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The General Polycentricity Index for South East is 0.15. This may appear quite low. But, in comparison with the other seven , it is in fact quite high: the lowest value, for the traditionally “monocentric” of Île-de-, is as low as 0.02; the highest values, for the traditionally “polycentric” regions of Randstad Holland and Rhine-Ruhr, are only in the range 0.15-0.20. The comment of the Randstad Holland team is relevant here:

A value of 1.0 would mean that all FURs in the greater Randstad area are equally well connected to each other in terms of commuter flows and that the entire working population works in a place different from their place of residence. Next to being a polycentric utopia, it would also be a clear recipe for traffic chaos and environmental degradation.

Against that background, ’s relatively high polycentricity index reflects the fact that it has an exceptionally high number of FURs relative to total area – second only to Randstad Holland – and an accompanying high density of its commuting networks. But this is only another way of saying that – despite the apparent predominance of - the region is intrinsically quite polycentric. Essentially, especially on the western side, the region contains an exceptionally large number of highly independent FURs, which have high degrees of self- containment but which also interact with each other as well as with the core.

7. Planning: 1945-2004

Planning in this vast and complex region has long presented unusual problems, simply because of its huge geographical scale and the resulting relationships between central and .

Central to understanding these complexities is the basic distinction between the continuously built-up area of , and the rest of the region. Greater London essentially represents the area that was developed before World War Two, within a radius of about 25 km from the centre, after which further contiguous development was essentially stopped by the Green Belt established as a result of the recommendations of Professor Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater , but subsequently extended to cover a large area roughly between 25 and 50 kilometres from central London. Since 1965 it has also had its own local government system, consisting of the ancient plus 32 London , plus a strategic planning authority formed by the (1965-86) and (Mayor plus Assembly, 2000-)1.

Outside it is a mosaic of counties and districts, plus some unitary (all-purpose) authorities for larger like , Reading or , which until 2004 divided planning responsibilities between them; from 2004, as in the rest of England, strategic planning becomes the responsibility of new Regional Planning Bodies (RPBs). Unfortunately, the old continuous South East Region was divided in 1994 between a “new” South East and a “new”

1 There was a strategic hiatus between 1986 and 2000, filled partially by a London Planning Advisory Committee of the boroughs. Region, with a dividing line that runs right up the middle of one of the principal growth corridors north of London.

The Abercrombie Plan, which was implemented with only small variations after World War Two, provided for more than one million Londoners to be “overspilled” to new and expanded towns on the outer side of the Green Belt: eight new towns were started between 1946 and 1950, another three (larger and more distant from London) between 1967 and 1970. But, as this was happening, spontaneous migration took many more people out, and in the process the ring of maximum population growth moved steadily outwards: it was about 25-40 km from London in the 1950s, 35-60 km in the 1960s, 50-80 km in the 1970s, and in the 1980s and 1990s has moved out as far as 100-130 km from London, washing over the boundaries of the South East into the neighbouring South West and East regions.

There have been two main attempts to provide a strategic vision for the development of the region. First, in the 1960s a series of studies and strategies – the South East Study of 1964, the South East Strategy of 1967 and the South East Strategic Plan of 1970 – steadily refined a vision of a polycentric city region with separate medium-sized cities and towns, concentrated on major transport corridors, with wide intervening sectors protected as agricultural land or as high-quality scenic conservation areas. Somewhat vitiated by a shift of policy after 1977/8, when government resources were diverted from the new towns programme into inner city regeneration including the huge Docklands project in , it has nevertheless had a major influence on the region’s form and functioning today.

Much more recently, the Gateway strategy of 1995 and the Sustainable Communities Strategy of 2003 return to the idea of corridor or sector development along highly-accessible transport corridors, with a new emphasis on exploiting the potential of high-speed rail. This is particularly marked in , where the new 300 kilometre/hour high-speed line from London to the , due to be completed in 2007, parallel to the M2 and M20 motorways, was re-routed to serve stations which would serve as nodes of regeneration at Stratford (East London) and Ebbsfleet (North West ). But other transport routes and corridors play a role in the 2003 strategy: the from London to , Manchester and Liverpool, plus the to Leicester, Derby and Nottingham, both operating at 200 km/hr., and the parallel form the basis for major expansions at , (both new towns of the 1960s), , and (a new of the 1950s), 80-130 km from London; the and the London Liverpool Street-Cambridge, plus the M11 motorway, form the basis for another growth corridor including , a former new town, Stansted airport and new communities around Cambridge.

An important difference in emphasis since the influential Urban Task Force report of 1998 is that these and other developments are supposed as far as possible to use recycled brownfield land. In part this has shaped the choice of locales for development, with extensive areas of old quarries in Thames Gateway and up the M1 corridor, as well as old dock or industrial areas in the former corridor and old airfields around Cambridge. And, in contrast to the 1960s strategies, there is a deliberate under-emphasis – in fact, a non-emphasis, on the entire western side of the region: from Milton Keynes/, all the way southwards and eastwards to the Channel Tunnel, there are effectively no proposals. Of course, development will have to take place here, to meet local demand and to make up for a serious shortfall throughout the late 1990s and beyond, as housing completions fell to their lowest peacetime level since 1924.

