The Royal Town Planning Institute, in Britain, has just published a report on possible measures to unlock the current context and produce a substantial number of housing units to alleviate the current national deficit. According to the report, in England the debate is entrenched between those thinking that the current system is too liberal and allows builders to do almost all they want, opposed to those claiming that nowadays red tape is stopping advances in that field; both seem to agree, nevertheless, in the feeling that the local authorities are not serious enough about the issue and the planning system is at least partly to blame. The document compares the situation in England to that in Scotland and proposes 15 practical recommendations to concerned agents. RTPI recommends a combination of piecemeal operations in consolidated urban areas with large scale urban extensions. Among other recommendations, it is curious to see a call for a wider public access to data on land ownership and land options, a bigger role for the authorities in land management that would include compulsory purchase (eminent domain for our American readers…), or the need to manage the sale of unused public land (former rail sites, barracks or hospitals) thinking in global terms rather than just in the amount of cash that can be obtained.

It is a rather compact document (just 24 pages), but really interesting. And when read from Spain, even more…