The urban guerrilla

Inept planning is threatening our towns and cities, says Lord Rogers. Tony Blair must join the struggle for its improvement now, he tells Jay Merrick

Lord Rogers of Riverside, perhaps best known as the architect who gave Lloyds of London the fabulously gleaming cathedral to profitable disaster in Leadenhall Street known fondly by underwriters as "the espresso machine", is fighting for something much more important today: the future of Britain's larger towns and cities – and therefore their quality of life and cultural meaning. As things stand, it's a fight that he, and Britain, are losing.

The physiques and souls of our urban centres are fragmented because of an essentially ad hoc approach to redevelopment on almost every scale, a meltdown condition exacerbated by the fact that there has been no significant investment in planning or urban development skills for decades. And this despite the fact that – after Bangladesh and Holland – Britain is the world's most densely populated country. Holland channelled billions of guilders into building and infrastructure projects in the Seventies and Eighties to keep ahead of the urban development game – and used largely untried but highly talented younger architects to do it. Britain's urban sin of omission has had an often devastating effect on both public and private sector architecture and infrastructure. And it's affected our sense of culture. If our towns and cities are vague urban smudges rather than places with a properly defined and organic presence, we might ask ourselves: are we British, or European, or just bit-players in an unravelling soap called "Grungeville"?

Lord Rogers and his Urban Task Force report, Towards an Urban Renaissance, was supposed to have delivered the goods three years ago – the goods being 105 strategic recommendations on urban architecture, masterplanning and land use which informed the Government's Urban White Paper. Seven have been acted on, about half ditched or shelved, and the key demands fudged. But this is hardly surprising: the Government funnels £5m into its Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (Cabe), and almost £60m into supporting dance and drama.

"At one level – economy, jobs – the Government is pretty sophisticated," said Lord Rogers, speaking in the top floor meeting room of the Richard Rogers Partnership, overlooking the Thames. "But I don't know if the penny has dropped that demand and supply in urban regeneration terms needs exactly the same attention that they're supplying to schools and hospitals". He says that four out of five primary school children no longer walk to school – the highest rate in Europe. "It's a terrible sign. It reflects in a nutshell what we have to face." What, he wonders, is the point of building schools that children, and parents, are afraid to use?

Lord Rogers claims Whitehall is "beginning to accept that you cannot separate physical urban regeneration from either economic or social issues. And those are the three legs, if you like, of the stool. We know that if we target these areas we can do a lot. But there's still a tendency for people to say 'when we get the other two right, [regeneration] will fall into place.' I say you can't do that. Because if you can't actually feel safe walking to school, the school can't function." Architecture and urban development, he insists, are indivisible from social and economic planning.

Housing is the most obvious pressure-cooker problem facing architects and planners, and the Chancellor has promised billions to improve the situation. London, for example, needs to deliver housing for another 600,000 people in the next six or seven years – "and all building will be within the 32 boroughs of the city. That's a hell of a statement. Because that means that we have to use our brownfield sites."

But how successfully? Lord Rogers is coruscating on the subject of urban design competitions, which should be the start of dynamic processes of improvement. Many of these competitions should be attracting top talent from Europe as well as Britain.

"But few of them are being entered by architects from the continent. The reason is that the vast majority of briefs are a disgrace. I complained about it 20 years ago – the concept that what you do is get two sheets of Xeroxed paper, the brief, and you're asked for 55 massive drawings. If the brief is not good there's no way you'll get an [effective] answer. And so we get poor results." Lord Rogers own involvement in the ongoing Thames Gateway regeneration project is an unfortunate, and bitterly felt, example: his work is being undermined by piecemeal planning processes that will lead to unnecessarily low-density housing.

Meanwhile, the Urban Task Force's call for properly funded Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and so-called centres of excellence to provide one-stop-shops to advise planners and developers has not worked, except in Yorkshire and parts of the south-east."We had hoped the RDAs would be the vehicles to deliver not just the land, but that they would have the skills and finance and government structure to deliver housing. But it's not in their mission. The majority are not stretching it – including the London Development Agency."

Furthermore, architectural and urban development know-how remains generally abysmal. Referring to one city borough, Lord Rogers said it wasn't just planners who were often deficient in urban-think, "It's the unbelievable lack of learning at the level of the councillors. There has to be re-training. Maybe planning applications have to have half a per cent [project cost] attached to them for education. There needs to be something quite definitive."

He said that despite John Prescott's enthusiasm for the Urban Task Force when he ruled the DETR,ministries continue to play pass-the-parcel with key urban legislation. "Why? If you ask Culture, they tell you to go and ask Treasury. Treasury? They will have lots of answers and say they will be doing it. But it's slow. We're talking about at least a 10-year cycle." It's a cycle that was undermined by the Urban Task Force's demand for timetabled action – a mistake according to Jon Rouse, the chief executive of Cabe: "It made the whole process too adversarial. Itjust got peoples' backs up at Whitehall. They ought to have taken out their timescales. They're meaningless."

And for how much longer? The physical future of Britain's urban areas may become clearer on 31 October when Tony Blair hosts an Urban Summit in London. "That's the real step," says Lord Rogers, "because if the Prime Minister doesn't get behind it we really have problems. What has happened to where 90 per cent of us live? It has to be a defining moment. Either we're motoring, or we're stuck in a siding. When we look across the water, Britain's [urban areas] are a pale shadow of the best examples on the Continent. We can't go on like this."