Underlying this are political tensions: local planning authorities, particularly lower-level district authorities, tend to have a strongly anti-growth bias reflecting the preferences of their local voters: NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard) tends to reign. But from 2004 they will be subject to higher-level Regional Spatial Strategies, a new concept deriving heavily from the ESDP, which will be binding on them and which – now the government’s devolution project has been abandoned – will come from non-directly-elected authorities, the RPBs: a major democratic deficit. This conflict is not fully appreciated by local electorates at the time of writing; but it could play an increasingly contentious role as the implications sink in.

8. Governance and Planning: Future Options

Against this background, we can consider possible alternatives for the future governance and planning of this vast region.

We start from the existing position: governance and planning are effectively divided between central government and no less than five Regional Planning Bodies – all of London, all of the South East, most of Eastern England, and small parts of the South West and . Faced with this extraordinary complexity, Government has chosen to simplify it by in effect creating a national strategic plan: the Sustainable Communities Plan. This has two elements: a growth corridor strategy for the Greater South East Mega-City region (population 18.98 million) and a growth strategy for six contiguous city regions – in effect a second UK Mega-City region – in the M62 Liverpool-Hull corridor (population 11.36 million): together, 61.7 per cent of the entire English population.

The central question is whether there is any realistic alternative. There seem logically to be three.

1. A single Regional Planning Body.

This has the merit of being logical. But to hand over responsibility for planning more than one- fifth of the land area and two-fifths of the population of England to a single regional planning body, however theoretically correct, is hardly practical politics. No single German Land is relatively as large as this; nor is any of the planning regions of France, nor any of the Spanish Autonomous Regions. To complicate this solution further, since the debacle of the regional devolution vote in the North East, there appears no way that such a region could be given democratic , even assuming any government would contemplate this.

2. Multiple City Regions.

In the wake of the North East vote, there is increasing interest in reorganising local government on the city region principle, as recommended by the Redcliffe Maud Commission on Local Government in England in 1969 (G.B. Royal Commission 1969) but rejected by the Heath government. But as has already been seen, a logical city regional governance for the Greater South East would comprise as many as 50 separate local government units: democratic, maybe, but hardly effective in generating a coherent regional strategy.

3. A new regional division: the “Licence Plate” solution.

The current division between three major regional bodies, plus pieces of two more, therefore makes more practical sense than might appear at first obvious. In terms of geographical realism, it might make more sense to split the South East Region into two: a Kent- “Garden of England” region and a Thames-Solent “” region, which would also incorporate Bournemouth-Poole and Swindon from the South West region. This would have the additional logic that the main growth focus of Thames Gateway would be placed in one region while the other, which has no major growth focus, would be separated. But even then, there would remain two major anomalies.

First: Thames Gateway would still be divided between three regions. London’s separate status has to be acknowledged, but it would make logical sense to transfer into the Kent- Sussex region, thus firmly embodying the outer part of Thames Gateway within it.

Second, the M1-A6 growth corridor, including the Milton Keynes- focus, would still be anomalously divided between three regions and on the edge of a fourth, part of which (Rugby in the ) clearly belongs within it. From this point of view, it would be logical for and to be joined in an enlarged East of England region containing both this and the parallel M11 Stansted-Cambridge corridor, and for Rugby to be moved into Northamptonshire and into this region.

Such a reorganisation would produce four regions within the Greater South East, each with a recognised relationship to the major growth corridors, and further with a reasonably strong geographical identity - not only in terms of existing and former counties, but also with older cultural identities (Wessex) and also with the Department of Transport’s new geographically- based car licence plates, which seem likely over time to create a geographical identity of their own (Table 1).

Table 1. A New Regionalisation for the Greater South East MCR

Region Counties Licence Plates London Greater London L London Thames-Garden of England Essex E Essex Kent G Garden of England Wessex H Hampshire R Reading (Former) O Oxford Anglia Buckinghamshire K Milton Keynes A Anglia Northamptonshire

It would of course still leave open the ultimate coordination of a regional strategic strategy for the entire Mega-City-Region. But that, evidently, has to fall to central government: the scale is such that this is, has been – ever since the 1940s – and always will remain a national challenge requiring a national solution. Below this level, the answer may lie in integrated sub-regional spatial strategies for linked Functional Urban Regions, as has already been demonstrated in the Milton Keynes-South Midlands area. These, if necessary, could cross regional boundaries – but the proposal made here would minimise such a need.

