Issues relating to new emerging theme of male hormonal contraception are explored. Success rates, compliance and long term data are reviewed

Introduction

In this chapter we provide a way of thinking about the impact of artists working collaboratively in order to co-produce ideas with a range of people, including people working in universities. The drive to make art with communities in order to effect change and support community activism has had a long history both in the UK and globally (Kester, 2005; Bishop, 2012). As projects have become more interdisciplinary and collaborative, contemporary artists have been increasingly visible working with academics from a variety of disciplines, including Social Science, Pure Science, and the Arts and Humanities. Artists work within contexts such as schools and hospitals, and when doing so, can challenge conventional practices. This includes ‘artist in residence’ programmes, where artists respond to place, site and people. In the 1960s Barbara Steveni, John Latham and others initiated the radical and influential ‘Artists Placement Group’, based in the UK but with European links, which situated artists within unfamiliar spaces including factories, places of work and businesses (Slater, 2000). They argued that coming from the ‘outside’, an artist might unsettle or question ways of doing things in a setting, create a space for a different kind of practice to take shape, or open up new pathways for thinking. Other partnerships, for example between artists and teachers, created new configurations of practice, enabling them to work together in new and unexpected ways. Often artists’ approaches will be different from established norms, creating an unexpected experience for all collaborators. For example, in a school, an artist might suggest stretching time to work on children's messy play longer, while teachers are more likely to remain within the timetable structure. Artists’ interventions can change the way people do things that might not have been considered previously. In a hospital, aesthetic considerations suggested by an artist can change how light and space are deployed in a waiting room, altering how people feel in the space. On a council estate, sculpture provides a focal point, or a one-off event might create a new configuration of how space is used and appreciated by those who live there. While the impact of artists working in such contexts may be recognised, what happens in the fine detail of these encounters is not always clear.

This chapter sets England's current poor performance in the wider context of European experience of policy on the built environment, including in relation to the other nations of Britain. There are many examples of utopian thinking and no perfect model; however, an exploration of the diversity of international approaches to placemaking and to the values that underpin these approaches, not only starkly highlights how far England has fallen behind, but also some of the possible ways we can put the nation back on track.

World-leading rhetoric

England used to be at the forefront of utopian thought and, until relatively recently, the nation prided itself on being a world leader in a number of key areas. Let's take the 2008 Climate Change Act as an example. It set the world's first legally binding climate change target, requiring the UK to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 80% by 2050, as compared with 1990. Jim Watson highlights that one of the reasons why it was so successful and ambitious was because of the ‘level of cross-party support it received. It was enacted by the Labour government, under pressure to do more on climate change by opposition parties and NGOs.’ The Climate Change Act demonstrated the power of cross-party consensus and the NGO community's being unified around an important goal.

The Act established an independent Committee on Climate Change to advise the government on emissions targets and progress on other aspects of the Act. To set a pathway to 2050, the Committee on Climate Change proposed a series of five-year carbon budgets that were legislated for by Parliament. In 2009 the first three carbon budgets were set, covering the periods 2008–12, 2013–17 and 2018–22. In 2011 the fourth budget was set for the period 2023–27, committing the UK to reduce emissions to 50% below 1990 levels.

In 2013 the Committee on Climate Change reported in its fifth statutory report to Parliament on progress towards meeting the UK’s carbon budgets, that ‘The UK has met the first carbon budget and our assessment is that we are likely to meet the second carbon budget. However, we are not currently on track to meet the third and fourth carbon budgets’.

At the beginning of this book we indicated we were not sure if we were writing a manifesto or an elegy. We are still not sure. Perhaps it’s best described as a message in a bottle. The message is in two parts. The first is a warning to the international community not to repeat the obvious mistakes of planning deregulation in England. The second is an invitation to all of us to start building the utopia that all of our children and our grandchildren deserve and for which we already have the technical know-how.

