Review of Green Belt Policy in Scotland

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REVIEW OF GREEN BELT POLICY IN SCOTLAND

CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW

INTRODUCTION

2.1 This chapter reviews the policy, professional and academic literature on Green Belts. It draws on material already known to us, as well as on systematic searches of electronic sources, notably government websites, searchable databases of journals, and some 20 individual journals, mostly English language.

2.2 The recent literature is dominated by pair of well known reports commissioned from Martin Elson and his team by the DoE (1993) on the effectiveness of Green Belts, which included Scotland, and by the DETR (2001) on quasi-Green Belt designations, which did not. There is additionally a consultancy literature focused on particular Green Belt cases, such as Baker Associates (1999) on the Nottingham-Derby Green Belt. There is however only a modest academic literature book targeted at Green Belts and their like since Elson's 1986 book (Elson 1986).

2.3 This contrasts with the vast academic literature on the goal context of Green Belts, i.e. managing urban growth and its relationship with the hinterland. This runs under rubrics such as growth management, smart growth and new urbanism in North America, and the compact city, polycentricity and new urban-rural relationships in Europe. Subsets of this literature include the impact on housing availability and price, and the relationship with transport planning. There is a professional and some academic literature on land management (as against land use) in the Green Belt, often running under the rubric of urban fringe. Most of all the above material is these days set within the normative paradigm of sustainable development, variably emphasising environmental, economic and social angles as appropriate.

2.4 As with the rest of the report, this chapter is presented under the four themes of functions, urban form, nature of the regime and land management.

THE FUNCTIONS OF GREEN BELTS

Early models

2.5 The Green Belt idea can be traced in the UK back to at least Ebenezer Howard and the garden city movement at the turn of the 20 th century. The post-World War 2 subregional plans for London, Glasgow and Edinburgh incorporated it, and the basic model has not changed radically since then, despite incremental shifts in purposes. This suggests that it is high time to revisit it in much altered socio-economic and environmental contexts. Yet it reminds us that we should not lightly modify a concept to meet contemporary concerns which may well prove shorter lived than has the policy. An analogy may be drawn with state subsidy to forestry in Britain, which has persisted for nearly a century under a succession of changing justifications: Green Belts, like woods, are deemed by the voting public to be "a good thing", whatever the reasons.

2.6 But what are the public's reasons? It is widely asserted that the public perceives Green Belt as a tool for protecting the countryside around towns from urban development, whether for the benefit of town folk or for that of country folk. In contrast, the professional and academic communities see Green Belt as a tool of settlement strategy (e.g. Frey 2000, Town and Country Planning Association 2002). In its original manifestation, it was clearly one half of a policy of containment and dispersal. Within this, however, Frey (2000) draws attention to a distinction in the purpose of Green Belt between Abercrombie's 1946 plans for London and Glasgow respectively. Citing Abercrombie himself, Frey interprets the former as intended to set a limit to the expansion of London, with the intent that further growth be directed beyond it to a ring of New Towns. In contrast, the Green Belt for Greater Glasgow

...becomes the area within which new development takes place, separated from existing urban fabric and from one another by parts of the open land that constitute green belt…. development is diffused within a zone of open land, the edges of which form the outer boundaries of the conurbation.

2.7 The crux of the Clyde Valley Plan is that it tackled the entire city region:

In whatever way the demand of new housing will be met in the end, the attempt to cope with this structure of the city region with the help of the green belt concept - either for containment or for dispersal or for both - is inadequate so long as a limited planning area, smaller than the actual urban region, is the focus of attention.

2.8 There is a striking contrast between this model of a Green Belt, and that around Edinburgh, which dates from Abercrombie's 1949 plan. Edinburgh's Belt is narrow and annular, deliberately stopping short of the settlements beyond which form part of the emerging city region (Llewellyn-Davies 1998). Following Frey, this severely limits its potential as a tool of city-region planning: it can mediate the relationship between Edinburgh and the rest of the region, but it cannot mediate the relationships between the other settlements.

