it could easily feed itself from the local countryside. Apart from coal and a few other resources, it was, use the current term, 'sustainable,' and it could, in theory at least, revert to that state relatively easily today.

Tom by Leeds Civic Hall: But I live here in Leeds. And if the experts are right, and we now have to make entire cities sustainable, then we've got a massive challenge on our hands.

For some time now, people have been using the word Rurban to describe urban influences on rural areas (in fact many suggest that the whole of Britain is now technically 'Rurban').

But recently, a range of new ideas have sought to achieve sustainability by, effectively, doing the opposite; drawing the countryside and some of its traditional activities back into the heart of our cities.

I think we can combine these into one comprehensive system, which could change our cities from being the root of the problem into the seed of the solution.

Title: The words Urban and Rural conflate to become ‘Urbal’

"The Urbal Fix"

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PROBLEMS

Climate Change Tom in studio: Before we go looking for The Urbal Fix, we need to get a handle on the problem. So first, how seriously should we really be taking the threat from Climate Change? Ranyl Rhydwen (Lecturer, Centre For Alternative Technology, Wales): I lecture on climate change. It’s my job therefore to keep up to date with the science as much as I possibly can, and I do. The cause of the heating at the present is carbon dioxide. The source of the carbon dioxide is man’s activity.

The rate of rise is dramatic. This is going to compromise the planet’s ability to support a rich variety of life, and that will compromise the planet’s ability to support us.

Paul Chatteron (Senior Lecturer, Geography, Leeds University): 99% of sensible scientists agree on a consensus that these things are happening. There’s 1% of dissident scientists who believe it’s not. Now the point is, they’re getting media attention on a 50/50 basis.

Mike Thompson RIBA (Director, Graduate School of the Environment, CAT): There are those who think it's already too late, the wire is very close.

Professor Greg Keefe (Downing Chair, Sustainable Architecture, Leeds Met):Certainly in the next 20 years we’re going to see severe problems on the planet. So I think if people are talking about 2050, we’re talking about 2020.James Copp (Engagement Consultant): The thing that seems to have most affect on people is the idea of what legacy we’re leaving for the next generations, and the fact that if we’re not careful we’ll leave an environment that is uninhabitable.

Tom in studio: Could it really be that bad? Well, New Scientist magazine published this map in 2009. It shows how the world will look within my son's lifetime (and possibly in mine), if we carry on as we are. The temperature has risen by 4 degrees, and the whole of this area (latitude Britain to latitude Tasmania) is indeed largely uninhabitable. Then, last November, The Independent predicted a SIX degree rise!

Jonathan Porritt (Environmentalist - addressing The Landscape Institute): 6 degrees centigrade isn’t just a bit worse than two degrees centigrade, or a bit worse than 4 degrees centigrade. 6 degrees centigrade is a death sentence for human civilisation. It doesn’t mean to say there won’t be lots of human beings left over after a 6 degrees centigrade rise, but I assure you they won’t be having much of a time!

Tom in studio:

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It looked like the 99% of scientists were winning the argument, but next thing, along comes 'ClimateGate' Parts One, Two, Three and more - and a lot of potential eco warriors went back to being mere eco worriers. By December, when the much vaunted Copenhagen summit proved to be a damp squib, it was starting to look as though the sceptics were winning.

Professor Lord Tony Giddens (Sociologist, Economist, Former Director LSE): Having pondered it all a lot since Copenhagen, and looked at the views of the sceptics, looked at the mainstream, you know I tend to think you have to give quite a lot of credence to people like James Lovelock, James Hanson, who say that it’s quite a lot worse than mainstream science says, and I’m fairly persuaded by that, it which case there may be an awful lot of change already in the system, which we’re going to have to react to, and it is pretty terrifying frankly.

HIIary Benn (Then Secretary of State DEFRA, MP; Leeds Central): It depends really in whether countries actually do what they promised, and what it shows is that we’ve got further to go. We didn’t get a legally binding agreement and you’re right, in the end the scientists have to listen to people going round the table putting their offer down and then say, Well this is what it means in terms of temperature change, are you OK with that? And the fact is, we’ve got some way to go.

Lord Giddens: Some countries involved, like the United States, have offered targets which are way too low, but I wouldn’t say that necessarily will add up to what the United States will contribute because the US is such a big and vital society and there are so many other things going on below the federal level, so I think we might get strongly different from the US but not necessarily at the federal level.

Tom in studio: And strong leadership from the US would be welcome - not least because their emissions are currently the highest in the world - as is their consumption. And that bloated map warns us that the climate is not the only potential threat we're facing.

Peak Resources

Lord Giddens: It’s generally accepted now I think that most of the oil that’s left in the earth is going to be difficult to get out.

Dr Rachael Unsworth (Lecturer, Geography, Leeds University): When we look back we’ll probably see that we’re about at peak oil now, which of course doesn’t mean that the oil is about to run out, but it means that every next barrel is more expensive to get out of the ground. Basically we’re past the era of cheap energy and the lifestyle that it supported.

Lord Giddens:

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Oil gas and coal are now essentially sunset industries, and that is going to create enormous pressure on innovation for other forms of energy

Rachael Unsworth: It’s not just fossil fuels, and of course they link to climate change issues, but also the trace metals and so on that we think we’re going to be able to do all the techno-fixes with. So many of those are in short supply. We think we’re going to be able to invent ourselves out of trouble, but we’re going to hit by resource shortages in many ways.

Tom in studio: And it's not just mineral resources that are running out, as the RSA heard recently in a debate on Food in a World without Oil.

Professor Tim Lang (Food Policy, City University, London - addressing the RSA):Agriculture is both about energy but also has now become reliant upon energy in the form of oil. But probably the single issue, that’s going to bring the current model to its knees quicker than oil, is water.

Jonathan Eyre (Ecologist): Water is quite a big threat because even the UK is suffering problems from place to place.