Thomas More's Utopia was the catalyst for one of most extraordinary journeys in human history, a journey in search of the ideal community which became one of the great inspirations for the practical action delivered by the town planning and Garden Cities movements. This book has recorded the end of that journey by cataloguing a period of intense reform leading to the decline of the town planning legacy. Of course we should all have stood up for planning and place-making and the values of social justice and sustainable development, but we didn’t. This was partly because of a simple lack of courage, but it was also because the planning system was, by 2010, only a shadow of the ambitious creative force it was intended to be. So, what now?

We have in our hands the means of creating a sustainable future. This book and the countless other solutions that have been implemented across the world show the potential for change and how that change can make a real practical difference, not just to basic planetary survival but to the way we live our lives.

In 1962 Rachel Carson set out two possible future pathways: ‘we stand now where two roads diverge … the road we have long been travelling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one “less travelled by” – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of our earth. The choice, after all, is ours to make.

This book has two simple messages. Firstly, the rich utopian tradition that underpinned the town planning movement in England is dead. It now needs wholesale recreation. Secondly, if we are to achieve this renaissance we need positive and creative ideas that make a real difference to people's lives.

This book is part manifesto for the future of England and part elegy for the wider western utopian tradition, a tradition we celebrate in 2016 with the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. With a kind of ironic symmetry we will mark this date in England with the abandonment of any commitment to the high ideals that drove so much progressive change over the last 150 years. In a debate marked by a rich mix of apathy and political hypocrisy, England will bury these utopian ideals just at the moment when we, and wider world, need them most. The external challenges intensify as fast as we destroy the tools we need to deal with them. From the historic agreement at the United Nations Paris Climate Conference in November 2015 to the severe flooding in Cumbria in December 2015, from the growing levels of homelessness in England to the greatest mass migration in Europe since 1945, we are unprepared and ill equipped.

The notion of sustainable development in town planning, the supposed foundation of the system, is now completely devalued, appearing at the table occasionally like Banquo's ghost to remind planners of what they used to believe in. Planning has been subject to regulatory capture, with those whom it was meant to regulate now dictating its form, policy and implementation. It has become fashionable to blame those parts of the private sector development community who have done well out of these changes. That is an easy analysis, but it is both wrong and not the purpose of this book. In fact some parts of the private sector have done very badly out the government's reforms on a range of policies, most notably those working with innovative place-making technologies in energy efficiency, renewable energy and flood resilience. The responsibility for the purpose and implementation of planning policy lies with government; and with those who elected them.

In Part One of this book we set out how planning in England has been systematically dismantled and in Part Two we set out how to rebuild the planning system so that it meets the needs of society today and the needs of future generations.

In 2016 we no longer have a national or regional way of working out solutions to our problems such as housing need and regeneration or flooding and food production. More and more development is being approved in piecemeal locations, often through appeals, leading to development that is often poorly served by infrastructure such as roads, hospitals or schools. Relaxation of permitted development rights has led to tens of thousands of new homes being created without the requirement for planning permission (for example, through the conversion of commercial buildings into homes), and this means that little or no thought is given to the most basic issues, such as whether there are enough doctors’ surgeries in the area or where children will be able to play. We are producing fewer and fewer genuinely affordable and social homes, so homelessness and affordability are blighting people's lives, and the new homes that are being built are often small and inaccessible because national minimum space or accessibility standards are no longer in place. While each one of these measures on its own may not have a considerable impact, the cumulative result risks creating a legacy of poorly serviced, badly designed places that don't provide for those in greatest housing need.

The good news is that it doesn't have to be this way. We need to rebuild the planning system in England founded on positive and creative ideas that make a real difference to people's lives. This requires clear principles and a new set of structures and approaches that can deliver a system that is democratic and participative, and effective and efficient.

In this chapter we set out ten ideas to meet this challenge. Each idea on its own will make a difference, and collectively they have the potential to transform the future of our nation. Five of these ideas are designed to rebuild the foundations of English planning and five are focused on key outcomes that we need to achieve right now.