National policy statements

2.9 Central and local government policy expressions of Green Belts functions have evolved over time. The standing dedicated guidance in Scotland, SDD Circular 24/1985, carries over three "main purposes" from circular DHS 40/1960:

  1. To maintain the identity of towns by establishing a clear definition of their physical boundaries and preventing coalescence;
  2. To provide countryside for recreation or institutional purposes of various kinds; or
  3. To maintain the landscape setting of towns.

2.10 By 1996 NPPG11 Sport, Physical Recreation and Open Space states that

Arising from these purposes a number of ancillary purposes have become commonly accepted, namely to reduce the need to travel, and to assist in urban regeneration through the containment of urban areas and directing development to inner city areas…(para 57)

2.11 These additional purposes are reflected in recent Development Plans: for example, the Edinburgh & Lothians Structure Plan 2015 Finalised Written Statement (2003, para 2.22) cites a fourth purpose to assist urban regeneration and sustainable development. Sustainable development is a vague purpose, but in this context generally refers to the "compact city" and curbing travel, especially by private car.

2.12 The standing English guidance is PPG2 Green Belts (DoE 1995). In a section entitled Intentions of Policy it leaves the reader in no doubt about what Green Belt is for:

The fundamental aim of Green Belt policy is to prevent urban sprawl by keeping land permanently open; the most important attribute of Green Belts is their openness. (para 1.4)

2.13 The key words here are sprawl, openness and permanence. In this PPG2 is close to the spirit of SDD24/1985, which is equally clear that the aim is to avoid sprawl (Annex para 1) and that Belts should be permanent (main text para 6). Although it does not use the term openness, it implies it in the anti-coalescence clause cited above.

2.14 PPG2 goes on to subscribe to both the urban growth management and countryside protection functions, and to sustainable development:

Green Belts can shape the pattern of urban development at sub-regional and regional scale, and help to ensure that development occurs in locations allocated in development plans. They help to protect the countryside, be it in agricultural, forestry or other use. They can assist in moving towards more sustainable patterns of urban development. (para 1.4)

2.15 Thereafter PPG2 draws an interesting distinction, not found in the Scottish guidance, between the purposes of including land in Green Belts, and the uses of land once it has been included. The former are fivefold:

  • To check the unrestricted sprawl of large built-up areas;
  • To prevent neighbouring towns from merging into one another;
  • To assist in safeguarding the countryside from encroachment;
  • To preserve the setting and special character of historic towns; and
  • To assist in urban regeneration, by encouraging the recycling of derelict and other urban land. (para 1.5)

2.16 The latter are sixfold:

  • To provide opportunities for access to the open countryside for the urban population;
  • To provide opportunities for outdoor sport and outdoor recreation near urban areas;
  • To retain attractive landscapes, and enhance landscapes, near to where people live;
  • To improve damaged and derelict land around towns;
  • To secure nature conservation interest; and
  • To retain land in agricultural, forestry and related uses. (para 1.6)

2.17 To reinforce the distinction, PPG2 spells out that the quality of the landscape is not relevant to the inclusion of land within a Green Belt (para 1.7). This distinction is imported directly from the Elson report on the effectiveness of Green Belts (DoE 1993, recommendations 2 and 23 ). The distinction, and its absence from the Scottish guidance, prompts the question whether revised Scottish guidance should also draw it. In fact, we argue in Chapter 7 that it is unnecessary, because we are not convinced of the continued intellectual validity of the anti-coalescence function, nor of retaining land in farming to service the nearby town, and do not see what is then the purpose of retaining open country on the urban fringe if it is not of a quality sufficient to serve amenity purposes. In short, the concision of the Scottish guidance should probably be retained.

2.18 How well have Green Belts achieved their stated functions? The DoE (1993) report concluded that

  • The sprawl and merger prevention purposes are achieved
  • The purpose of safeguarding the countryside from encroachment adds no practical value to these
  • Green Belts around historic towns do not of themselves necessarily protect their cores
  • The urban regeneration purpose is not aided by Green Belt designation unless matched by parallel policies to encourage the use of underused urban land
  • The bottling up of development risks town cramming, which can damage amenity and ecological health more than does Green Belt land release
  • Green Belt must be seen as an instrument of subregional policy - implying that too often it is not.

2.19 The Town and Country Planning Association (2002) and Baker Associates (1999, para 6.3) also consider the urban regeneration purpose introduced in England in 1980 as redundant, because the link is not proven.