Tim Lang: Land use - soil structures - any assessment of soil structure shows the world’s soils in distress. Not everywhere, some are wonderful, but in distress generally, even in rich Europe, even in rich Britain.

Lord Giddens: We might get 9 billion people on the face of the earth and I think we know that we don't have enough resources simply to have a model of development for that number of people.

Overshoot

Tom in studio: So really it's irrelevant whether we can do anything about climate change or not. We have to do things differently anyway. Ecologists call the problem 'Overshoot.' and it works like this.

This line is the world's carrying capacity; the total amount of life that the planet can support. And this is consumption - still growing strongly at the moment.

If we're very lucky, mankind will see where it's heading in time, and ease off before we hit the limit - then keep consumption at a steady state, just within the planet's support system.

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But if we overshoot by trying to consume too much, we'll actually damage the system. So, when consumption finally starts to fall, the carrying capacity drops with it - a potentially catastrophic situation.

And there's another factor. The depletion of natural resources is often shown as a bell shape. Extraction, in this case of oil, starts slowly, then increases to a peak - around about now, then declines in roughly mirror image, as the resource runs out.

Some experts suggest we should draw the graph the other way up, to show that the early stages are an easy downhill ride, and there's an increasingly steep climb out, as reserves get harder and harder to extract. But even this doesn't tell the full story.

André Angelantoni (PostPeakLiving.com): Oil importers can only purchase the oil that the oil producers don’t use themselves. Oil subsidies by the oil producers to their populations give them little reason to conserve. Their internal use will continue to grow, leaving less for the rest of the world. Brown and Foucher’s work shows that net oil exports will be squeezed from both sides - top line production will decline and the exporting country consumption will increase. Oil importing countries will not get all the oil they do now. To them, world oil production will look closer to the white line.

Tom in studio: And the closer we get to 2040, the more problems we'll have. A major price hike, or some other interruption in supply, and suddenly we'll find we can't grow or deliver food - or, indeed, function at all.

Paul Chatterton: I think one of the key things we need to confront is a global moratorium on fossil fuel extraction.

Lord Giddens: I don’t think we have the right to use up all the oil we can find. What gives us that right compared to subsequent generations?

Tom in studio: The root of this entire problem is growth.

Economic Growth

Nick Green (Incredible Edible Todmorden): The model of economic growth is not sustainable. You can’t have anything over zero% growth year on year without coming to some kind of crisis, so sustainability is essential. You can’t keep growing the population on one planet for ever and ever. Something’s going to go crunch.

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Paul Chatterton: The problem with a growth-based economic system is that it’s based on the ceaseless demand for new goods which creates more and more production which creates more and more consumption. And that consumption is base on our constant desire for novelty and newness. So we’ve had debt bubbles emerge, easy credit has lead to more consumption. More consumption has lead to more production, more production leads to more consumption. The banks lend more money because people are buying more. So we see this virtuous cycle of growth between debt, credit, production and consumption. All that leads to is more CO2 and more global warming.

Tom in studio: That destructive cycle is driven by a linear consumption system, in which resources are inefficiently extracted, wastefully processed, carelessly used and then casually discarded, with waste and pollution all along the line.

Jonathan Eyre: The greatest environmental impact is in the extraction of the raw material in the first place. So as soon as you start to capture materials that are about to be discarded and recycle them or reuse them, you’re immediately having a huge impact, not just the energy saving there, you’re stopping all the impact at the beginning of the process. It’s about changing a linear progression into a circular one.

Tom in studio: Changing from a linear to a cyclical system requires a complete rethink on how we do things. This is how the economists explain it.

In the current model, the economy, society and the environment are treated as separate entities. Problems created by the economy which affect society, such as poverty, ill health, deprivation and injustice, as well as those that affect the environment, like pollution, extinctions, water depletion and global warming, are externalised, in other words not included in any financial calculations. So the economy grows while the other two suffer.

They call this the Mickey Mouse model, for obvious reasons. (Economy 1) So an increasing number of economists, and many governments, are now trying develop a second system.

In this, the economy, the environment and society are seen as overlapping - and when they're in balance then 'sustainable development' can take place. It’s also sometimes described as the three-legged stool.

The control mechanism here is the market.

Hilary Benn: We’ve fuelled our economic growth on the back of carbon but we know we can’t do that any more, so the first thing we’re trying to do is count the cost of carbon to re-orientate the investment supertanker. The second thing is, we’ve got to start to count the things we don’t count at the moment, the extent to which we take from the natural world, natural resources, with no thought of the consequence at all.

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Tom in studio: So costs are applied to externalities - pollution, waste and so on, and as people don't want to pay the extra, they favour the less wasteful processes, so with luck, the polluters go out of business. Sorted, you might think..

But this is still a growth-based, profit-driven system, and there are many activities still outside of that safe central zone, not least poverty, injustice and deprivation which remain uncontrolled.

So the third model takes financial growth out of the equation - to create what's known as a 'steady-state' solution. Here, the economy is subservient to society (and so the social issues are resolved), and society is subservient to the biosphere (which resolves the environmental issues.) The only externality is sunlight. They call this one the Target.

Paul Chatterton: Essentially, the way a steady-state economy differs from a high-growth economy is that there is much less throughput of natural materials. So what we have is a zero-waste economy where all the waste produced from different parts of the economic system are put pack into that economic system, which reduces the environmental impact on various ecosystems, but it also reduces basic things like landfill and pollution.

Lord GIddens: Well I think it’s not only viable, it’s necessary. One has to separate the developed and the developing countries. Developing ones have the right to become richer, and for a certain period that probably means following quite traditional growth models. If you look at the example of China, those things work, at least up to a point. There are a lot of unfortunate consequences too. In the developed countries, I think we can talk of overdevelopment in some areas. I’m not sure I’d call it a steady state model, but certainly I think we’re looking for a different way of assessing what growth actually is.

Paul Chatterton: We need to measure new things and value different things in our society. Not just economic growth. So we need to move away from Gross Domestic Product, GDP, and measure other things that are important to us: well-being, human happiness, sustainable environments, good education: those kind of things.

