cede rights of control to others by leasing or licensing. In leasing, a tenant is granted exclusive possession for a fixed term in exchange for a payment. But there are a bewildering number of varieties of this arrangement. Similarly, licenses can vary from a simple permission to be on someone’s land to a more proprietorial interest. Or the extent of a landowner’s control may be circumscribed by restrictive covenants or by devices such as easements, rent charges, mortgage charges or rights of entry. However, in modern times, by far the most significant cause of restriction on property rights arises out of the activities of the state, especially in planning legislation and environmental protection. Gray and Gray (2007: 420) argue that the contemporary view of property law is in stark contrast with the absolutist view of earlier times:
With their ringing assertions of ‘property absolutism’, the great judges of the Victorian era acknowledged no overriding duty on the part of the private landowner to safeguard wider interests in the exploitation of his land. The estate owner remained free to utilise ‘his’ land selfishly with little or no regard for community concerns or environmental sensitivities.
And they conclude:
The role of government in the regulation of land use … is now so pervasive that ‘property’ in land is often said to have taken on the character of a kind of social stewardship … ‘Property’ can therefore be conceptualised as involving – on a vast scale – the distribution by the state of user rights which are heavily conditioned and delimited by the public interest … On this view, ‘property’ in land comprises not so much a ‘bundle of rights’, but rather a form of delegated responsibility for land as a valuable community resource. (Gray and Gray, 2007: 55)
Restrictions, by the state, on property rights in the name of the collective interest are an intervention in the market for land and constitute resistance to commodification. How, then, did this increased role for the state come about?
Land Use Regulation in the UK
To answer that question, I now look at the history of what in the UK is called town and country planning. It is a commonplace of that history that town planning arose as part of a very strong reaction to the horrors of everyday life for many people in the nineteenth century, especially for those living in cities. This stemmed largely from a growing realization that the very rapid growth in urban settlements that occurred in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, together with an unconstrained market in industrial development, had generated a set of acute social problems of very poor housing, very long working hours, poverty, ill-health and, in the eyes of many, moral failings. It is difficult to overstate the moral outrage generated by this realization, which is expressed, over a long period, in novels (Dickens and Gaskell), journalism (Stead), government inquiries (Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes) and surveys of the poor (Booth and Rowntree). Philanthropic individuals and organizations and more enlightened entrepreneurs made attempts to solve, or at least moderate, these problems over the course of the nineteenth century. A very early venture was Robert Owen’s experiment in the construction of workers’ housing at New Lanark in Scotland in the early part of the nineteenth century, which combined the provision of housing with wider welfare schemes. Similar private, semi-philanthropic initiatives were undertaken by employers who effectively adopted Robert Owen’s model village idea. Amongst the biggest and best-known of these were Saltaire (1860), Bournville (begun in 1895) and Port Sunlight (1885) (Ashworth, 1954; Bell and Bell, 1972; Hall, 1988). However, crucially, these initiatives were private developments, often undertaken, moreover, by people with somewhat mixed motives, whether that was the moral improvement of the working class or the need to attract workers to a factory site by providing housing. It became more and more obvious as the century wore on that only a public agency operating at the required scale could undertake the necessary development.
Many of the elements of public policy and subsequent legislation introduced by the state, including restrictions on working hours, reform of the Poor Law, the slow enhancement of the powers and efficiency of local government, and improvements in sanitation, had implications for the management of land. In particular, local authorities became responsible for implementing legislation introduced by central government, and that was a major stimulus in making them more efficient and democratic. In the second half of the nineteenth century, measures for the improvement of drainage, provision of an adequate water supply, removal of refuse, control of street widths, structural safety and building heights, requirement for the submission of building plans before work began, use of powers to demolish, and then replace, insanitary houses following compulsory purchase, and the provision of open spaces and adequate roads all passed through local authorities. There was a steady flow of public health and housing legislation (Ashworth, 1954; Broadbent, 1977). Progress was slow, and resisted, but towards the end of the nineteenth century the basis for systematic town planning in the collective interest and as a function of an interventionist state at national and local levels had been constructed.
As concerns over housing and public health began to coalesce and legislation and action by local authorities began to affect larger and larger areas, there became obvious a need to recognize that the land use of whole towns and cities constituted a single problem. As a result, the first specifically town planning legislation was introduced in 1909. The Act made two important provisions. The first enabled local authorities to prepare town planning schemes for the development of new housing. Although the actual development was to be undertaken commercially, the scheme laid down the framework of roads, open spaces and utility supply and ensured the preservation of important buildings. Since this involved a substantial intervention in the market, the Act also introduced proposals for compensation and betterment. The former compensated landowners for any loss of value caused by the interventions, while the latter involved a tax on the gain in the value of land generated by the town planning schemes themselves. The proposals for a betterment levy essentially came out of a long history of arguments about the injustice of the private ownership of land (George, 1931) and those arguments have continued in the formulation of town planning policy ever since.
Between the closing years of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the First World War, town planning as a movement gradually took shape (Tichelar, 2018b). The term ‘town planning’ was first employed in Britain in the 1909 Act and it was used not only for a set of statutory powers, but also to describe a professional activity with appropriate training. A professional body – the Town Planning Institute – was set up in 1914 and now describes itself as the largest town planning institute in Europe and the ‘UK’s leading planning body for spatial, sustainable and inclusive planning’ (Royal Town Planning Institute, n.d.). Schemes for the construction of entire towns abounded, the best known of which was Ebenezer Howard’s plan for garden cities, originally published in 1902 (Howard, 1965). Importantly, Howard’s proposal combined an aesthetic interest with the provision of healthful housing, and that same combination informed the building of two actual garden cities: Letchworth (begun in 1904) and Welwyn (begun in 1919). Despite the fact that only two were built, the Garden Cities movement remained influential in British town planning in the development after the Second World War of New Towns, mostly seen as a solution to London’s housing problem, and, probably more significantly, in the way in which suburban locations were favoured for new housing throughout the twentieth century.
Legislative activity continued in the interwar period between 1918 and 1939. The need to see the problems of town and country as linked led to a renaming of relevant legislation as town and country planning. The Acts of 1919, 1925 and 1932 covered such topics as provision of state-owned housing, improved building standards and an obligation on local authorities to provide systems of town planning. Helped by the improvement of public transport, the role of local authorities in housing provision was enhanced in this period. Many authorities, most notably the London County Council, took advantage of government subsidies to build extensive council estates, especially in suburban locations. This was significant not least because it marked the ownership of substantial areas of housing by local authorities, agencies of the state, as distinct from philanthropic or commercial ownership.
The