2.20 With regard to Scotland, the DoE report found the Scottish guidance superior to the then (1985) PPG2 in being more explicit about the subregional planning purpose of Green Belt. However, it recommended the addition of four extra purposes to be more explicit and to up-to-date: checking sprawl, retaining the openness of the countryside, protecting the setting and special character of historic cities, and urban regeneration. The last two need to be taken in the context of the conclusions above that they do not work alone without matching positive policies.

Quasi-Green Belt designations

2.21 The Elson team carried out a later study of English county Structure Plans into quasi-Green Belt designations (DETR 2001; see also Lyle and Hill 2003; Tewdwr-Jones 1997 reviewed whether Wales should adopt these or Green Belts). The Elson team found that the purposes of the designations are:

  • Strategic gaps: to protect the setting and identity of settlements and to avoid coalescence, to retain the settlement pattern by maintaining the openness of land, and to retain the social benefits of nearby open land.
  • Rural buffers: temporarily to avoid coalescence until the long-term direction of growth is decided.
  • Green wedges: to shape urban growth by retaining strategic open land, to link town and countryside, and to facilitate the positive management of land.

2.22 The main overlap with Green Belt purposes is in preventing the coalescence of settlements. Most strategic gap and green wedge policies also seek to prevent large towns swallowing villages, which is not a purpose of Green Belt. Some green wedges are to protect important open land, again interpreted by the report as not a purpose of Green Belt. It is hard to see how the public would reconcile these last two interpretations with the purposes of Green Belt stated in PPG2-1995 or indeed SDD 24/1985. They exemplify a level of semantic finesse in the debate on Green Belts that could only be expected to lead to the planning profession's frequent complaint that people do not understand what Green Belts are for.

2.23 The report concludes that:

  • These policies have such strong local support that they cannot be removed.
  • Giving gaps Green Belt status would reduce land development options on the edges of large settlements.
  • Giving wedges Green Belt status would tighten the inner boundary of land bearing a strong presumption against development.
  • Gaps, which are strictly limited in size, can be a useful tool at county level.
  • Buffers are a specific interim tool of limited application to exceptionally fast growing towns.
  • Wedges deliver lots of outcomes and have the potential to become a successful future model for the urban fringe.

2.24 Most significantly for the purposes of the present study, local planners operating these policies considered them an improvement on Green Belts, offering a wider range of objectives and more flexibility in pursuit of sustainable development objectives; and thereby raising questions about the existing purposes and rigidity of Green Belt policy in current circumstances. However, that conclusion needs to be seen in the light of the perception that Green Belts in England carry more of a national stamp than they do in Scotland. The then DETR (now ODPM) was keen to maintain a distinction between them and Green Belts, whereas local authorities often wanted to extend them, and indeed some have created them when the DETR has refused a Green Belt. Whether Green Belts in England are formally any more of a national policy designation than in Scotland has been questioned, but we believe that they have been perceived in that way.

URBAN FORM

Introduction

2.25 Criticism has been mounting for some years that the Green Belt concept, as it now stands little changed in half a century, is anachronistic. For example, it was created when the city's hinterland was expected to contribute to feeding it (Abercrombie was explicit about this in his 1946 plans for London and Glasgow, Frey 2000), whereas modern transport and globalised trade have rendered that irrelevant in the prevailing contemporary view (Skinner 1976; Hague in press); this also chimes with the recent abandonment of the half-century-old protection of prime farm land in England, and the removal in Scotland of the requirement to notify Ministers of proposals to develop on such land. Thus the Green Belt requires revisiting to ensure better alignment with contemporary concerns about sustainable development, including environmentally sustainable urban form.

Compact city?

2.26 At the same time as the Urban Task Force (1999) reinforced the 1990 European Commission paper in favour of the compact city (CEC 1990), others were finding the evidence equivocal (Frey 1999, Burton 2000, 2001). A parallel debate is carried on across the Atlantic under the rubric of smart growth, well summarised in Litman's categorisation and rebuttal of critiques of smart growth (Litman 2003). The arguments are of remarkable similarity to those here, given the very different planning, land regulation and taxation regimes. The Netherlands pursued through the 1990s a strongly interventionist policy to shape the Randstad or ring city around a Green Heart. This has been widely recognised as successful, but is now subject to revision by government within a more market-led environment, provoking a fresh look by academics (Needham and Faludi 1999, K ühn 2003, van der Valk 2002, Bertolini and le Clerq 2003; see also Chapter 6).

