(See also Tips on climate, planning and economy)

Update 17th March 2024:

The original plan was to build one million new homes, within 20 kilometers of the centre of York. That should accommodate 2.4 million new residents, with lots of open space left.

However, there would not be enough land to feed this population.

In the complex global society we live in, it is unrealistic, as a first step, to expect residents to be fed from food grown within a kilometer or so but when there may not be enough food to feed the global population, this may be a worthwhile objective. I have therefore put a constraint on this plan so that, in theory, enough food could be produced within the plan area to feed the population, with a basic diet.

In Ireland before the famine, potatoes, with some milk and pigs could
support a population density approaching 10 people per hectare (1).

The world now has about 0.5 people per hectare.

Food: Scientists vs amateurs.

A million extra people in the area of the plan would give an overall density of 11 people per hectare. Comparing basic calorie needs with yields shows this may be possible but is a challenge.

Cities in the UK have much higher densities. in people per hectare: London (56), Birmingham (42), Manchester (47), Glasgow (34).

Introduction (26th September 2023)

This is a project to build (one million new homes) homes for one million new residents in the Greater York area – the area within 20 kilometers of the center of York. With very minor exceptions the development will be car free. Housing will become very much cheaper.

The plan starts with an initial stage of housing surrounding 15 nodes of roughly 18000 homes each. This will provide a quarter more than 60% of the final total.

York is a good place to build a large proportion of the new homes the UK needs. More people want to come to live here. There will be additional need for housing – for refugees from Hull, Goole and Grimsby when sea level rise floods them out.

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I have been told that next section is too pessimistic and will stop people from reading further. Also my friend Paul says humans are infinitely adaptable and will overcome the problems (But Carole asks how many billions will perish first. Paul responds “Geoff, your policies will make it worse.”)

So Paul and similar, you keep optimistic and skip the next five paragraphs:

[skip] Here is my vision to show that human life might be compatible with saving the planet. After the past few months of bad climate news, I think this may be a delusion.

[skip] When I started this a few months ago I was just a little bit more optimistic. Now heatwaves, floods, droughts and the renewed threat that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) will falter have sapped most of my remaining optimism.

[skip] The news of the slowing AMOC current was the last straw. This current transfers enormous amounts of heat to North Western Europe. This keeps January night time temperatures in the UK averaging 1°C. At the same latitude Labrador averages 15°C below freezing. If the AMOC fails, the UK will get very much colder in winter even in a warming world. The AMOC has failed before.

[skip] Since then we have seen unprecedented floods and wildfires in separate parts of the Earth…. Question: Are wildfires properly accounted for in climate models? I once squeezed an answer from the government department in charge of climate change. It admitted these feedbacks were not in the climate models. Are they now? The fact of these missing feedbacks and the difficulty I had getting this admission increased my skepticism of UK Government. (See Missing feedbacks in climate models below.)

[OK. Paul, resume here] In March, when I started to write, I was less pessimistic. I’m now tempted to give up but I’ve put too much effort in to stop now, so here is my (overly optimistic?) vision.

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The links (in red) open appendices to give more detail.

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Link: The plan: A vision for a Greater York

Map showing locations of suggested development nodes for this plan. Four additional new developments will surround existing out-of-town shopping centres.

This plan increases the population of York by (10 times) about 4 times with enough food production to fullfil basic food needs. It tries to show it is possible for us to live without destroying life on Earth as we know it. The plan is for (a million extra homes) homes for an extra million people. It …

• Promotes pleasant low carbon living,
• Makes housing much cheaper and
• Radically reduces inequality.

Initial development is planned at nodes near existing settlements to enable their residents to use the facilities of the new greener settlements. All new housing will be car free (with minor exceptions).

The plan will give new residents pleasant environments with shops, pubs, healthcare, schools and good public transport. These “greener” developments will be adjacent to existing settlement to give their existing residents local, sustainable facilities.