Annex MEASURING POLYCENTRICITY

Rank-Size Indices

Population size can be used to generate a first and admittedly crude measure of relative polycentricity, the rank-size index - a staple measuring tool of urban geography since the 1960s (Haggett 1965; Chorley and Haggett 1967). When FURs within a nation or region are arrayed by size on double-log graph paper, the “log-normal” distribution takes the form of a straight line at a 45-degree angle from the vertical; divergences (a tendency to “primacy”) indicate a hierarchical system dominated by one or maybe two or three leading cities, as Hall and Hay (1980) showed for different European countries: France and the have a strongly primate distribution dominated by a , while the Netherlands and the former West had a different distribution dominated by a number of top cities of roughly equal rank. At regional scale, a primate distribution is more likely because of the absence of “balancing” second-order cities; Stewart (1959) found that the ratio between second and first city was much higher at provincial than at national level.

The rank-size plots for FURs by population and employment, plotted on semi-log scales as Fig. 11 shows, demonstrates an almost identical pattern: a composite, comprising first a sharp divergence from the general rank-size order caused by the primacy of the London FUR, and then a modified rank-size distribution with a slight inflexion at about 200,000 for population and just under 100,000 for employment, suggesting that a second tier of sub-regional FURs has grown somewhat disproportionately. These patterns, though representing an admittedly crude measure of polycentricity, would seem to suggest that the South East England MCR is far from achieving that condition. However, it needs to be emphasised that much of the classic work by geographers on rank-size distributions has been done at a national scale, where the dominance of a single leading (capital) city is powerfully modified by the existence of strong regional cities; use of the measurement at a regional scale is bound to involve distortions because this balancing mechanism is lacking. Even then, the inflexion point suggests that limited agglomeration or clustering effects are occurring in FURs based on leading cities toward the regional periphery, at distances 50-100 miles from London (Southampton, Oxford, , Bournemouth-Poole, Northampton, -), producing a weak regional hierarchy.

Fig. 11: South East England MCR: Rank-Size Population Plots, 2001

Measures of Self-Containment

It is also possible to develop a simple standardised index of self-containment of a FUR, following the pioneering work of Ray Thomas in the 1960s and Michael Breheny’s later commentary on it (Thomas 1969, Hall et al 1973, Breheny 1990). Thomas’s measure showed how many resident employed workers were employed in that urban unit; for this, FURs are the logical units since they are defined in terms of a degree of “closure”. His method is used here (Fig. 12).

Overall within the MCR in 2001, no less than 70 per cent of all workers lived and worked within the same FUR, representing a high-degree of self-containment in a region with such a high degree of interconnectivity. But Fig. 12 shows that this proportion varied considerably, from as low as about 30 per cent in some FURs close to London (, , , )

to as high as 75-85 per cent for some FURs near the edges of the MCR (Bournemouth-Poole, Portsmouth, , , Colchester, Cambridge). Even here, however, there were considerable differences, reflecting the closeness of neighbouring FURs and the potential for commuting. Interestingly, in contradistinction to other maps, there does not seem to be a strong west-east distinction here: strong self-containment seems to be equally evident in the extreme west and extreme east.

Fig. 12: South East England MCR: Self-Containment Measures, 2001

Fig. 13: South East England MCR: Special and General Functional Polycentricity Indices, 2001

Graph-theory-derived analyses: Special and General Polycentricity Indices

These too have been long employed in geographical analysis since the early 1960s (Haggett 1965, 251-253; Chorley and Haggett 1967, 634-642; Tinkler 1977). In a paper, Green (2004) has developed concepts of Special Functional Polycentricity and General Functional Polycentricity. The first is generated from separate observations of in-commuting and out- commuting to and from all individual FURs within the MCR. The second is generated from aggregate observations of both sets of commuter movements2.

This index is graphically represented in Fig. 13. Here, the surfaces represent in-commuting, while the networks represent in- and out-commuting and both the General Functional Polycentricity index (PGF ) and the density of the network (∆) are shown in the top left corner. This value can theoretically range from .0001 to 1.00.

The General Polycentricity Index for South East England is 0.15. This may appear quite low. But, in comparison with the other seven regions, it is in fact quite high: the lowest value, for the traditionally “monocentric” region of Île-de-France, is as low as 0.02; the highest values, for the traditionally “polycentric” regions of Randstad Holland and Rhine-Ruhr, are only in the range 0.15-0.20. The comment of the Randstad Holland team is relevant here:

A value of 1.0 would mean that all FURs in the greater Randstad area are equally well connected to each other in terms of commuter flows and that the entire working population works in a place different from their place of residence. Next to being a polycentric utopia, it would also be a clear recipe for traffic chaos and environmental degradation.

Against that background, South East England’s relatively high polycentricity index reflects the fact that it has an exceptionally high number of FURs relative to total area – second only to Randstad Holland – and an accompanying high density of its commuting networks. But this is only another way of saying that – despite the apparent predominance of London - the region is intrinsically quite polycentric. Essentially, especially on the western side, the region contains an exceptionally large number of highly independent FURs, which have high degrees of self- containment but which also interact with each other as well as with the central London core.

2 Specifically, the expression for General Functional Polycentricity is: PGF (N)=(1-σ∂a/ σ∂max)·∆ where:PGF (N1,N2…Nn ) is general functional polycentricity for functional networks N1,N2,…Nn; and the sum is taken over all PSF; n is the number of networks.

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