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A recent thread I bumbled into spoke about tech in a negative way in relation to planning and though the authors are going to balance up the argue with the positives I think it would be great to highlight some now:
Technology has arguably done more to create a sustainable environment than planning. Solar panels, more efficient battery technology and water desalination are just a few of the examples where tech finds answers that planning cant comprehend.
Modern planning in the UK was essentially begate from health issues which arguably medicine, building regs & advances in social welfare and importantly jobs created by technology have done more for health and wellbeing than planning.
Even in this pandemic- home working has been incredibly reliant on tech and has doubtlessly saved lives from allowing us to keep aspects of the economy running whilst remaining physically distant.
Tech can speed up and democratise planning. Milton Keynes are testing an automated validation process which will include a human check at the end. This frees up people to do roles which add more value to the economy and themselves. Keynes spoke about this & clearly we aren't all
Living the life of leisure promised but thats an issue with capitalism in its current form not technology.
Technology has enabled the automotive industry to refine cars and bring down costs whilst enhancing thier efficency and features. If housing construction could implement even a fraction of this type of work (MMC is not anywhere near the possibilities yet) then we would have
Much lower construction costs that would be much more transparent whilst also being able to drive up environmental efficiency and creat carbon store homes http://thatplanningblog.com/2020/09/27/3d-visionaries-and-doing-it-with-it-on-a-computer/
The planning process is already reliant on technology and further advances in relation to GIS, Lidar etc will help us understand better baseline data and help us map any implications of changes we may wish to make. In the wrong hands tech is bad but so is any level of power.
Sustainaility appraisals are largely a analogue assessment of how sustainable any plan is and highly contentious and subjective. Many plans fail at this stage and rightly so as unfortunately.. listening to local people and politicians doesn't always lead to the best results.
Nimbyism and the ballot box have influence over plans as much if not more than pure sustainability and the power is much more heavily in the hands of those with homes than those with out as highlighted in the 1st podcast of @PricedOutUK with @SirBobKerslake
Planning is highly emotive as a subject and the arguments around mutant algorithms just make people sound incredibly dense. Its a simple math equation & by using such terminology disregards that it was those in power who specifically created that sum. Does anyone honestly think
To my mind an algorithm (which has connotations of more complex rules such as, land area, constraints and generally could calibrate for policy on) would do a better job than the basic sum.
So I just request that we take a sensible approach to view technology and trust that it can be incredibly useful for mitigating the housing, climate and biodiversity crisises (starting to sound like the end of the world when you have 3 of them)