Link : Green Urban Extensions

This plan uses Green Urban Extensions – extensions to existing settlements – helping the existing settlements to be ‘greener.’ Ebeneezer Howard’s Garden Cities do not do that. Garden cities need new infrastructure and take decades to build.

Link: Climate is worse than they say

We are exhausting climate budgets and now realising climate change is worse than thought. Scarily, the Earth’s Energy Imbalance has tripled in the past 20 years.

Link: Sea level rise and bigger storms

Sea level rise continues long after ‘net-zero’ – and with bigger storms, An emergency for Hull, Goole and Selby.

Link: Downplaying climate change

‘Official’ sources are downplaying climate change. York Council ignores its declaration of a climate emergency.

Link: Net-zero not good enough

A steady decline in emissions to 2050 will easily exceed carbon budgets for 1.5° C. The Earth will continue to accumulate heat after ‘net-zero’, raising sea levels, melting ice and thawing permafrost.

Net-zero policy also cheats. It allows an undetermined amount of greenhouse emissions up to the date at which ‘net-zero’ is reached. The policy that it eclipsed, Contraction & Convergence, gave a method of constraining emissions by setting limits on the concentrations of gases in the atmosphere.

The switch from C&C to a net-zero policy has enabled the UK Prime Minister to follow policies in the medium term which increase greenhouse emissions but still claim he is still aiming at net-zero in 2050… “Although the changes being considered by the government are pushing back a ban on the sales of petrol and diesel vehicles from 2030 to 2035 and a weakening of plans to phase out gas boilers by 2035, Rishi Sunak says he is still committed to reaching net zero by 2050.”

Link: The politics of growth, inequality and climate

Political parties support economic growth, which makes climate worse. It’s difficult to knock on doors to ask for votes and tell constituents they are destroying the climate.

Link: Sample climate events in year to April 2023

A list of links to worrying climate related events. The events have got much worse since then April 2023.

Link: Missing feedbacks in climate models

In 2016, I extracted an admission form a UK Government Department about missing feedbacks in climate models. I found the effort needed to get this admission disturbing.

Link: New Institutions

New institutions, national and local, are needed to support the Greater York Plan.

• An Institute of Low Carbon Living.
• A new Ministry of Works
• New Green Development Corporations
• An Office of Plotland Development
• A new climate prediction market

Link: What type of homes should be built?

Tall flats suppress neighbourliness. Architects and planners know little of this important aspect of housing. Somehow they have missed Leon Festinger’s important work on ‘propinquity‘. New homes should be low rise and mostly have gardens. Surveys show that most people want gardens.

Link: Plotlands

Plotlands were banned by Aneurin Bevin in 1947. They may be coming back.

Link: An Office of Plotland Development

An institution to promote plotland developments should be established.

Link: Plotlands and prefabs on Progress Online

This is an article I had published in 2017 on plotland development.

Link: Building types and embodied carbon

The construction of buildings usually causes large carbon emissions. Tall buildings are worse.

Link: Heating and cooling

Houses are treated as boxes of size 200 cubic meters to warm people who occupy 2 cubic meters each. Local heating, like (modern) inglenooks or warming furniture should be researched.

Link: Densifying cities and heat waves

Heat waves kill. Densifying cities will make cities hotter. Brownfield sites should become green urban parks.

Link: Visions of planners and architects

Planners, architects – and politicians – have been awful at providing good housing.

Link: Modern planning

Modern planning has capitulated to car culture. Even Sir Peter Hall.

Link: Beauty and prejudice

The urge for sculptural beauty has meant large dramatic buildings, which make unsuitable homes. Low rise housing, mostly with gardens, should be the general rule.

Link: Some other housing examples

Walter Segal homes, plotlands and some new houses in Cambridge.

Link: Prefabrication examples

Prefabrication advantages, prefabs, tower blocks and modern prefabrication. Tower blocks bad, prefabs better. Gardens good.

Link: Changing complex systems

As Oscar Newman told me, choose the best examples. Make small changes … then test the results. I simplify the problem: Remove cars. Grow local food.

