Chapter 01

The general public creates an outcry if any attempt is made to invade this green belt and that is something we want to get into planning – the creation of public interest. We want to get them to know something of our work and support us in our activities The implementation of green belts in many countries can be regarded as one of the most internationally famous attempts to control urban growth. Green belts have ringed major cities to prevent them sprawling. Planners have used them to separate satellite 'new towns' from the urban core, safeguarding land for recreation, agriculture and forestry. Green belts have also provided sites for more utilitarian uses such as salvage yards, incinerators and quarries. In some places, areas of the green belt have suffered through illegal dumping or through neglect. The popularity of green belts among planners during the twentieth century is due to the alignment of their attributes with some of the assumptions that underpinned modernist planning. These assumptions were that strict divisions between different land-uses could be unproblematically drawn, and that planners' actions could be justified by normative conventions and a search for universal truths. As planners began to grapple with the messy realities of urban growth during the twentieth century, green belts gave them a tool to realise a normative geography that a city has natural limits, that urban and rural areas should be separated and that settlements should be balanced and evenly-spaced. Green belts were used as part of a project to construct a universal planning canon, being employed regardless of the contingencies that affect urban growth in different cities around the world. They also contributed to the construction of planning as a discipline, as the open space they preserved could be linked directly to a who's who of famous UK planners such as Patrick Abercrombie and Raymond Unwin (Gault, 1981). Planning has changed considerably since the early post-WWII period when practitioners attempted to physically realise the ideas of high modernism (Taylor, 1998). As planners seek to direct the growth of cities towards sustainable patterns of land-use, how likely is it that they will continue to see a green belt policy as a useful tool for managing urban growth? Planners are no longer the all-powerful experts that they once were, nor can they rely on a consensus politics that will support such bold measures. The impact that green belts have on …