Wayne Hemingway @ Bristol Festival of Ideas

On Tuesday at the Arnolfini in Bristol, Wayne Hemingway - fashion designer, urban planner - gave a talk on the problems of and possible solutions to housing problems in Britain.

Accompanied by slides projected onto the cinema screen behind him, Hemingway started with an article he wrote for the Independent about housing developments, those awful collections of identical houses built by Barratts, Persimmon and Wimpy. "No-one aspires to these houses," Hemingway told us, "why not?" Apparently, just a 24% of people consider buying a newly built house when they are looking for a home. His first thought was that it must be bad design, that people like old houses for their soul, their lived-in-ness. "But it can't just be that?"

It turns out it pretty much is "just that". But "just that" happens to be about far more than design - it's about quality of life, which encompasses pretty much everything and is what actual people living in actual houses talk about. Later in the talk, Hemingway noted with satisfaction that in a survey of people that lived in his housing developments, architecture as a reason for contentment was sixth, communal barbeques first.

In a previous National Housing Audit the amount of homes that were considered poor or mediocre was 80% and that 29% shouldn't have even been giving planning permission. Why was this? Showing pictures of a housing development on the outskirts of Swindon that looked more like a prison than a set of homes (he even added a high fence just to complete the allusion), Hemingway ran through the "buy to let" fad that characterised the housing boom of the early 2000s. Houses were considered money-makers, ready-made earners. You didn't have to put any work in to fixing it up, you can pack in your job, "have the gap year you never had" while the rent pays for the mortgage. Of course this was incredibly short-sighted. Hemingway used mortgage-providers offers to his kids as an example of predatory mortgage practices - young first-time buyers were given 125%, sometimes even 150% mortgages!

These housing developments, he said, and the systems in which they were bought and sold, will inevitably turn into the slums of the future. Residents have no control over their environment - they can't change anything, can't add or take away elements they like or don't like, the windows are too small, there are no trees, no greenery, no communal areas. Each family is locked up in an area too small for them and not let out. Obviously this will have psychological effects, and so it's no surprise that kids do badly in school and are disruptive, that people binge drink, that drug and alcohol consumption is high. They are trapped and lash out.

The next slide was of a house in a township in South Africa. A tall, almost mock-Tudor house, patched together with corregated iron and wood, sheets of metal. "This speaks to me of possibility," Hemingway said, switching between the Swindon prison and the township. "I began thinking, what would I want, this or this? Who's been to South Africa?" A few hands went up, opinions canvassed. People of the townships looked happy, opinion said, there was a semblance of community, people were active, with a bit of entrepreneurship there was a potential for change. This reminded me of a recent article on iMomus, in which Nick Currie looked to the improvised houses in the "Baseco compound, a shanty camp located at a shipyard on the Pasig River, near Manila's port".

Europe, particularly Scandinavia, has far less problems. Hemingway showed slides of developments in Malmo and Copenhagen to illustrate a rule that seems absent in British town planning: that you build up a community before building any houses. The Ijberg development in Amsterdam, for instance, created a beach first, and then encouraged young people to open up shops and bars along its length, creating a vibrant community ten minutes from the centre of the city. Only then did they build houses. And of course the houses weren't the identikit ones you see across Britain, each one was different.

Part of the problem is local councils. Even the best ones are in no position to understand what people actually want. In Britain, an elected council member will have to give up 2 or more days a week for very little pay. "What 30 year-old can afford to do that?" asked Hemingway. In Morecombe, the youngest member of the council is 68. She's great, according to Hemingway, but when the majority of councils are made up of people of retirement age, no-one acts as the voice of the families and young first-time-buyers that move into the developments.
In Europe, councils are made up of people aged 18 to 78. That means that housing projects are far more in touch with residents' needs. Developments are undertaken not through design competitions in which one developer is given complete control over the building of 1000 homes, but in which 15 or more housing companies build separate parts and in which designers, urban planners, community groups and residents work together to create places in which people can live happily.

And that's what it's all about really. If there was a theme that ran through the talk, it was that it's not about architecture but place, it's about making places not units. Britain continually comes low or bottom of quality of life surveys, from the Monocle Global Quality of Life Survey to Unicef's studies of child welfare. That is because British house-building is founded on the monetary value of the houses, whereas in Europe the value is in quality of life.