Link: Removing cars from housing

Low carbon living is necessary to save the planet from a climate catastrophe but, as a House of Commons committee noted, the mass use of motor cars is incompatible with the low carbon living.

Reducing car use in existing neighbourhoods may become necessary but will be politically difficult. (But it will be helped by a policy of Green Urban Extensions.)

Banning cars from new housing will make the housing much cheaper because people with cars won’t bid for the houses. If enough car free housing is built, it will enable younger generations to afford houses again.

Car free housing will be much pleasanter with more local facilities.

Link: Housing and inequality

The planning system is increasing inequality by restricting the supply of new houses. The UK is not short of land. Greenbelts protect the visual surroundings of the upper middle classes. The UK should grow more food locally, avoiding animal agriculture.

Link: The national economy

Friday 8th September. On BBC World at One, Tom McTague, Political Editor of the website Unherd.com was interviewed. He said we were no longer the wealthy nation that we were before the 2007/2008 financial crisis. The period before that was probably the last time we felt comfortable and quite wealthy as a country. Kate Andrews of the Spectator agreed.

It seems sensible that we should plan for cheaper, simpler lives. For example by saving on the enormous expense car culture causes. See Cheaper cities without cars in the appendix Removing cars from housing.

Before the 2007/2008 crisis there was a rising trend in UK greenhouse gas emissions. The reduction in economic activity corrected this trend.

Link: Affordable housing, social housing and owned housing

York’s affordable housing policy. There is no a good definition of ‘affordable housing’.

This plan claims that it is possible to reduce the cost of new housing by a very large amount so that the demographic that has replaced the ‘aspirational working class’ of the years after the second world was will be able to own their own homes and enjoy the security that Keir Starmer says he experienced as a child.

Link: Degrowth needed

The necessary fall in greenhouse emissions cannot be achieved, without a fall in economic activity.

It is possible to create jobs and cut economic activity. See next section.

Link: Jobs and Productivity

Work is good for society (in addition to its role of providing income) but as robots replace more of the workforce, the owners of the robots will receive a greater share of the rewards of production. Jobs must be supported by Universal Basic Income and Labour Subsidies.

Economists have rediscovered happiness since Robbins, Hayek and von Mises ousted it from economics. Professor David Blanchflower said “The biggest result that emerges is that unemployed people are unbelievably unhappy even controlling for their income”

In discussing unemployment and inflation he has written”We also discover that unemployment depresses well being more than inflation”. Fortunately there are schemes that address both. For example, a “labour subsidy” scheme to modify VAT to give tax rebates for every worker employed can create jobs without inflation. The scheme does not increase government expenditure because it uses tax rebates which are not expenditure but tax cuts.

“The term “subsidise” was perhaps unfortunate. The “subsidy” in the scheme is a tax rebate paid to employers. It is a reduction in their tax bill and therefore not government expenditure. This point has been accepted by the UK Treasury.“. A macroprudential proposal for employment, 2014

Are one million new residents too many?

I chose for this plan to have a million new residents (million new homes) because, as my friend Dennis Martin said, York is an excellent place to build them. This plan shows that it is possible to locate these homes and encourage a greener way of living – and help existing settlements be less polluting.

This highlights one worry. If York is made greener with a million new homes by Green Urban Extensions, will there be enough green development to help the polluters in rest of the country?

However, as Dennis noted, York is a very good place to start.

Epilogue: Electric cars won’t help much

Since writing the first section above, I have become more pessimistic, having watched Reality Roundtable #1:Electric Vehicles on Youtube.

The host, Nate Hagens, introduces three experts Arthur Berman, Pedro Prieto, & Simon Michaux. (OK, I’ve had my fill of ‘experts’ too but watch the video and decide for yourself.)

The discussion started with a discussion of the proposed change over to electric cars. The points I took from this discussion were:

Stop here?

Dear reader, if you agree with the above points and know the reasons for them, you might stop here and skip the linked appendices. You may consider them a bit nerdy and have a bit too much ‘Geoff Beacon was right’.