Daniel O’Neill (Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy): If we look at surveys of happiness and life satisfaction, over the past 50 or so years in a country like the UK, what we find is that while average incomes have increased by about a factor of 3, happiness has not increased. If we do surveys, we ask people how happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10, those types of data, we find they haven’t increased. So economic growth is hurting the planet, and it’s also not helping us.

Lord GIddens: I’m a bit of a revolutionary on these things, because I think we’re at the outer edge of some of the biggest changes in our history across the world, bigger than the industrial revolution. Not just another industrial revolution. We’re grasping our way to

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how we’re going to deal with all that, and the debate about growth is only one aspect of a much wider debate about what kind of society do we want, how do we factor in not just climate change but wider sustainability issues.

Work

Paul Chatterton: One of the things we’re up against is the whole idea of work. We’re all obsessed with the world of work, we all produce more things, but one of the things we have to realise is if we’re going to create a genuinely humane economy, then we actually have to do less. One of the big things that people are trying to push at the moment is the idea of a 21 hour week. If we work 3 days a week, essentially 21 hours, we’d be all much happier, there would be less unemployment because we could share the work, and we’d have a more humane work/life balance.

Tom in studio: Less time doing paid work will mean more time for barter-based earning, food growing, sustainable travel, exercise and community activity.

If we add to that a tax system which turns unsustainable products into sought-after luxuries (rather than trying to ban them altogether), plus a new focus on home working and local employment to reduce commuting, we could see major changes happening quite quickly.

It's not going to be easy - but if the experts are right, and we're already past Peak Oil and into 'overshoot,' then a steady-state, low-growth, high-reward economy has got to be the first priority of the Urbal Fix.

OPTIONS

Technology

Tom in studio: So far we've established that time is short, and radical economic changes are necessary. But do we really have to put ourselves though it all? Surely there's some wonderful techno-fix just around the corner?

Lord GIddens: Technological innovation is going to be important because there is no single technology, whether it’s solar, thermal, wind power, which at the moment is able to deliver the goods without further innovation. So we do need technological innovation and we need a lot of drive to do that, but I’m very strongly of the view that technological innovation is not enough. We are going to need social, economic and political innovation.

Tom in studio: But unfortunately politicians hands are tied.

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Politics

Councilor Richard Brett (then Joint Leader, Leeds City Council): The politician’s difficulty is that - although I’m one of the joint leaders of Leeds City Council, and the word implies that leaders lead, one expects the Prime Minister to come out with statements that take the nation in quotes the right direction, the difficulty is on a lot of these things, there is an element of ‘I don’t want to change that, I want to keep my car, I want the freedom, I like this that or the other’.

Chris Johnston (Activist, Leeds TIDAL): Government cannot physically lead the change that we need. It’s not that it would be nice if it could and should be doing it, it’s that it physically cannot. The Government is constrained on how it can act by what people want.

Commerce

Tom in studio: But what about the corporate sector? It is, after all, the big companies who encourage consumerism with advertising, and also perpetrate the worst of the waste and pollution. William Bliss, like the Utopian Socialists, understood that businesses could press ahead with social reform against the political tide. Is it too much to hope that today's industrialists might see the writing on the wall, and start to initiate change?

Tim Lang: Behind the scenes there are some interesting things going on, particularly, funnily enough, in the big companies. Big companies are waking up to the enormity that they too will not be able to survive this. And that actually puts a very interesting political with a small p debating point. Do you let Tesco and Walmart and Unilever and Nestle and Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola resolve this problem? Or do you not.

Chris Johnston: There’s lots of amazing initiatives going on in the business community, but fundamentally it’s like asking a lion to go vegetarian. They’re not going to do it. And again, you can’t blame them because structurally they have to pursue profit at all ends. So society’s job then, is to make new political reality possible. It needs to convince the electorate that it really wants this massive change, that it’s not some kind of dystopian, bleak, living-in-huts future that we’re after. We need to convince them that its a really compelling, exciting future that actually means a better quality of life.

Tom in studio: So. Science, technology, politics and commerce are all in one way or another stuck in the mud, and nothing looks likely to happen soon - or soon enough anyway. But there is one institution which might be able to jump the lights on sustainability - cities.

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Cities

Lord GIddens: A lot of things that will actually bring about reduction of greenhouse gas emissions will be bubble-up from below. Cities provide a kind of laboratory for that.

Hilary Benn: Lots of very important decisions that affect our lives and the nature of our community are decisions taken in towns and cities and in rural local authorities as well.

Tim Lang: I think Local Authorities are absolutely paramount. They have been eviscerated, they have had their powers taken away. We have got to argue that food for after peak oil is a local issue and local authorities have got to be empowered to do that.

Lord GIddens: We certainly don’t want to be wholly dependent on national leaders so third sector groups and cities and regions are going to have a very big role to play.

Hilary Benn: As I travel round and see what some towns and cities are doing then it demonstrates what is possible.

Lord GIddens: If you get things right a city or local level could be a model for national policy

Rachael Unsworth: Where you’re got concentrations of people and activity and the supply lines can be shorter and there is a chance of supplying a lot of people who can go and get things on foot for instance, it can be more resource-efficient in that sense.

Lord GIddens: Cities also have big problems because of congestion of traffic, the ineffectual nature of buildings in many cities and so forth. Therefore they could be a driving force of enterprise. Arnold Schwarzenegger has got his R20 organisation of cities, that’s going to be a global organisation of cities, so a lot can be done there I think.

Tom in studio: Havana, Detroit, Los Angeles, Singapore, Chicago and many others are already introducing some radical sustainability measures, but it's naive to believe that any metropolis could ever be totally self-sufficient.

Transition Towns (as Chipping Norton will soon be) might get there, but it's in Regional cities like Leeds that the big opportunities lie - because they're both small enough to manage, and big enough to make a real difference. So this is where we need to inject The Urbal Fix.