2.27 Hague (in press) provides an up-to-date European review in reporting the findings of a Noord XXI study on place identity and settlement pattern. He finds a policy consensus on the sustainability of the compact city in European, UK and Dutch governments, and an acceptance that Green Belt is an effective and acceptable tool for securing it. Yet Hague comes out as broadly sceptical of the claims made for it. He asks three questions about Green Belts specifically:

  • Does Green Belt help define and maintain place identity?
  • Is this at the expense of other sustainable development goals such as containing travel and social equity?
  • How does Green Belt affect economic competitiveness?

2.28 The answers are ambiguous. Scottish housebuilders thought coalescence of settlements does not lower the marketability of houses within them. With regard to reducing travel it is simplistic to assume that, because the broadly inverse relationship found between urban density and fuel consumption, this will necessarily translate compacting the city into burning less fuel; employment location is as strong a determinant of travel demand as is density (Newman and Kenworthy 1989 et seq; see discussions in e.g. Hall 1997, Jenks et al 1996, Williams et al 2000, Bramley and Kirk forthcoming; and see below on leap-frogging). Hague judges traditional containment policy as at best indirectly supporting competitiveness and at worst undermining it. The demand of the new growth industries is for spacious green sites with good road connections, which works against a place narrative based on Green Belts - although it has also been argued that such businesses welcome Green Belts precisely because they offer a strategic reserve of such sites, which they will be able to access if they can exercise enough leverage. Indeed, cynics may argue that some planning authorities also operate Green Belt as a strategic land reserve.

Leap frogging or transport corridors?

2.29 Among the critiques of compact urban form, a leading one is leap-frogging, the spillover of development into settlements and countryside beyond the Green Belt as a result of land in the belted settlement being unable to meet demand. The critical issue is whether the leap-frogging development is stand-alone, or whether it takes the form of primarily dormitory settlements whose residents then commute across the Belt to work in the city. Here we come full historical circle to Howard's vision of independent garden cities, and its betrayal into gardens suburb dormitories: plus ça change.

2.30 Hague (in press) finds from studies of Aberdeen and East Lothian that in both cases housing leapt the Green Belt while employment remained largely in the city. The Strathclyde Structure Plan addressed leap-frogging through a second tier of restraint beyond the Greater Glasgow Green Belt with a "countryside around towns" policy. Leap-frogging was also one of the reasons for the abolition of the Dundee Green Belt in the 1980s, in favour of more positive countryside and rural settlement policies (Planning Exchange 1995). Planning Exchange (1995) asserts that attempting to counter leap-frogging by widening the Green Belt runs up against the problem of the elastic travel tolerance of commuters: it may simply generate longer trips, many of which these days will inevitably be by private car, which runs counter to the mantras of sustainability. This suggests a tension between the benefits of a deep, Greater Glasgow style, Green Belt in securing planning at the city region scale, and the costs of it in forcing longer distance commuting. But even this is probably too simplistic: once again, the key will lie in how independent are the outer settlements and the jobs/homes balance between the core city and its hinterland.

2.31 We must nevertheless accept that the current obsession with reducing travel distance does stoke the perception of leap-frogging as a problem. It is one of the rationales offered for meeting demand by releasing Green Belt land. But most commentators want those releases to be strategically planned, condemning drip-feed releases on the grounds that they lead to unplanned erosion of the Belt, either of its inner boundary or through honeycombing of its heart (DETR 1993, Curry 1998). There have been some spectacular planned releases, such as in 1998 for 10,000 houses west of Stevenage (Curry 1998), and in the South East Wedge of Edinburgh for half that number.

