Garden cities

[Posted by Prof Henry G. Overman] I'm fairly ambivelant about Garden Cities. We clearly need additional housing. The idea of finding some fast growing urban area, taking a bit of greenbelt land and building decent housing on it with good transport links and open spaces would probably help (such a suggestion won the Wolfson Prize). Whether it's the solution to our housing supply problems is another matter. I'd certainly want to see whether such a development proved attractive to people in general (rather than to the people who designed it) before rolling it out across the country. I'm also a believer in properly incentivising local people to agree to development - so I don't like the idea of a blue print that we'd impose on lots of places.