THEORY

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‘Sustainable’ Cities

Tom in studio: Leeds City Council already has a number of admirable sustainability measures in place, and recently they pledged to cut emissions by 40% by 2020. But I'm not convinced that the one will deliver the other, so I want to explore a more root and branch approach.

At the moment, Leeds lies at number 6 in the sustainability league table, but even Newcastle, at number one, is a million miles from being truly sustainable. So what are the key priorities that we need to address if Leeds is to change from seriously Urban to sustainably Urbal?

Paul Chatterton: They key ingredients of a truly sustainable city are a real localisation of food production ...

Pauline Neale (Suburban Gardener): Well certainly, if we can bring as much of our food in from the surrounding area, and not transport potatoes from Scotland or Egypt ...

Tim Lang: One fourth of all lorry miles in the country are moving food, one half of which are empty ...

Roxana Summers (Health Improvement Specialist, NHS): If anything fails to a supermarket we only really have two days worth of good there, whereas if there is a variety of shops in the area or if people are growing their own things, the likelihood of survival is greater ...

Nick Green: If we were doing this 30 years ago there would be probably 100% more people who knew how to do vegetable growing or even knew that vegetables grow in the ground. So the key priority is education ...

Andy Goldring (CEO Permaculture Association): A big priority for me would be to regain soil health . . .

Tim Lang: Land and access to land, and getting land to stop growing horses for the middle classes to use (I hope I’ve offended half of you!) ...

Niels Corfield (Permaculture Consultant): All the area of it, whether it be surface area, roof area, wall space, has to accumulate energy whether it be food energy or solar energy or wind energy...

Andy Walker (SURE, Otley): We must remember health and well-being...

Alex Hammond (Health Improvement Specialist, NHS):

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Take cars off the road and get people walking reduces carbon emissions...

Andy Goldring: The transport system needs to be improved, housing stock needs to be retrofitted...

Greg Keefe: We should be producing carbon-neutral buildings. We’re not using passive and renewable energy as much as we should be...

Paul Chatterton: The democratic base of the city is really important. A sustainable city is a truly democratic one...

Andy Goldring: Social justice and equity is a really critical issue...

Paul Chatterton: I think the final aspect is really looking at the way the economy of the city, how does it function...

Tom in studio: It goes without saying that those priorities are not going to be easy to achieve in a city like Leeds - but they might just be viable in a small market town like Chipping Norton. So perhaps one approach might be to view cities as if they were a group of market towns.

It sounds fanciful, but there is one theoretical model which does exactly that, and it can accommodate most of our priorities because it dates from a time before cars, when even large cities could feed themselves from the local countryside.

Ebenezer Howard

Tom (outside the First Garden City Museum in Letchworth): This is Letchworth, the first town to be built, partially at least, to principles invented by another of my ancestors: my Great Grandfather's first cousin, Ebenezer Howard.

Sir Peter Hall (President, Town and Country Planning Association): I very much think the time has come for a fundamental re-examination of Howard’s ideas and those of his contemporaries.

Tom in Letchworth: Howard's plan was to internalise the Victorian externalities of slum, smoke and disease by attracting people to what he called the town-country - (an Urbal concept if ever there was one), so that the old cities would die and could then be reborn. His green field Utopia had three main elements -

Sir Peter Hall: One was a physical concept, building a self-contained garden city which would contain homes and jobs in the same place, and would be surrounded by a generous

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green open space. It was to be built at reasonably high densities but interspersed with very large amounts of public open space, particularly around the town centre, and then in a sort of broad midway park. He even included an incredible circular shopping mall which he called the Crystal Palace within easy walking distance for everyone.

Tom in Letchworth: Well, we don't need any more malls, though glasshouses for growing veg might work! But it wasn't just about food.

Sir Peter Hall: Also playing areas and recreation areas, especially for children. Everyone could get to work, could get to shop, could get to school and could get to all kinds of recreation within a few minutes walk. And finally, the town was to own the green belt around it, which was to be managed not merely for agriculture but for a very wide variety of social purposes for people in the towns.

Tom in Letchworth: But the Garden City was only one part of Howard's invention.

Sir Peter Hall: He envisaged that if the garden city was successful and there was a need for extension, then another garden city would be started and then another and another and they would be linked together into what he called a social city. As the garden city grew into a social city, the inter-municipal railway would provide a very efficient way of moving people around.

Tom in Letchworth: It looked wonderful on paper, but Howard knew the physical plan would not be enough.Sir Peter Hall: There was also a very important social element to all this, that in effect each garden city was to be a self-governing commonwealth. Over time the rents from the garden city would actually pay back the investors their money and thereafter the rents would in effect produce a local welfare state.

In the famous diagram of the three magnets there are a couple of words at the bottom, which many people think probably is sort of decorative rhetoric - “Freedom, Co-operation”. But they weren’t decorative or rhetoric, they really meant something very important. They meant that the people in the garden city, the citizens, would have total freedom to control their own city, not merely democratically but economically through a co-operative system.

Tom in Letchworth: But sadly, this never happened.

Sir Peter Hall: Howard essentially failed in his central mission. Although Letchworth and Welwyn are glorious monuments, they failed in their central purpose or creating this co-

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operative commonwealth that Howard envisaged. The reason was, the industrialists who were bankrolling him struck a very hard bargain.

Tom in Letchworth: In other words, the movement was defeated by demand for capital growth. But that wouldn't happen in a steady state economy. Let's just compare the 19th Century theory with 21st Century reality.

By chance, they're both about the same size. Howard, however, was catering for just 250 thousand, while Leeds has a population of nearly 780 - so obviously there's no way we can feed everybody from within the city limits as Howard hoped to do. Or is there.

New research by architects Viljoen and Bohn suggests that there IS a way it might be done, and it goes under the unlikely name of "CPULS."

Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes

Katrin Bohn (Architect, Author CPULS): CPULS stands for Continuous Productive Urban Landscape and it is quite a bulky title, we have heard this often before. But it stands for exactly what it says. It’s an urban landscape that happens in a city or town and a landscape that is continuous, so you could walk it from one end of the city to another end, without being interrupted by obstacles. And above all it is a productive landscape, and we look at this idea of productivity in a variety of senses: environmental productivity, social productivity and economic productivity.

Tom in studio: It's this linking of green spaces that's key. First, the CPULS change the city from one urban zone, punctured by pockets of green, into a number of separate urbal ecosystems, each with the best possible access, for both wildlife and humans, to green corridors. So in a way, each sector starts to function not unlike one of Howard's garden cities.

But just as importantly, CPULs connect right through to the countryside. This not only allows both wildlife and humans to migrate into, through, and out of the city, but it also provides an essential psychological fix: Even in the most built-up area you're only ever a step away from the countryside.

I have a hunch that Leeds might be the ideal city for road-testing what must be the most Urbal idea yet. I remember my first ever lecture in Landscape Architecture 35 years ago here, in what was then Leeds Polytechnic. The tutor explained that Leeds was like a cartwheel, with spokes of green running right into the city centre, something borne out by the council’s own designation of multifunctional green space.

Katrin Bohn: We also want to look at everyday uses of that landscape in a productive way. This could be sports facilities, or there could be leisure facilities, or there could be outdoor

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offices. Maybe also one major aspect for which that continuity is important is the idea of a transport network, so you could cycle that landscape or you could walk it. All of that makes it a productive landscape.

Tom in studio: Those are of course all activities that landscape architects and managers are very used to organising.

Professor Robert Tregay (Landscape Architect, LDA Design, University of Wales):Looking backwards the open space agenda in cities was to do with amenity and recreation, and to some extent, access. This is now broadening. Energy will be a significant matter and water will be a significant matter. I think we have to add to this, food.

Tom in studio: So now the challenge is to introduce low-impact food production without compromising the other priorities. And there are more places to do that than you might think...

John Preston (West Yorkshire Manager BTCV): Starting inside the house on the windowsill, going outside onto the window-ledge, the window-box, going out into the concrete yards, doing backyards, front yards, looking at gardens. We’re also exploring using bits of unused space be they fully public open space, development sites and so on. There is the grounds of schools, there is the grounds of all other buildings within the urban area...

Katrin Bohn: Community gardens, allotment sites, rooftop gardening, railway embankments, leftover spaces, traffic roundabouts, brownfield sites. It would hopefully take up parts of well -established parks. A big inner-urban park could give up portions and develop a food-growing landscape, in the same way that they might have a rose garden.Robert Tregay: Open spaces in cities have to be owned by their communities. Not necessarily literally, but owned and managed and owned in your head by communities. To do that they have to be productive and food is going to be a key part of that.

Tom in studio: Of course this is not only about home-grown veg. There will be commercial market gardens and new types of horticulture and agriculture too. So bearing that in mind, how much of a city can we realistically hope to feed with CPULs?

Katrin Bohn: We did calculations very early on and we confirmed them, several times later, that if you were to use existing open space, in a contemporary British city, meaning you’re not knocking down any buildings, you just use what you have, then you could feed about 30% of the population, or you could feed all the population a third of their fruit and vegetable requirements.

Tom in studio:

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One third. That's a LOT. Well - this circle represents the average area of Leeds. So one third of the city's population could in theory be fed by introducing CPULs here.

And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that if we draw an outer circle enclosing an area twice the size of the inner one - the rest of the population could be fed from within that zone. Looks hopeful, doesn’t it?

And this is nice too - the outer circle is about the same size as Howard's - so, in spite of the population increase and the fact that Howard was dealing with a greenfield site, the Social City model is still relevant today.

Robert Tregay: The overall concept then is for green space within cities to be productive. We all know how much food contributes to global warming, it’s substantial, so the idea of a city that produces its own food not only has the benefits in terms of its carbon profile, it has benefits in terms of the way people can contribute to the management of their own spaces. So instead of jobs related to food happening somewhere else in the world or in the country, it means that the jobs are on your doorstep. And the idea of internalising economies within cities I think is a very very important one, and food can definitely be part of that. The food economy within the city.

Tom in studio: Of course there is a precedent for all this. When the collapse of the Soviet Union cut the supply lines to Cuba's huge oil-dependent farms, the country faced starvation.

But within a few years, new small organic farms, and pocket-sized urban market gardens, were feeding the population - and providing healthy, local, co-operative employment. So - it can be done.

SOLUTIONS

This scene is in précis form

Tom in Todmorden (West Yorkshire): So far we've established that to become Urbal, Leeds will need to introduce something like a steady-state economy, while connecting up, and planting up, those green corridors. It'll mean growing food in all sorts of unlikely places, but that's not a problem - as they're proving here in Todmorden.

Nick Green: Enthuses about the Incredible Edible Todmorden project, where they grow vegetables in the streets.

Tom in Todmorden: But is it really feasible to scale Todmorden up to the size of Leeds?

Nick Green:

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Confirms that it is, because Leeds is built on good farmland.

Tom in Meanwood: And there is one farm, here, already - right in the middle of Leeds.

Robert Paige (Meanwood Valley Urban Farm): Explains how the farm teaches people to grow veg, even in built-up areas.

Tom in Harehills: And there's a great example of that approach here in Harehills.

Iris Liete (Urban Gardener): Explains how they grow veg in pots.

Tom in Harehills: It wasn't long before Iris and Jose were feeding a family of four through the summer, from a shaded plot just a few metres square, here in the middle of the densest part of Leeds.

Iris Liete: Enjoys gardening because she’s bringing the countryside into the city.

Tom in Harehills: Harehills is just one of a number of areas in Leeds where urban gardening is being actively promoted, including by the NHS.

Roxana Summers: Explains the health benefits of gardening.

Tom in Harehills: They've been recruiting Street Champions to help the newbies.

Roxana Summers: Explains the benefits of Street Champions.

