What short memories politicians have. Is it only two years since shadow housing minister Grant Shapps attacked Labour's so-called "eco towns" programme as "a discredited gimmick from a discredited Government that's run out of ideas and run out of steam"?
"All the low-flush toilets in the world can't make dumping a housing estate on green fields somehow eco-friendly," he said. "At best, this scheme is a distraction from the more important task of reducing carbon emissions from our existing housing stock."
Millions of pounds had already been spent on eco towns but, fortunately, most were eventually dropped. To the Treasury, they must have seemed a good way of raising money from redundant ordnance depots and military airfields and furthering its bizarre belief that investing the nation's capital in greenfield housing sprawl would benefit the economy. But, to sustainability campaigners, they mostly looked like what they actually were - predominantly greenfield, too small to support green infrastructure like rapid transit and situated at locations where their inhabitants would inevitably have to drive long distances to get anywhere, with heftily increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Smart politicians, of course, spot runaway trains coming and step off the track - maybe that accounts for Eric Pickles' recent comparative silence about his planning reforms - but not all do. Fast forward two years from a shadow minister dubbing eco towns "a discredited gimmick" and here's the very same Grant Shapps who damned the idea in 2009, suggesting "a discussion with developers, investors, designers, local authorities and, most importantly of all, community groups, to reinvent the garden city for the 21st century".
And where would they be located and what would they be?
"In June I announced Government plans to release surplus public sector land for up to 100,000 homes by 2015. Some of that land will be on sites that could generate new communities of over 5,000 homes".
Those discussions with community groups should prove interesting, as the plan sounds pretty well identical to New Labour's eco towns and some of their opponents are still armed to the teeth from the last time a Government tried to dump unsustainable development on them.
Take the Long Marston eco town, for instance. The highly successful BARD Campaign mobilised a huge opposition campaign which included mass lobbies of their local authority and Parliament and eventually the idea was dumped. But the Campaign is watching.
"If something were to be foisted on our area, we'd certainly revive the campaign," the Campaign's communications co-ordinator Hilary Bliss told BB.
BARD may not have to worry about a garden city coming their way as the site has seen other residential and leisure development which could preclude one. But the anti-eco town campaigns communicated with one another and their effective network could well revive.
"If something like that happened again, I'm sure you'd see the campaigns regenerate," she says.
They may yet have to. A belief still lingers among ministers that communities will accept substantial greenfield residential sprawl if you dress it up with community plans, community rights to build, new homes bonuses, etc.. And, even in a country that needs to reduce its greenhouse emissions by 80% and protect every precious scrap of greenfield land, there are siren voices encouraging ministers to believe sprawl would be a good thing.
Mr Shapps' conversion to son-of-eco-towns did not come out of the blue. The coalition began eroding what was left of its predecessors' urban renaissance as soon as it took office, with a bizarre decision to waste scarce housing land by dropping minimum residential densities. But his conversion to low-density sprawl was apparently accelerated by a Town & Country Planning Association report in June called Reimagining Garden Cities for the 21st Century which restated its view that "new, comprehensively planned, sustainable communities" could make a contribution to both housing and jobs.
The eco towns row had failed to finish off the Association's love of new settlements and it bemoaned the 40 years since the last new town was designated, claiming a new generation of garden cities would offer the economies of scale to innovate and create truly high-quality places.
Founded as long ago as 1899 as the Garden City Association and inspired by the ideas of Sir Ebenezer Howard, the TCPA enjoys widespread respect in the planning profession and among some environmental groups, despite long-standing advocacy of sprawl. It was founded at a time when Victorian reforms were transforming our cities into functional, compact, mobile and sustainable communities, but Howard proposed replacing them with new planned greenfield settlements of 30-50,000 people built at low densities. And he did mean replace - he believed the attractiveness of his garden cities would seduce most people to desert traditional cities, leaving them to dereliction and eventual replacement with more garden cities.
It didn't work out that way. Howard only saw two of his garden cities built in the UK - Letchworth and Welwyn - although the post-war new towns and growth area sprawl owed much to his ideas. But his movement's garden city purists eventually had to cede ground to enthusiasts for garden suburbs and their ideal - low-density, semi-detached suburbs - became the model for a whole century of hyper-sprawl, both the huge unplanned inter-war sprawl and the huge planned post-war hypersprawl.
Howard's legacy was threefold. He and his followers are rightly revered for their role in founding planning as a professional discipline. But he also proposed a strong ethical basis for the economy and society of his new settlements. Wide adoption of these ideals would doubtless have made the world a better place, but they didn't get far. What did take root, however, was his advocacy of low-density development on greenfield sites, as far from existing towns (and their employment opportunities) as possible. Not only did this encourage the youngest and most economically active people to leave the cities for more than half a century, creating the inner-city problem, it also destroyed countryside and agricultural production on a colossal scale. And the low-density, cul-de-sac-ridden 20th century suburb was a wholly car-dependent suburb, utterly unable to support sustainable local transport modes. It wasn't until the 1990s that politicians began to realise the massive damage this had done, eventually spawning urban renaissance, town-centre first and brownfield policies.
But the TCPA kept the faith and worked on politicians and Whitehall, eventually spawning the eco town fiasco. Even their failure and the massive opposition they generated failed to make the penny drop. Now, with the dead hand of the Treasury again on the tiller, it has persuaded the coalition to reconsider the idea and a dysfunctional coalition of planners, politicians and a free-market think tank is backing the idea. The TCPA described the Policy Exchange's recent Cities for Growth report as "an interesting contribution to the debate on well-planned, sustainable new communities". Support from a planners' organisation for a report which launched a huge assault on their profession was a surprise, but the Policy Exchange is good at identifying where power lies, and saw that supporting new garden cities would buy off the opposition of influential planners.
But while this unlikely love affair is probably just opportunism on both sides, what's more difficult to understand is why conservation bodies still respect the garden city ideal. The National Trust, for instance, commenting on the Policy Exchange report, took a strong line on a conservationist planning policy but went on to say garden cities could be part of a housing solution so long as they were agreed through a democratic and balanced planning system.
Too often has Howard's strong moral stance proved seductive to environmentalists, but it provides no reason for adopting his discredited garden city ideals. For garden cities can provide no sustainable route to reconciling carbon policy and housing demand in an acutely overcrowded island. They are a Trojan horse which could reopen the door to damaging and unsustainable sprawl.
One useful lesson from the Government's destructive planning proposals is that, while brownfield policies must be retained, there is scope for additional refinements such as location efficiency and a Smart Growth approach to spatial and transport planning. But these would be wholly at odds with Howard's principles
Remember, we urgently need to reduce UK greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2040; nothing less will do. To this end, planning new settlements separated at all from existing settlements should be utterly unthinkable for the obvious reasons that they must increase car (and lorry) mileage and the size of the settlement will nearly always be far too small to support sustainable transit modes. Howard's low-density ideal squanders precious land, destroys precious farmland and biodiversity and, far from firing the spirit of community, promotes an anti-social "my home is my castle so stuff you mentality" that residents of sustainable higher-density development really can't afford. It needs binning alongside other 20th century high-carbon fixations recently rediscovered by the Government, like road and airport building.
So perhaps Mr Shapps might care to recall his two-year old promise that "the Conservatives will not support a programme that has been exposed as a green sham, and which will not help build genuinely eco-friendly homes" or his acceptance that "eco towns were simply eco-spin".
In truth, garden cities and their successors have been eco-spin for more than 100 years now. This strange fixation just puts off the tough decisions on sustainable development for an overcrowded island.
Jon Reeds' book Smart Growth - From Sprawl to Sustainability is published by Green Books.
