Tomorrow's slums today?

Richard Simmons, chief executive of CABE, worries that the housing audit reveals a trend towards 19th-century style slums.

Most of us are familiar with the idea of the slum as it existed in the late nineteenth and early to mid twentieth centuries and as it came to be defined in environmental health and housing legislation. Insanitary, overcrowded, often let on very short tenures - by the day in some cases; by the week very often. Usually giving onto poorly maintained streets with no greenery. Occupied exclusively by poor, working class people and immigrants. In one conception, the home of crime, disease and immorality; in another the bastion of the extended family and strong community networks.

As these slums were swept away by war damage and slum clearance programmes and replaced by new municipal housing, two new phenomena emerged which had a tendency towards recreating some of the problems they were trying to solve:

• large out of town housing estates built to the Tudor Walters standards between the world wars and after the second world war, which suffered serious degradation and deprivation in many cases; and,
• into the 1960s and 1970s the growth of what Lynsey Hanley describes in her book Estates, an intimate history as "slums in the sky". Large scale mass housing constructed using system building methods, be it tower blocks or deck access slabs quickly became synonymous in most cases with poor quality construction, failed social engineering, concentrations of problem tenants and "postcoding". It happened faster on some estates than others and, on a few not at all. But it was depressingly common as an outcome.

It wasn't all bad, of course. For example, people rightly bemoaned the loss of their Parker Morris sized rooms when they were rehoused in housebuilders' standard products.

It would be totally naïve, of course, to ascribe the failure of these estates only to design problems. Yet I can catalogue a series of lamentable design failures in estates like Holly Street in Hackney which I helped to redevelop in the 1990s. At the level of strategic urban design one can also criticise the approach to developing the Tudor Walters estates. Anne Power and Rebecca Tunstall showed in 1994 that the failure to create distinctive places was a contributor to the failure of many inter-war cottage estates. So, design does have a part to play in the destiny of new housing. Will what we are designing today become the slums of tomorrow?

It's important to understand that what's going on now is the same as what's gone on before in some ways. In others it's fundamentally different. So, as in the post World War 2 period we believe we need around three million new homes. As then, we aren't building them fast enough and housing supply and prices are high on the political agenda. As then we face uncertain demographics, though for very different reasons.

But there are big differences. A glance at Prefabulous Homes, David Birkbeck and Andrew Scoones's case studies of modern methods of construction for Constructing Excellence's Housing Forum shows that MMC offers far more choice and far more prospect of building something which has architectural merit and kerb appeal than the system built blocks of old. Finally there is a consensus that climate change is real and needs tackling. Our society is wealthier overall and many more people expect to get what they want through consumer power rather than politics. Thatcherism created the aspiration for a home owning democracy, we don't do council housing any more and we build a lot of homes for buy-to-let investors, some of whom don't seem to do the let bit.

We expect the private sector to build a lot of our affordable housing under planning agreements and the Thatcher government introduced the idea, still sadly current today, that if someone would be prepared to buy it, then it's good enough for poor, distressed families and individuals too. We also have widespread recognition that mistakes were made in the past. Organisations like CABE exist to try to head future mistakes off at the pass. The view that architects can shape an egalitarian society by building faceless homes is less apparent now than it was when Modernists advocated it from the 1920s through to the 1970s.

So do these differences mean that we are safe from building future slums? CABE's housing audits suggest that the jury is out. In this region we have some excellent examples of good housing developments such as New Hall and Accordia. There is great potential in schemes like Northstowe if they are designed and executed well. However, as CABE's housing audit showed, 88% of new housing developments which we surveyed in Eastern England weren't good enough. 26% of the total shouldn't have been given planning permission at all. Some of these poor developments do present risks for the future and we need to sharpen up on urban design and architecture. It may sound extreme to say that these homes could become slums but let's look at some of the risks:

• The risk of access poverty as fuel prices rise and people become trapped on estates relying on the car and with poor public transport.
• The risk of fuel poverty as energy costs climb and poorly designed homes fail to match up the standards of environmental performance they will need to cope with expensive energy prices.
• The failure of poorly designed public spaces and streets as maintenance costs rise and councils can't afford to look after them.
• Failures as a result of not planning for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
• Lack of character and over use of poor standard designs, leading to similar effects to those that Power and Tunstall observed for standard Tudor Walters estates.
• High crime rates on estates where the widely available guidance on designing out crime has been ignored.
• Overcrowding in homes with rooms sizes which are too small and which don't allow for storage.
• Social and health problems and neighbour disputes in blocks of apartments with double loaded corridors and single aspect north facing flats.
• Health problems in places with insufficient play and exercise space for children, young people and adults.
• Mental health problems in over-dense places and tiny flats.

This all sounds very gloomy. Yet there is no inevitability about building new slums. We have the technology, as they say. We know how to design places which can be dense enough to be environmentally sustainable, yet delightful enough to be economically and socially sustainable and desirable. There's lots of guidance from CABE, English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation, of course. Using the Building for Life standard as a planning tool will get us a long way towards a holistic view of building great places. The Code for Sustainable Homes may force some constructive rethinking of standard designs and estate layouts by the house builders - but they must use this rethinking time to take the opportunity to add distinctiveness and beauty to the package in the process. We can go and look at great examples of sustainable, people-centred design on the continent - Hammerby Sjöstad. Malmo and Vauban are well known examples.

Critically, developers, local councils, development agencies and designers have to work together to learn the lessons of the past, understand the similarities and differences which we face now, transfer what can be learnt from good examples elsewhere and invest in well designed, robust, attractive homes and neighbourhoods which people will care for and value. That will at least give new communities a good start on the road to avoiding slumdom and prospering in an uncertain future.