Tom in Wellington Place: There's another unexpected example right here in the city centre.

Rachael Unsworth: Explains how she persuaded developers to install temporary allotments in Wellington Place.

Nick Green: Expounds the potential for ‘Forkliftable allotments’.

Niels Corfield: Expounds the potential for ‘Big bag allotments’.

Tom in Wellington Place:

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We do already have 96 allotment sites in Leeds, but very few of them are within the main green corridors. So obviously we need more, and there are national initiatives working towards that, but allotments are not the only way people can acquire land for gardening.

Niels Corfield: Explains the potential for food growing in private gardens.

Tom in a Leeds garden: And people who have large gardens they can't manage, like these, can share with those who don't.

Niels Corfield: Endorses garden sharing and suggests commercial garden production.

Andy Goldring: Explains productivity benefits of market gardens.

Niels Corfield: Explains potential for urban gardening, including walls.

Tom in an urban market garden: And walls (and roofs) are not the only unconventional new approach. There's a whole host of new sustainable growing techniques which fall broadly under the term bio-mimicry.

Kate Dundas (Landscape Architect): Endorses potential for bio-mimicry systems.

Niels Corfield: Lists various viable biomimicry systems.

Andy Goldring: Explains benefits of Permaculture, specially the soil food web.

John Preston: Explains importance of biodiversity.

Tom in a Forest Garden: Other innovations include things like polyculture and partner planting, with perhaps the most comprehensive model being the Forest Garden.

Andy Goldring: Extols the advantages of Forest Gardens.

Tom in a Forest Garden: These very technical, low-impact high-yield systems may even eventually replace conventional forestry, agriculture and horticulture. But as they usually involve minimal digging and locally sourced mulch which saves on trips to the

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trip, they should catch on quite quickly. But as we've seen, Urbal cities are not just about food.

Kate Dundas: Explains importance of biodiversity corridors.

Jonathan Eyre: Endorses need for biodiversity and an end to municipal clearing and mowing.

Tom in woodland plantation: The Government has welcomed the recent Read Report which recommends that UK tree cover should be increased from 12 to 16 percent - to offset our carbon emissions by 10%. It takes 2,500 saplings to capture the carbon dioxide from six people and provide oxygen for ten, so Leeds, with a population of 770 thousand, will need to plant a lot. And with one 60 year old beech achieving the same result, we need to keep all the trees we can, too.

Alan Simson (Landscape Architect, Urban Forester, Reader, Leeds Met): Explains the need for trees in cities, for microclimate and biosequestration.

John Preston: Endorses need for biosequestration in cities.

Andy Goldring: Endorses advantages for trees for health.

Iris Liete: Explains that wildlife in cities makes you happy.

Tom by Leeds hospital: So Urbal corridors need to connect with the countryside so that the Rural can permeate, and heal, the Urban. In fact there's a proven relationship between green space and health. Patients who can see green out of a hospital window recover quicker than those who can’t. Another study compared two high rise areas in Chicago.

Roxana Summers: Explains the improved mental health of tenants in greener area.

Tom in Leeds park: Natural England have gone so far as to recommend that no house should be more than 300 metres from 2 hectares of green space - the same size as the parks in the heart of Howard's Garden Cities.

Alex Hammond: Explains the health benefits of walking.

Roxana Summers: Explains that walking better than tablets for depression.

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Tom by local shops: So the Urbal City, like Howard's, will need above all to be a walking city. A study in Sandwell mapped the housing areas that were more than 500m - (that's how far they reckon you can walk with shopping bags) - from somewhere you can buy a good range of reasonably priced fresh vegetables.

No-one's done it in Leeds yet, but I suspect the problem areas would be more extensive than Natural England's green space islands - largely thanks to the supermarkets.

Lord GIddens: Complains that supermarkets destroy local shops.

Tom at Oakwood Farmers Market: So we need local shops, and numerous Farmers Markets like this one. And all linked by safe, green active travel routes.

Alex Hammond: Explains that active travel involves exercise.

Richard Brett: Extols the need for walking / cycling routes - but explains that Leeds not flat.

Duncan McCann (Get Cycling CIC, York): Extols advantages of powered cycles.

Tom at Get Cycling: And once you introduce assisted leg power, then all sort of other things become possible.

Duncan McCann Suggests use of rickshaw vans for veg deliveries

Tom on electric motorbike: So the Urbal City will be leg-powered wherever possible, but fully electric vehicles - like this motorbike, and busses and trains, are sustainable as long as they use renewable energy.

Richard Brett: The benefits of intra-urban electric public transport.

Hilary Benn: The benefits of inter-city electric travel.

Tom by substation: Hopefully we'll soon be getting exclusively green juice from the National Grid, but even here, the Urbal City can play its part. Gussing, in Austria, has achieved electrical self-sufficiency using locally coppiced wood, grass and clover, rather than unsustainable biofuels like palm oil.

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Hilary Benn: Feed-in tariffs will encourage local production.

Philip Wilson (Slipstream Energy, Keighley): Point-of-use wind power generation.

Andy Walker: Local hydro electric power.

Tom by River Wharfe: The Settle Hydro scheme shows what might be possible. The screw generates 165,000 kWh per year - and Leeds has two rivers with 16 weirs in all. But rivers are not just about power.

Jonathan Eyre / Andy Goldring: Advantages of Sustainable Urban Drainage

Tom by River Aire: Sustainable Urban Drainage, known as SUDS, is a key element of the Urbal Fix, because it not only provides major sustainability benefits, but in offering an alternative to costly flood defences it also provides a financial incentive for increasing green space and vegetation. Los Angeles was able to save 20 billion dollars in flood control and water supply projects just by introducing SUDs. Leeds is about to spend millions on 2m high walls right through the city centre - is that really wise?

Tom in studio: There are of course many other issues that are crucial to the sustainability of a city - not least the retrofitting of insulation, the creation of new buildings - specially housing if we need to take in our share of climate refugees - and waste disposal,

What I do want to cover in the next section is how we might go about making the Urbal Fix actually happen.