Incidentally, I have been mostly right – although in 2012 I did get too pessimistic about the downward trend in the area of Arctic summer sea ice – I worried that it was disappearing much more quickly than mainstream climate scientist were predicting. It returned to near the predicted trend in the next few years. However, sea Ice is again disappearing at a speed worrying the scientists – now at both poles.

One silver lining for me was winning over £1000 betting against climate deniers on InTrade on 2012’s low figure for Arctic Ice extent. A prediction market for climate outcomes, an updated Intrade, is one proposal in this Greater York Plan.

I’ve been wrestling with some of these topics for 50+ years so do dip into the linked appendices. You may find some of them interesting. Here are some of their main points.

1. As the House of Commons Committee on Science and Technology noted, the mass use of motor cars is incompatible with low carbon living – the low carbon living that is necessary to save the Earth. New housing must now be greener so new development must be car free.

2. Car free housing will be much cheaper because the affluent will not want live where they can’t park a car. This will cause a fall in demand, which will reduce housing costs substantially. The young could buy homes again.

3. Car free neighbourhoods, towns and cities will liberate very large areas now filled with local air-borne pollution – and threats of injury caused by cars.

4. The Bank of England has expressed concern that too much cheap new housing will cause financial instability because it will cause a fall in house prices – resulting in mortgage defaults. Building car free housing will allow cheaper accommodation for the young & the poor without necessarily causing a fall in the value of existing houses because existing housing could keep their rights to car parking – for the time being.

5. The main use of green belts is to preserve the view for the upper middle classes, looking out from their homes or from their cars.

6. Greenbelts also preserve land for animal farming. Current animal farming severely damages the climate and turns much food into not much food.

7. Where possible, new car free settlements should be next to existing settlements to provide low carbon infrastructure that existing settlements can use.

8. Existing settlements must also become low carbon. Electric cars are a red herring. A switch to electric cars does not cut carbon emissions nearly enough.

9. Governments and the mainstream media downplay our climate perils.

10. As temperatures increase, development should not be on brownfield sites, creating bigger urban heat islands. They should become urban parks.

11. High buildings have high embodied carbon and cause nasty winds around them

…. and there is the York Local Plan.

The Inquiry has refused to accept my evidence.

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The York Local Plan

I have been excluded from giving evidence to the York Local Plan Inquiry, in circumstances which I dispute. This is not necessarily relevant to the Greater York Plan but I hope readers can understand why I’m a bit obsessed about my exclusion. One comment from what follows could be rewritten as “I believe this submission on the Greater York Plan can start something of
worldwide importance.”

Link: The call for sites, October 2012

In October 2102, I provided a response to York Council’s Call for Sites, which was a preparatory stage to the York Local Plan. I suspected that the site selection would be start the process of allocating planning permission to a few landowners and developers. The value of these permissions would be enormous. This would make housing in York unaffordable.

link: York exiles the poor, July 2018

This was my first submission to the York Local Plan Inquiry in July 2018. It was late and rejected in circumstances I dispute (See Excluded … below)

Link: July 2019 submission to the YLP Inquiry

Summary of my July 2019 submission to the York Local Plan Inquiry.

Link: Visionary or pretentious?

“I believe this submission on the York Local Plan can start something of
worldwide importance.” July 2019 submission.

Link: The York Local Plan: Exiling the poor

The York Local Plan is exiling the poor. July 2019 submission to the York Local Plan Inquiry.

Link: The York Local Plan: Climate change

July 2019 submission: The York Local Plan will plan for large emissions of green house gases. It will be contrary to the National Planning Policy Framework, which incorporates UN resolution 42/187, which says we must not ruin the world for others (present and future).

Link: The York Local Plan extra

The whole point of the green belts is to stop any housing anywhere near where upper middle class people might want to live. The York Local Plan will bring an enormous bonuses to land owners and existing house owners.

Link: Excluded from the York Local Plan Inquiry

Correspondence concerning my exclusion from the York Local Plan Inquiry.