Power and the built form video description.

Title screen showing a head and shoulders shot of Ian Bentley, Emeritus Professor, Urban design, Oxford Brookes University. He is sitting in his office. The next screen displays the question: 'How are towns and cities made?' The questions fades out and we can see Ian Bentley who begins to answer the question.

Ian Bentley: "A good way of getting a handle on it is to recognise that there are fundamentally three kinds of things that towns and cities are made of."

A picture of a street plan is shown as Ian Bentley's voiceover continues: "The first is public space networks. Streets, things like that. Streets, paths, lanes, whatever."

The streets on the street plan are highlighted by a blue colour as they are mentioned in the voiceover. The voiceover continues: "You have to have them because, without them you can't move about from one place to another, and if you can't do that then obviously the whole thing's useless."

A still video clip of two people crossing a road is shown.

As the visual fades back to the street plan, the voiceover continues: "The second thing you need is plots of land that you can use for different things. That you could use for a house or a park or a hospital or whatever."

A visual of a building under construction is shown. This visual fades back to the street plan, which now has plots of land marked on it. The voiceover continues: "And the third thing obviously, is that you've got to have buildings that you build on those plots of land because most of the things we do in towns nowadays need to go on in buildings that keep the rain out and to make life more efficient generally."

The buildings marked on the plots of land are highlighted.

The voiceover continues: "So those three kinds of things; public space networks, plots of land and buildings are a good first way of thinking about what towns and cities are made of."

The following question is displayed on screen: "Who decides how the streets are laid out and what kind of buildings go where?"

The video then fades to a shot of Ian Bentley who continues: "I think it helps to realise that there are fundamentally four kinds of actors involved in this town building game."

A visual of a building site is shown.

The voiceover continues:"The first one is private sector developers. They're much the most important these days and fundamentally what they do is they buy land, they get a design done and therefore they have to hire various kinds of professionals like architects and quantity surveyors - endless numbers of people that they call the development team to get a design together. Then they get a builder to build it. Then at the end of the day they sell it and move onto their next scheme." This section of the voiceover is accompanied by a drawn illustration of the people in the development team and a video clip of a building site.

The video fades back to Ian Bentley who continues: "The second is another kind of developer from the public sector or from the voluntary sector. They do exactly the same things as the private sector developer except they tend to keep the scheme at the end of the day instead of selling it for their own use. They might want a hospital or a school to teach kids in or a road that everyone can drive about on or a park that everyone can enjoy. So they're not selling those schemes, they're keeping them for the public benefit."

The visuals show video clips of a hospital and a school.

The video fades back to Ian Bentley who continues: "The third people that we should never forget are just ordinary people like us. It's the users of the places who just have to kind of live with the results of what the developers produce and who will obviously, would like to, influence what developers do, some way or another. How can they bring any influence to bear? Well really, only by the impact they can make on a fourth kind of person, a fourth kind of organisation, which I like to call mediators."

A diagram shows coloured blocks marked 'private' and 'public sector developers' on the left side of the screen. A coloured block labelled 'users' is shown on the right hand side of the screen. A coloured block labelled ' Mediator' which includes politicians and planners appears in the middle of the screen indicating that these people mediate between users and developers.

The voiceover continues: "They are people like local authority politicians, for instance and the various kinds of council officials, who give them technical advice, and basically what they're trying to do is find some kind of compromise between what the users want and what the developers want so that everyone gets more or less what they want. Often they're not terribly successful in that, but that's what they try and do."

"So there are those four kinds of actors basically. Private sector developers, public sector developers, users like us and mediators who try to stitch the whole thing together in a rather messy compromise."

The screen shows the question: "How do developers, users and mediators benefit from the town building game?"

Ian Bentley continues: "There's a constant battle going on between all four of them usually. Private sector developers, the important ones that get most of the stuff built these days, what do they want? Well, they want to make a profit."

A cartoon graphic of a bag of money appears on screen. The voiceover continues: "Fundamentally, they're the manufacturers of buildings that they then sell to make a profit at the end of the day."

A video still shot of a building under construction appears on screen. The voiceover continues: "They're manufacturers just like manufacturers of anything else. They might be manufacturers of cars or plastic buckets or whatever. It just happens that they make buildings. They're not usually particularly interested in anything other than selling the product at the end of the day to make a profit. They have to behave like that. It's not that they're sort of evil or short sighted or anything. They have shareholders who they have to pay dividends to and they have banks that they have to pay loans back to, so they're in a corner and pushed to make a profit out of what they do."

The voiceover is accompanied by a graphic which shows a set of scales. 'Cost' is balanced at one end of the scales and 'value' at the other. The graphic illustrates the balancing act that goes on between cost and value for private sector developers.

The voiceover continues over shots of a hospital building and a school: " You also find public sector developers who produce public facilities like hospitals and schools. Things that people need, but that can't make a profit."

"Users? Well what a user's trying to get, you know that as well as I do really. We're trying to get a nice place to live aren't we? But sometimes it's not quite that simple, because we also are trying to make a profit. Like for instance, we buy a house to live in and really we want a nice house to bring our family up in, but we would be pretty fed up if, at the end of the day, we sold it and we didn't make a profit out of it actually."

The screen shows a newspaper headline: "Plenty of choice in Oxford, but at a price."

Ian Bentley continues: "So there are those different kinds of aspirations that all pull in different directions. At the end of the day, I guess, the only actors that are really able to try to pull it all together into some kind of coherent pattern are the politicians, both the national ones and more importantly, usually, the local ones who are trying to get everybody involved, as much of what they want, as they can."

The screen shows two newspaper headlines: "MPs unite to fight for hospitals" and "MP makes mark with new centre" as well as an illustration of people carrying placards and demonstrating to save their school.

Ian Bentley continues: "But underlying all that is they have their own axe to grind, because they want to get re-elected, so they've got to do things that will get them support at the next election. So sometimes they behave in pretty short sighted ways as well. And you can see that really, it's a very conflictual situation all this. It's not actually very nice, the town building game. It's full of people trying to pull fast ones over each other and trying to get their own advantage. Not necessarily thinking in a big way about how it's going to make a better place for everyone to live in."

The following question appears on screen: "Is there a simple diagram that maps out the roles of the different actors in the town building game?"

Ian Bentley answers: "Yes, there is a diagram that we call a powergram that relates together, on one side, the different actors that are involved in the town making game, and then along the top, you can see all the different components towns are made of. So you can see how the actors influence the components."

A visual of an example powergram is shown on screen.

End.