ACTION

Tom in studio: So how do we bring all this together into one Urbal Fix for Leeds - or indeed any city?

Well, we know for a start that anything and everything we do needs to help deliver a low impact, low growth economy, as close to a steady state as possible, and based on co-operative principles.

But that's going to take some time, and we can't afford to hang around - so what can we be doing in the mean time?

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Well, we can start with the easy part - the ground plan of the ecosystem we call Leeds.

First, we need to identify the existing and potential green corridors, link them up where they don't join, and then maximise productivity within them - that's food, biodiversity, carbon capture, water retention, amenity value, and benign transport links.

It's going to mean protecting the green we have now - perhaps with something like Tops on all vegetation (with exemptions for things that will increase production of course), while maximising growth. So, less much mowing and clipping (and keeping what we cut on site to go back into the soil). And much more planting (ok and litter picking!).

But second, we also need to increase the size and number of green spaces, specially when linking up those green corridors, turning brown sites green (even if only temporarily), installing green roofs and walls, and where necessary perhaps removing some roads and buildings as well, using low-impact deconstruction methods of course.

All of this is going to require action by a number of different players, and it's how all these players interact that will determine whether we make progress or not.

Paul Chatterton: What we need for cities for the next few decades is a Plan B.

Andy Goldring: We need to look at the DNA of cities. How does a city remake itself, and how can we change that so that more people can be involved in that process?

Paul Chatterton: Plan A is defunct. We know what Plan A is, ceaseless economic growth, climate change, environmental pollution, social breakdown. Now Plan B is a very different proposition.

Andy Goldring: How we participate in decision making, whether it’s participatory budgets, or whether its participatory design, I think its a really critical issue..

James Copp: You need a much more community-based, you might almost say communist, type of regime in order to make the bottom-upwards process function.

Andy Goldring: We’ve got to the stage where it’s no longer enough for a small number of people in a small room where nobody really knows, to be making decisions which affect the whole city.

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Paul Chatterton: So it’s not just a matter of, this is up to the politicians or this is up to the business community. This is all hands on deck.

James Copp: Engagement is about first of all identifying who it is you’re going to talk to and why.

Kate Dundas: There’s the public obviously . . .

Paul Chatterton: Non-governmental organisations . . .

Kate Dundas: The council . . .

Paul Chatterton: Charities . . .

Kate Dundas: Natural England . . .

Paul Chatterton: Business community . . .

Kate Dundas: The landowners . . ..

Paul Chatterton: Church leaders . . .

Kate Dundas: Tenants . . .

Paul Chatterton: Active groups, politicians, you name it.

James Copp: It’s everyone who lives, works and plays or has an interest in the particular area you’re dealing with.

Andy Goldring: If we have the right information easily accessible and a space where people can come together, then we will start to generate the sorts of projects that we need.

James Copp: The decision-makers often feel that it’s an impossibility to up-skill others who haven’t got their background. I think that’s a very lazy approach. I think it’s entirely possible.

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Tim Lang: We need re-skilling. I do think we have got to skill the citizenry. It is not happening, and we need to have integrated skilling. If we have resilience we’ve got to have skilling.

James Copp: It’s not that difficult if you have the will, and it’s not even that costly if you have the will. It is merely committing yourself to the idea that you, whoever you are, the policy-maker, the politician, the opinion-maker, don’t have all the answers, and that actually it is worth listening to the voices of others.

Tim Lang: I see a new role for colleges of further education, I see a new role for secondary schools, I see a new role for community organising and adult education. I don’t see that vision yet but I think it is possible. Put it this way, if there was a war, it would happen tomorrow.

Tom in studio: Well, there's two things we can do if not tomorrow then very soon.

We heard earlier about the importance of Street Champions in urban gardening, and we'll certainly need an army of them. But I think we need some City Champions too - a team of motivated enablers and mentors recruited from every facet of city life, working together in an integrated effort, to move us from business as usual towards genuine sustainability.

They'll need some training, of course, but that would be easy to arrange - not least through existing organisations like Groundwork and some of the other courses available in the city.

So, Street Champions and City Champions - plus, I think, some people with the skills to pull it all together - to masterplan.

Ebenezer Howard wasn't a Town Planner - the profession didn't exist till he created it, and even then he went on working as a court stenographer.

When he invented the Social City, he was no more than a concerned citizen. So he relied on two architects, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, to get Letchworth off the ground.

Can we rely on architects, planners and urban designers to co-ordinate the Urbal Fix today?

Sir Peter Hall: Well, I don’t think any profession is really well set up as things are. I know that my profession, Town Planning, is not, because the education of Town Planners doesn’t address such issues.

Mike Thompson:

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Architects just don't know enough and don’t have enough influence because they don’t know enough, and I think there’s still a long way to go on that. And that’s quite disturbing actually.

Greg Keefe: I don’t think there’s anyone in the team whose specific remit is sustainability and climate change, and I think there may be a change to a new team which is based around a primary driver of the project being carbon neutrality, because it’s going to be difficult to achieve in quite a lot of cases.

Sir Peter Hall: I think it’s going to require a new approach, but I don’t know that any profession really has the tools entirely to handle this, which is why I tend to believe it can only be done through a team approach.

Greg Keefe: Usually when you start a project the blank sheet of paper is first filled by the architect, and so if those first marks on a sheet of paper are going to be the most important, then the architect is going to be the person who’s the expert on climate change (laughs). Or we are going to have some new climate change professional who can think spatially, which is another difficult thing because maths and special things don’t always go together.

Andy Goldring: Two and a half thousand years ago mathematics was in the hands of a religious cult. Pythagoras was talking about the Golden Section and the wonder of the spheres and it was all quite religious. Now mathematics is seen as a basic skill, so crucial that every child in every primary education system on the planet it taught maths. I believe Ecological Design and Ecological literacy are as fundamentally important for human beings that was to occupy a sustainable planet as maths. So on that basis, probably it won’t be called Permaculture, but something like ecological literacy, ecological design, is a skill that we all need to be learning.

