A room with a view: remaking the relationship between citizens and the built environment

Look out of your nearest window and what do you see?

Wherever you are in the country, whether there are buildings in sight or not, your view is almost certainly of a human habitat. It might sound unlikely given that only 10.5% of land in the UK is officially classed as being built up, but it is also true that there are very few views today that would count as truly wild. Instead, whatever you can see is the result of human ideas and human actions, shaped to meet human needs. The result of millions of minutely laid out plans, grand ambitions, the most mundane of everyday habits and behaviours, high fashions and ultimately, decisions, layered through time and rendered in solid form.

The most tangible decisions that you see before you, are the decisions to build something at all; that is, the decision to build in this place instead of that place; the decision to build this thing instead of that thing. But equally, your view will be the outcome of decisions not to build, perhaps decisions to demolish and start again, or decisions to repair, refit, redecorate or repurpose.

Who gets to make those decisions? Whose ideas, what values, do you see embedded into your view? Who won or lost the argument to shape that space? Who was even involved in the discussion?

The view from my window, as I type this, looks out over the 1970s-built, council estate in which I live. From my fourth floor flat I can see one of the other blocks as it curves (rather clunkily) around a generous communal garden. There are several fine mature trees in view with a tangle of overgrown shrubbery, squealing children and rusting play equipment around their feet.

What decisions can I see embodied in this view?

The reason this view exists at all is because of a collective decision made in the postwar era to provide council-funded housing for working class Londoners at rent levels in line with their income. The policy was in many ways more than a decision; it was a declaration that decent, affordable housing was a right, not a privilege.

The estate looks the way it does – “brick-clad [with] glass-tiled entrances… eye-catchingly modernist” (according to John Boughton, author of Municipal Dreams) and now, a bit rough around the edges (according to me) because of decisions made about what was considered a fitting style for council properties at the time and the corners cut to save costs in upkeep since.

The blocks were part of the ‘Five Estates’ area between Burgess Park and Peckham Road that was remodelled in the 1990s as part of a sweeping regeneration project. Most of the other estates were razed to the ground; others were spruced up a bit; a decision was made to leave this one standing relatively untouched.

The fact that I happen to be sitting here, looking out at this view, is a result of Thatcher’s decision in 1980 to introduce Right to Buy. It enabled the previous owner of our flat to purchase it from the council at a 70% discount and sell it to us on the open market.

This is what makes the built environment so fascinating.

Buildings, streets, roads and parks – they are primarily objects you share space with, places you inhabit. They are experienced in the way they look, the way you use and move through them. But of course there is another way to read buildings and streets – as expressions of power and of capital. What then, as a citizen, can I learn, by looking at the stories that our buildings are telling us? If I look at the place I live in, take the time to interrogate the view out of my window, or look up from my phone as I sit on the bus, what is the built environment saying to me? What is it communicating about my value to society? My place in the world? What can I learn about who has power and agency? And who doesn’t?

Let’s start by looking at a story with an absence of buildings at its core – the story of the housing crisis.

This is a crisis comprising millions and millions of individual decisions made over a period of decades and by people from all parts of society – decisions not to build, not to invest, to oppose, to appeal, to chase the bigger profit, to take the easy route. So, we find ourselves in 2025 with a deficit of at least 4.3 million homes and countless stories of misery and hardship up and down the country.

There are around 112,660 households stuck in temporary accommodation, struggling with something as basic as getting a decent night’s sleep or being able to prepare a proper meal. A primary school not 10 minutes walk from where I live reports over half its pupils are homeless. There is now at least one generation of young people either stuck living with their parents in a state of arrested development or more precariously in poor quality, eye-wateringly expensive private rented housing. Meanwhile, in the heart of Peckham, the affordable housing provision in a major redevelopment project has been slashed from 35% to just 12%. Safe, secure, affordable housing; a place to call home, is a fading dream for so many people.

Let’s take a look at the story of new buildings and places we are managing to get built.

A brief appraisal of many of the new housing developments around the country reveals a fairly bleak state of affairs. We seem to be especially adept at land-hungry, energy-hungry developments; identikit, place-less places, swathed in tarmac, car-dependent and built with minimal community infrastructure. An astonishing 110,000 new homes have been built in flood zones in the past decade. They’re not even especially affordable. It’s little wonder that almost a third of people (32%) think new builds are poor quality and that more than double the number of people would prefer to buy an old house (47%) vs. a newly built one (21%). And it’s not just a case of aesthetics. The design of these built environments is increasingly recognised as playing a significant role in making us lonelier, less trusting, more stressed and more isolated.