2.32 The Edinburgh release has in fact been justified as the best solution on a variety of grounds spanning environmental, economic and social sustainability:

  • It is the best solution travel-wise (always provided that travel patterns based on the car do not gel before public transport is in place.
  • It rounds off the city (or, looked at the other way, it loses a green wedge into it).
  • It helps to rebalance the city, which is tending to develop westward.
  • The release will allow 4000 homes to be built (a modest part of the total Structure Plan requirement of 72,000, although a much larger share of the net new land allocated).
  • The land in question does not serve Green Belt functions particularly well, contains dereliction which would be cleared up, and would benefit from strategic planting funded through development.
  • The adjoining communities of Niddrie, Craigmillar and Greendykes would benefit socially and economically (although regeneration has pushed ahead there without waiting for development of the Wedge, and the mechanisms for securing direct benefit from the latter are weak).

2.33 Since block release of land from the Belt is conceptually and politically contentious, many have sought to render it more environmentally sustainable by guiding development into transport corridors through the Belt (Town and Country Planning Association 2002). Development is generally envisaged as being focused at nodes along such corridors, for a variety of reasons:

  • as a means of minimising distances between trip destinations within the nodes;
  • as a means of retaining their separate identities as they grow, in the best spirit of Green Belt purposes;
  • as a means of steering development away from those parts of the Green Belt which offer most amenity services to the built-up areas, or have independent justifications for being protected, such as biodiversity.

2.34 It is then but a short step from corridor focused development to the hub and spokes model of growth, in which arms of development extend outwards, separated by green wedges - typified by the 1947 Copenhagen "finger plan". Cynics, or those with long memories, might also maintain that it is also but a short step from corridor-focused development to ribbon development!

House prices

2.35 A second sustainability concern with Green Belts is that they help drive up the price of housing by constraining the land supply, penalising the bottom end of the market in particular (e.g. Adams and Watkins 2002, Bramley et al 1995). These concerns are underlined by the findings of the recent Barker (2004) Inquiry into Housing Supply. Hague (in press) reports conflicting evidence on the effect of constraining land supply (by means of Green Belt amongst other tools) on the density and price of new housing. To the extent that it does raise land prices, this will benefit land owners and existing homeowners at the expense of those seeking affordable housing. There is as ever a body of thought with the opposite concern, that urban sprawl, rather than containment, exacerbates social exclusion, through contributing to the decline of inner cities (Power 2001). To the extent that Green Belts do prevent sprawl, then those with this concern will favour Belts.

2.36 A specialised subset of the green belt and housing issue is the release of land for affordable housing in Green Belts. A study in England of exceptions policies allowing release of sites for affordable housing concluded that the policy should be the same in Green Belt as in the wider countryside (Elson et al 1996).

NATURE OF THE REGIME

2.37 Issues about the nature of the regime include

  • permanence;
  • whether "white land" should be reserved on the inner edge of the Green Belt for future development;
  • what are acceptable land uses in Green Belt;
  • whether non-conforming uses within Green Belt should be pocketed in insets operating under less stringent policy, or "washed over" by Green Belt and thus subject to Green Belt development control policy;
  • the treatment of minor applications;
  • the treatment of exceptions.

2.38 Debate is about both the principles and the degree of central government guidance thereon.

2.39 The major DETR (1993) report reviewed all these issues systematically. On development control it recommended:

  • Policy on farm diversification should be the same as in the countryside beyond, but permitted development rights for converting buildings to non-agricultural use should be removed.
  • There is no case for special treatment of institutional uses.
  • Redevelopment in insets should contribute to Green Belt purposes.
  • There should be a distinction between insets and washover.
  • Development Plans should not try to define exceptional circumstances in which the authority will countenance development in the Green Belt.
  • Green Belt land should not be released in return for environmental improvements, but any release should be required to secure such improvements.

2.40 On permanence and white land: two options emerged:

  • Allocate white land between the built-up area and the Green Belt, in the context of the Green Belt enduring well beyond the life of the Development Plan.
  • Do not allocate white land (most Scottish Green Belts do not), in the context of Green Belt life being tied to that of the Development Plan.

2.41 The report favoured the former option, in the context of the then guidance expressing worry about town cramming and loss of urban greenspace. But those arguments carry less weight today when the pendulum has swung back to the 60% brownfield target, reduction of transport emissions and compacting the city. Another take on this would be to suggest that the terminology of 'white land' is unhelpful, and that what is at issue is the allocation / safeguarding of land for longer term development requirements.