Kate Dundas: We don’t need a new term, we just need people to understand what a Landscape Architect is! If somebody else asks me to design their garden one more time . . . We’re an established profession and yet nobody knows what we do.

Tom in studio: It's certainly true that, in the UK anyway, Landscape Architects are the only design discipline who are actually trained to think holistically, in ecological terms, about urban issues, as their equivalent of the RIBA, the Landscape Institute, were recently reminded.

Jonathan Porritt (to The Landscape Institute): By definition, this is a holistic profession. That brings with it fantastic opportunities, but it also brings with it very considerable responsibilities to think that through, in a systemic and strategic way.

Kate Dundas:

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We are the people who can oversee everything. We understand about people and about place and about the importance of everything working together.

Jonathan Porritt: This is a proactive championship role that is now necessary for the institute, and one which I am absolutely certain will be embraced by the leadership of the institute and by its membership, given the pivotal, absolutely crucial role that you play in society today.

Kate Dundas: We have to assume a role of leadership within multi disciplinary teams. It’s one of the driving aims of the Landscape Institute.

Robert Tregay: We’re drawing different specialists into our field now: engineers who specialise in energy production, energy minimisation, people who talk the language of carbon - that didn’t happen even a year ago - and that’s all in response to climate change of course. So there is a completely new agenda because it’s unbelievably complex. So the only way you can achieve it is by people working together and that’s what we do in all the teams I work with. It brings together different professions and the trick is to have leadership which can bring all of those things together simply because it’s so complicated.

Tom in studio: There is, however, a problem. Although trained for this work, many Landscape Architects find themselves at the bottom of the food chain, and shoehorned into a more interventionist way of doing things. Many are a little rusty on ecological design, and few know much about the new bio-mimicry systems.

Others may just not be interested for one reason or another - thought I hope they'll try at least to make their schemes not so much carbon neutral - as architects are now expected to do - but actually carbon negative - because, uniquely, they can.

But there's another problem too, both Landscape Architects and Architects are expected to design beautiful places, and for the moment at least, the fashion is still for expensive, carbon-hungry schemes.

James Copp: I would think there is one basic way in which it needs to change, and that is to look less at the aesthetic and more at the socio-economic, socio-political aspects of what they do. It’s going to be about how the space functions, how it meets the needs of the immediate community, how it looks at issues to do with energy use, how it meets the needs of food production, how it meets the needs of education, and if it looks good then so much the better.

Tom in studio: Some designers do already do that, but there are also a lot of people outside the chartered professions who possess many of the necessary skills, and

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could make a major contribution if we could somehow conflate the alternative and the mainstream.

So the second thing we can do almost tomorrow is to set up an Urbal Institute - based here in Leeds, why not - to develop and share techniques and processes amongst design professionals, business people, growers, politicians, street and city champions - whoever needs them.

The Institute will need many links at many levels, with professional bodies, local authorities, colleges, NGOs, community groups and so on. It'll need to have an open door open source horizontal policy, and it will need to employ trans-disciplinary rather than conventional multidisciplinary techniques. It'll need to have permeable boundaries.

It'll need input from a wide range of professions, academics and the corporate sector, but because Urbalism is as much about engagement and co-operation, it will also need to attract and embrace and learn from the many expert amateurs who remember the things that the professionals have forgotten.

It won't be like any existing Institute - but it will do all the usual things: conducting research, advising government on policy, running and cascading courses at every level from PHD to night classes, right across the country - and whatever else it takes.

It's a big ask at a time when money's tight - but I don’t think we have a choice. Do you?

CONCLUSION

Tom outside Bill Mill: I'm proud to have two Victorian visionaries among my ancestors. Neither of them were exactly Utopian Socialists - and neither am I, and I'm certainly not a visionary. But I share with Bill and Ben - yes, those really were their family names - a belief that major social change can be achieved, and quickly if the need is sufficiently great.

For many people, the word Utopia means an unachievable ideal - and it's certainly true that most of these visions, from Karl Marx right back to Plato, relied too heavily on altruism and so were defeated by the Selfish Gene.

But this time it's different. For the first time ever, this is not about altruism or ideals. It's about survival - in a very grim reality.

Lord GIddens: We need what I call Utopian Realism. We need to think beyond the world as we see it at the moment. We need an element of Utopian thinking. If you look at a city, think how could it be radically different? But it has to be realistic, because the issues of sustainability are real.

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Andy Goldring: Even if climate change wasn’t happening it would make sense to have industries which didn’t pollute the environment. It would make sense not to destroy the soil. It would make sense not to have social injustice. So actually many of the things that we need to do to address climate change are things that we need to do anyway. So actually it doesn’t matter if you believe in climate change. Do you want a better planet? Do you want a better future for your children and for yourself? I think that’s the simplest argument.

Katrin Bohn: I think we have all the time we need...

Ranyl Rhydwen: People will realise the situation, we will work together and therefore I’m very optimistic and positive that we’ll get through this in an appropriate way.

Katrin Bohn: If you research into agriculture you very quickly come to those famous campaigns like the Dig for Victory campaign, where basically from one day to the next you transform your landscape into one that can feed yourself.

Hilary Benn: In the end I think you either approach this with an optimistic or a pessimistic frame of mind, and its very easy to talk ourselves into a gloom and say we’re all doomed, but that isn’t going to motivate anyone to do anything. And the thing about humankind’s existence on the earth is, we have shown an astonishing capacity to adapt, and it seems to me that all of the building blocks that we need in terms of science, technology, inventiveness, resourcefulness, politics and so on are there, and if we use that, then I think the challenge can be overcome because in the end we’re quite rational. And you look at what the majority of scientific opinion is saying, you have to beat back the sceptics, because now is the time for getting on with it, not for stopping. And if you do that, then I’m an optimist, that we will make the change that is needed. Why would we not want to?

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