Town planning has a godawful reputation for a reason, and Cardiff city centre is a beautiful example of it. From the baffling repaving of Queen Street (‘These paving slabs will be a massive safety hazard when wet? Ah, don’t worry – it doesn’t rain much in Wales’) to a willingness to green light every plan to put yet another Tesco into the city, it resembles more of a working plan than an actual coherent planning strategy.
Now things are set to get worse: the St David’s/Queens Arcade behemoth is set to expand again to take all the land up to the Cineworld cinema. That’s despite the seemingly endless High Street downturn, the raft of units already lying empty inside the existing building, and the fact that outside of opening hours it’ll make getting from one side of the city centre to the other a complete bastard.
The story is repeated all over provincial Britain: 31 Bluewater’s worth of shopping centre space is in the pipeline around the country. Even the shops that fill them up are wary of the problem. Stuart Rose, CEO at Marks & Spencer, says developers are ‘piling on new space faster than the market [is] growing.’
Of course, that is the job of developers. The responsibility for the problem lies at the door of one group alone: town planners.
They often complain that they are much maligned, but it is for a reason. I had the misfortune of being a Town Planning student for a year, and from day one mediocrity is ingrained as standard. The phrase ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ has never been so apt, rapidly jumping from irrelevant politics to frivolous architecture without ever teaching any actual planning content. Is it surprising that the result is so stunningly inept? And Cardiff is supposed to be the best in the country; God only knows what the rest are like.
The planning system still lies unreformed but it’s about time town planners stopped whinging and did their own part to improve planning decisions and that has to start with university departments. The department ratings are irrelevant; the practice, evident both in the optometry building fiasco to the visual massacre of the city centre, are real proof of failure.
