Remember Seattle?
"Many people will never see a shop window or a hammer in the same way again. The number of broken windows pales in comparison to the number of broken spells - spells cast by a corporate hegemony to lull us into forgetfulness of all the violence committed in the name of private property rights... Broken windows can be boarded up and eventually replaced but the shattering of assumptions will hopefully persist for some time to come."
     
A striking image for me from the World Trade Organisation protests last November was that of people targetting the corporations right there in downtown Seattle and letting them know - through damage of corporate property - that they had had enough of this insidious occupation in our lives. Of course the sources of corporate power are widespread and shop-fronts a mere tattoo on the corporate bicep. However, the high street outlet is one of the most obtrusive facets of the branding which corporations in the consumption-driven North shove in our faces on a daily basis. It is immensely disempowering to go into the centre of any town and be faced with McDonald's, Gap, Tesco's, Shell - all of whose facades I hope to see metaphorically deconstructed in these pages at some point.
     
In an immediate financial sense, property damage in Seattle will have minimal impact on these global giants. What the broad scope of resistance in Seattle did, though, was to locate our power to act as being beyond the political space created by corporations – beyond the narrow realm of how we consume their products. So much of our lives seems to take place in an arena whose buttress of 'happiness' in apparent financial and domestic security appears to have little foundation. The disorientation of a life mediated by corporate promises makes finding our feet difficult, let alone finding the power to start moving them. But this is what we have to do. I've always found slightly simplistic the theory that their power is based on our consent, yet taking on a mindset that the power lies with us to define new political territory, and to shift away from corporations, is an essential first step.
     
Disorientation also lies behind the main theme of this season's magazine - Planning & Development. I read a quote recently that "The form of a city changes faster than the heart of a mortal". And indeed, the speed and nature of the changes thrown up as a result of planning decisions in the UK are at times astounding. How we physically accommodate ourselves raises fundamental questions over the nature of our lifestyles. The inequality of the current planning system raises fundamental concerns over who defines those lifestyles.
     
Until recently I lived close to Manchester city centre where the pace of development is truly phenomenal. Now each time I go back to visit, yet another expensive hotel jars the skyline and pushes spaces such as the Peak District further from my former home. In the neighbourhood where I used to live, despite the concern of residents for green space and meaningful work, the vision of the city's planners is to construct a call centre – local residents' participation only being called upon to decide where to locate the development's handful of trees.
     
Last week I went to a protest camp in Ashingdon, Essex, where developers have bought up a piece of woodland in which residents have walked their dogs and escaped their four walls for years. The site was initially hard to find - down the end of a garden of an ordinary looking bungalow in an ordinary looking street. A woman who lived across the road started telling me how glad she was to see a campaign to defend the space. With almost a note of desperation in her voice, she listed the different species whose habitat was about to be ruined. It was as if she felt that she had to underline the degree of destruction which the proposed development would bring. But what did she have to prove? Surely there is something in all of us that recognises the need for that kind of space: the humanity which is lost in the planning office is struggling to hang on in corners such as these.
     
The 'soul' of a place is an abstract idea, but the urge to make links between our identities and our surroundings is a strong one. This issue’s look at Planning & Development is intended to both set a compass amidst the disorientation of seeing these links broken, and to provide inspiration to create new ones.