It used to be said that parliament can do anything, even make a man a woman. In a sense they went some way to doing that in 1850 when the Interpretation Act provided that ‘he’ can mean ‘she’. But there are limits to what legislators should do.
The greatest criticism of the Nuremberg trials set up by the victorious allies after WW11 was that many of the former German leaders were convicted of offences which, at the time they were committed, were not regarded as crimes in international law. The allies retrospectively created the crimes and then convicted. This was only acceptable in the aftermath of war because the proscribed actions were so manifestly wicked.
For generations in Scotland it has been the salutary rule that a person cannot be tried a second time for an offence for which he has already tholed a trial and been acquitted. There is now a proposal that in certain cases, where new evidence is found which was not available and could not have been obtained at the original trial, a person who has been acquitted may be tried again for the same offence.
There is more than a suspicion that this proposal is designed to harass and punish a particular individual. This vindictive streak in the legislators must be curbed. It violates the rule of law which is often proclaimed to be a mark of our civilisation, so making the law unpredictable and suspect.
Another recent suggestion is that legislation should be used to prevent Peter Tobin the serial killer from appealing against the severity of his sentence. This would be the law retrospectively depriving a convicted citizen of a right which all of his fellows enjoy. Judges are well able to deal with unmeritorious appeals. Others have argued that Megrahi the convicted Pan Am bomber should have been denied the benefit which Scots law customarily allows to the terminally ill prisoner.
Much distress was occasioned in recent years when parliament enacted a rule of taxation law which rendered taxable a transaction which at the time it took place was exempt from taxation. This is the world of the crooked gambler: heads I win, tails you lose. In the stress of wartime, retrospective legislation has occasionally been used to cure improper acts of an illegal regime, but such a power must be used sparingly.
Certainly parliament may legislate for the future, but when it reverses and backdates a rule to its own advantage this creates great resentment and distrust of law and lawyers. We must challenge and block every attempt by legislators to use the law to target individuals and to reshuffle the rules retrospectively.
Legislation should be used for the benefit of the community and never to impose unfairness and injustice, even upon the guilty.
Andrew Guest
Andres Duany, international urban planner
Part II of our inquiry into an American-inspired vision for the regeneration of Scottish towns by means of ‘the New Urbanism’
At the beginning of the week in Lochgelly, Andres Duany asserted that he knew ‘things had not always been done well in Lochgelly’ but that ‘we will design them better, in the traditional Scottish way’. He expressed his approval of the newly devolved Scotland’s attempt to ‘discover a distinctive approach to planning in the 21st century’ and to ‘do things their own way’. At the launch of the charrette, culture and external affairs minister Fiona Hyslop had promoted the government’s interest in discovering ‘traditional qualities of place’.
Since the Scottish National Party took over the administration of the Scottish Government in 2007 there has been a renewed emphasis on the use of the word ‘traditional’ when talking about planning and design, while across the UK there has been an increased use of the word ‘place’ in the language of planning and design. By the end of the week we could begin to see what Duany (and perhaps also the government) meant by ‘the traditional Scottish way’, and also how an outsider might interpret the ‘local architectural traditions’ of Lochgelly.
In their work at Tornagrain (Inverness-shire), DPZ have cited the influences of Dunkeld (Perthshire) and Edinburgh (New Town rather than Old). In Lochgelly, Dunkeld and Edinburgh were again cited as exemplars by Duany, but now with the addition of a dose of Fife coastal villages (in particular Culross and Charlestown – to which we were told the DPZ team had made a dash earlier in the week). In the way that many Americans speak about places in Britain, Duany gave an appreciation of how Lochgelly was so ‘rich’ and ‘old’, announcing that, in response ‘We have drawn you something that looks like an old town’.
Lochgelly (both present and future) has never looked prettier than in the pen and wash sketches of DPZ’s designers. Houses had uniformly pitched roofs, with painted harling, fore-stairs, astragalled windows, piended dormers, corner turrets and stone quoins; 1940s bungalows become transformed into seaside cottages with porches, sturdy timber doors, 15-paned sash-windows, and roses growing up the front. Although Duany claimed that New Urbanism was ‘style-neutral’, even the one or two ‘contemporary’ options he showed for streets of two-storey housing had a period look to them – somewhere around 1940.