2.42 Notwithstanding this debate, the report recommended that:

  • changes to Green Belt boundaries should be through review of Structure, not Local, Plans;
  • Development Plans should not contain policies favouring incremental small releases;
  • Green Belts should be designated only where other policies have been shown to fail.

2.43 This last is an interesting point, also raised in our discussions with stakeholders. In particular, is there any need for Green Belt where land is all within one planning authority?

2.44 The DoE report devoted a chapter to Scotland ( Chapter 7). On the nature of the regime, this concluded that

  • in the absence of white land, guidance should include criteria for land release;
  • the relative merits of inset and washover of existing non-conforming uses are balanced, leading to no firm conclusion;
  • uses inappropriate to rural character but of strategic significance should be approved only in very special circumstances;
  • guidelines are desirable on the re-use of large redundant sites in Green Belt such as hospitals;
  • guidance should make it clearer that use of land for sport and outdoor recreation is appropriate;
  • a statement is needed on the government's attitude to farm diversification, and on the re-use of redundant farm buildings.

2.45 More recent debates about particular Green Belts, such as those of Edinburgh (East Lothian District Council et al 1997, Llewelyn-Davies 1998), Nottingham-Derby (Baker Associates 1999) and Cambridge (Cambridge City Council 2000, Cambridge Futures 2000), have suggested that the Green Belt regime is operated too rigidly. The Royal Town Planning Institute (2002) and the Town and Country Planning Association (2002) have published revisionist position statements in this vein. The RTPI supports existing purposes, but recommends among other things that:

  • Green Belts should not be inviolable;
  • Green Belt policy should adopt a lighter touch;
  • Green Belts should be reviewed at regional level and have the same life as the overall strategy of which they form a part (this is the Institute's answer to the question of whether Green Belts should last longer than the Development Plan);
  • Green Belts should be protected from development only to the same extent as rural areas generally

2.46 The last point is a surprising one which raises the question of what Green Belt is then for, and returns us to the DoE report's conclusion cited above that Green Belt should be used only where other policies have been shown to fail.

LAND MANAGEMENT

2.47 We discussed above under Functions the relationship between the purposes of designating land as Green Belt and the objectives of land in Green Belt. The landscape setting and recreational objectives of land in Green Belt imply that the land will be of a quality to serve them. But this is by no means necessarily so for all designated land, some of which may have been included for other reasons.

2.48 Firstly, much Green Belt land is actually of the poor environmental quality typically associated with the urban fringe, home to a range of service land uses which society needs but which people do not want in either the townscape or the countryside: airports, civic amenity sites and waste tips, quarries, electricity substations, park and ride schemes etc (Phillips 1995, Toft 1995).

2.49 Secondly, Green Belts vary widely in character - dereliction, quality of farm land, land ownership and size - such that the one designation will tend to produce different effects in different cases, which require different managerial responses (Oldham 2000; Shoard in press, p139. This stress on local variety was reinforced in our interviews - see Chapter 4).

2.50 Thirdly, some argue that Green Belt designation actually affects negatively how land is managed, by raising development hope value, which dissuades landowners from sustaining land uses which serve landscape and recreation functions well. This is most obvious in the case of farming. Why bother to invest money, time and effort in farming land, when you can idle it, perhaps in "horsiculture", in the hope of some day selling it for development at a profit out of all proportion to its agricultural return? In those Green Belts subject to development pressure developers hold options on most land, further adding to the disincentive to continue investing in farming. Scottish Natural Heritage (2002, p11) goes so far as to argue that owners have an interest in making their land as much of an eyesore as possible, so that a change in land use can be viewed by the planning authority as environmentally beneficial.

2.51 Farming in the urban fringe is in any case subject to problems of public access, fly-tipping, vandalism and crime. Physical fragmentation of farm holdings by development, including transport routes, can render fields uneconomically small or inaccessible (e.g. Skinner 1976 on the Glasgow Green Belt). Added to these urban fringe pressures on farming have been the nation-wide BSE and FMD crises, reflected in the continuing amalgamation of holdings and decline of the farm workforce. These pressures are all independent of Green Belt status, but do undermine any assumption that land in Green Belt will be managed in ways which make then attractive and accessible.