Research by the Humanise Campaign adds to this overall picture, through a focus on the psychological impact that the built environment has on passersby. They argue that boring buildings that fail to visually stimulate us, cast an oppressive monotony over their surroundings and create high stress urban environments for people at street level. The negative impact on people can be measured by looking at cortisol production (that’s the key stress hormone responsible for a host of health issues when experienced at chronic levels) which spikes when people find themselves in such alienating environments.

The story of the places we’re building is that they are falling short of the mark. But we’re also failing to improve the housing stock that already exists.

A significant proportion of the country’s building stock is in an embarrassingly poor state of repair. In 2022-23, 3.5 million households—equivalent to 14% of all homes—were classified as failing the Decent Homes Standard. This means they were found to be hazardous, lacked modern facilities, or were not warm and energy-efficient enough to be considered fit for habitation. Poor quality housing with these health hazards built into them are calculated to affect one in 10 people in the UK – that’s over 6 million people we’re locking into poor health and poor life chances.

In Demos’ paper on The Triple Dividend of Home Improvements, we set out the devastating impact that poorly maintained homes have on people’s health as well as the wider economy and environment. We calculate that investing in home improvements would save the NHS £858 million a year, generate a £10 billion boost to the UK economy and reduce our annual CO2 emissions by 744,283 tons.

But the crisis in building standards is not limited to residential properties. Whether it is leaking roofs in schools, crumbling walls in hospitals, or overcrowded and deteriorating prisons, buildings across the public sector are suffering from chronic neglect. According to the National Audit Office, the maintenance backlog for these critical public facilities has reached a staggering £49 billion. This means that essential repairs and upgrades are being postponed year after year, leading to unsafe environments, disrupted services, and higher long-term costs as problems worsen.

How does all this make us feel, I wonder, that so many of the places that we physically inhabit are actively harming us, making our lives more difficult and more expensive, damaging the planet and giving us so little joy?

To anyone experiencing the problems and hardships described above, in their local area, indeed, in their own homes, the story of the built environment is a harsh one.

What lessons about our society might someone living in temporary accommodation learn? My quality of life isn’t seen as important as other people’s.
What might someone renting a damp infested flat that the landlord won’t fix, surmise? I can’t trust those with power to protect me.
How about a local resident seeing a major developer running circles around the council and slashing quotas for affordable housing? We are not the true owners of our towns and cities.

These are the stories we are telling ourselves. Our built environment is the story of a set of decisions we have collectively made, a reflection of the dominant values of our age. A closer look at that view from your window holds some unpleasant truths.

We’re failing to build the places that will help us meet the challenges of our age. We’re failing to build places that enable us to foster strong social bonds and create communities. We are failing to build places that will be resilient in the face of climate change. We are failing to build places that will really unlock economic growth.

More than that, poor quality built environments have a damaging effect on us as citizens.

The social inequalities that we are baking into the foundations of our towns and cities create human misery and stoke resentment. And the transactional relationship that is fostered between citizen and state at touchpoints in the planning system does little to build trust and a sense of shared purpose. It’s not surprising that without a fair chance, without an economic stake, without any power to change desperate situations, it becomes appealing to blame our problems on scapegoats, and to turn to divisive narratives.

We need to renew and remake the relationship between citizens and our built environment. For example:

• Trialling radical new ways to prompt deeper engagement with place and with one another. (See the amazing work done by Intelligent Health in their Beat the Streets programme for one such idea).
• Rebalancing the planning system away from discretionary decision-making, towards a set of clear rules embodied in the Local Plan, that representative public panels in each local area are deeply involved in setting, reviewing and auditing.
• Changing the rules and incentives that developers are currently working within so that it is not possible to row back on promises on affordable housing.
• Instituting early and representative public participation in the making of Spatial Development Strategies as recommended in our report The MIMBY Majority.
• Instituting a participatory process that operates at different points in the system to help politicians mediate trade-offs between planning decisions at the national, regional and local levels.

We need a radical new way for the public, local planning authorities and developers to work together that is more constructive, authentic and grounded in the public interest. And then, maybe in several decades’ time, we will have a view to look out on that tells us a positive story about who we are.

If you are interested in partnering with Demos on research and policy work to build the case for change, or running a public or community participation process, then please get in touch with Lucy Bush, Director of Research & Participation on [email protected]