Not developed till well after 1836, Lochgelly is in fact not such an old town, and shares little built or cultural heritage with Dunkeld, Culross or Edinburgh. Duany gave no justification for why his vision of Scottish architecture was appropriate for Lochgelly, or why a predominantly aesthetic makeover, in whatever style, would assist places like Lochgelly come to terms with the challenges of small towns in the 21st century.
Duany’s proposals for how Lochgelly should develop over the next 50 years were geared strongly around its rail link to Edinburgh (reinforced by the creation of a new railway station), with an expanded town of new streets and squares reconfigured as a series of neighbourhoods grouped around local facilities, to encourage walking, but connected together by a bus loop. The new supermarket would be built downtown rather than on the edge of town, and the current town centre would be improved through a programme of pro-active support and development.
One of the accusations against modernism is that it relied on aesthetic solutions to deal with the social problems it encountered – one result of which was that everywhere ending up looking the same, and mostly
pretty dull.
Downtown Lochgelly would be further strengthened with improved social and cultural facilities and a necklace of ‘elegant’ (word much used by Duany) civic spaces. Few could disagree with the principles of Duany’s proposals for a more neighbourly walkable Lochgelly, although a week was not long enough to confirm whether this would be enough to secure Lochgelly’s future – as one of many such towns in Fife, let alone in Scotland.
Looking at the bigger picture Duany was sharply critical about some of the more fundamental problems in planning and development in Scotland. He asked why regional and local planning was still leaving such a legacy of scarred and disconnected places, and why current regulations continued to facilitate the suburban sprawl of badly designed and over-priced houses – as well as actively prevent other alternatives, including the types of houses and streets that DPZ thought should be built. Why did the planning process take so long and therefore cost so much? Why, as Fife Council’s head of development Keith Winter was honest enough to agree, did planners’ education and practice remain so un-creative? And why did our planning system involve so many people producing so many reports, for so little change to take place?
In their critique of our planning process and in their holistic approach to master-planning and design, and in their direct approach to communicating issues about urbanism and place-making, DPZ undoubtedly have a lot to teach planners and urban designers. And the built environment directorate of the Scottish Government should be applauded for trying to build political support for better planning and good urbanism and encouraging local authorities to be more visionary in their approach to planning and design. But the drama of the charrette process and the charisma of an international ‘expert’ should not divert attention from serious questions for Scotland raised by this initiative.
Scotland has to confront the systemic problems in its planning process, including the lack of skills and understanding in both central and local government which inhibits better planning and design. The promotion of the fine sounding but vague notion of ‘sustainable communities’ should not be used to duck the question of whether it can be sustainable to build new towns as opposed to being more intelligent about how we develop existing ones.
The process of planning and designing places certainly needs to be invested with more imagination and vision and opened up to broader discussion, but a five-day drop-in studio is no substitute for a genuine programme of public participation and engagement. We cannot make better places by depending on someone from outside to ask the awkward questions and make the awkward comments: we have to ask these questions and come up with the answers ourselves.
Most places already own a wealth of cultural, social and creative skills which could contribute to this process – especially if supported by local and national authority. We don’t need a team of outside experts to do this for us. We already have our own immense knowledge of historical and traditional architectural traditions if we want to draw on these to inform new design solutions for new communities – we don’t need to rely on an outsider’s sentimental view of what Scottish architecture was or could be. Past experience and tradition is important but so is interpreting this with new ideas and new experience today, and Scotland has a substantial reservoir of its own design talents and plenty recent design experience with which to do this. If it is invidious for the Scottish Government to back this expertise to lead a programme to promote better design, then perhaps that was not the right programme, or the government should not be taking this particular lead.
But above all a superficial nostalgia for a past ideal of community should not prevent us from facing up to the multi-sided challenges of urbanisation and sustainability in Scotland in the 21st century and from engaging creatively and openly in a process that asks ‘What kind of places do we want?’ and ‘Who will they be for?’ One of the accusations against modernism is that it relied on aesthetic solutions to deal with the social problems it encountered – one result of which was that everywhere ending up looking the same, and mostly pretty dull. Scotland is in danger of planning the next 50 years pursuing another false aesthetic ideal – an un-debated ideal of the traditional – the result of which will be another form of destructive monotony.
Andrew Guest lives in Edinburgh and writes on culture and
the environment.
[click here] for part I: Re-inventing Scotland