2.52 Commentaries on the management of Green Belt land in the light of this analysis emphasise three requirements for securing management which will serve well its amenity functions:

  • First, since the policy of restraint on development tends to work against environmental quality, it must be countered by properly funded programmes of positive management measures.
  • Second, long-term boundary stability is needed not only to control the negative effects of hope value on land management, but also to provide the security needed to persuade owners, occupiers and other funders to invest in positive measures to secure the environmental quality of Green Belt land.
  • Third, positive management programmes and long-term boundary stability both independently indicate the need for a strategic, joined-up approach to Green Belt planning and management.

2.53 There is a wealth of designations and programmes operating coincidentally over Green Belt land which overlap the landscape setting and recreational functions of Belts: Regional and Country Parks, countryside around towns programmes, green networks, open space strategies, nature conservation strategies, LBAPs, forestry strategies, Paths for All partnerships and in the future local path networks under the Land Reform Scotland Act, etc (see e.g. PAN60 Planning the Natural Heritage). While for the most part these pull in the same direction, there is room for rationalisation and coordination to improve efficiency at the least.

2.54 In this context an interesting model, although not itself explicitly tied to strategic management of urban growth, is the German combination of strategic landscape plans and environmental compensation. The plans in principle provide an environmental forward planning framework to ensure that case-level implementation of the legal requirement of environmental compensation in kind for green field development cumulates in a direction which enhances rather than diminishes environmental land assets (Wilding and Raemaekers 2000a, b; Rundkrantz and Skarback 2003).

2.55 Some (Royal Town Planning Institute 2002, Town and Country Planning Association 2002) argue for a formal policy making the grant of planning permission on Green Belt land conditional upon such positive management, rather than leaving it to the mercy of ad hoc planning gain agreements. It has also been suggested that the best means of securing positive land management of at least part of the Green Belt might be the release for development of sizeable chunks which can be positively landscaped, planned and managed for access (Toft 1995, Oldham 2000). The original masterplan for the release of the South East Wedge from the Edinburgh Green Belt envisaged something akin to this (Chesterton's 1996). We note some similar ideas around currrent land release proposals in Aberdeen, and pick up this idea again in Chapter 7 in the context of planned releases.

2.56 A more extreme proposal is that of Phillips (1995), who observes that the imposition of Green Belts froze the development patterns of the 1930s, leaving numerous isolated patches of development isolated, inefficient and unattractive. He proposes tidying up, and securing positive management, by defining a firm new boundary to the built-up area, then defining a zone, between that and the Green Belt beyond, which is handed over to an urban fringe development corporation. This concept is not unattractive for those cases where there are many such islands of prior development and much derelict land: it brings together the land management efforts of urban fringe projects, planning policy and the can-do nature of development corporations. It could be self-financing by realising the development value of the inner fringe, and even have money left over to fund works in the Green Belt beyond its territory.

CONCLUSIONS

2.57 The functions of Green Belt have evolved over time, notably adding urban regeneration and sustainable development, with farming being seen as less relevant. There is a complicated intellectual knot about distinguishing between the purposes of designating land and the objectives of designated land. In practice, however, although the key Green Belt idea is keeping land open to steer urban development, land in Green Belt needs to be of a quality which can serve amenity purposes. If it is not so when designated, then mechanisms are needed to ensure that it is made so.

2.58 The circumstances of Green Belts vary, so maybe their purposes and the way the regime is operated should do so accordingly.

2.59 Modern notions of environmentally socially sustainable urban development call into question the sustainability of the belt form, and suggest that a hub and spokes form may be a better general alternative, although local circumstances should dictate detail.

2.60 There is a revisionist movement which considers that the Green Belt regime is operated in too rigid and negative a way, although this is based mainly on English practice.

2.61 Green Belt designation does nothing of itself to ensure management of land in a way which is friendly to landscape and recreation objectives, and may indeed work against it.

2.62 We explore more of the literature on international experience in Chapter 6. Meantime, the next three chapters report the results of our primary data collection from scanning Scottish Development Plans ( Chapter 3), stakeholder discussions ( Chapter 4) and case studies ( Chapter 5).

Page updated: Friday, March 17, 2006