A case study approach to this research strategy was adopted immediately after the PAR memorandum between The Architecture Foundation and Dacorum Borough was dissolved. This decision was influenced by the fact that case study research offers a qualitative mixed methods approach. A characteristic of case study research is:
It aims to understand what is distinctive of a case being defined as ‘specific, a complex functioning thing’ (Stake 1995), whether it be a person, a clinic, a classroom, an institution, a programme, a policy, a process or a system (Simons 2009). (Petty, Thomson and Stew, 2012: 379).
As a consequence of the PAR project, a vast amount of real-life material grounded in a site-specific New Town community became available. By using Hemel to understand a mark 1 New Town, one can ‘provide an explanation’ to the ‘complexity and subtlety of real life situations’, which is what Denscombe (2007: 38) ascribes as the strength of this methodological technique. However, dealing with a single case (Hemel) would have generated limited results if generalisations were to be drawn for a wider discussion, and a binary unit of analysis was thus required. This was part of establishing the boundaries of the case study research, not for a comparative analysis, but for a parallel narrative of two New Towns built under similar conditions in what Yin (2003) refers to as a ‘literal replication’ (Yin, 2003: 47).
The logic of a multiple-case design in this instance is that by selecting two similar cases they would be expected to predict a similar result. Whilst Hemel Hempstead had emerged as the most relevant case study because it was one of London’s outer ring mark 1 New Towns that was on the edge of the designated 2003 Growth Areas (ODPM, 2003c), Harlow New Town was identified as a suitable second case study. This process of identification began by mapping the sample area of relevant New Towns that would be suitable for a binary analysis:
Figure 4-a: Location of New Towns in England, with the relevant case studies (mark 1) shown within the red ring Source: Map drawn by researcher
Conducting research using two case studies meant that New Towns could be investigated from a localised perspective at a micro level whilst adopting a longitudinal approach to the study that allowed the research to cut across contemporary issues and challenges (Arabindoo, 2012: 130201-14S). This technique revealed nuances that could contribute to the established historiography of New Towns, which was clearly lacking from the preliminary literature review. Flyvbjerg’s (2006: 222) writings on the five key misunderstandings of case study research show that not only can you draw valid generalisations from a single case but that ‘human learning’ is based on ‘context-dependent knowledge’. According to Flyvbjerg, the phenomenological difference
between knowledge that is context-independent from context-dependent is what can mark the difference between ‘being a beginner to being an expert’ (ibid.).
Case study research relies on ‘qualitative data and interpretive methods rather than quantitative data and statistical procedures’ (Denscombe, 2007: 46). By virtue of the secondary research question of this thesis and its quest to incorporate localised narratives to the New Towns historiography, a qualitative and interpretative approach was fundamental. So too, was the adoption of a Ryle’s philosophical explanation of how we generate intellectual work. He coined the idea that qualitative research required a ‘thick description’ that ‘involved ascribing intentionality to one’s subject…by understanding and absorbing the context of the situation and behaviour’ (Ryle 1949, cited in Ponterotto, 2006: 539). Thick description was further developed into a methodological framework by Geertz (1973) and is used for managing secondary sources in this research (see 4.2.7).
The following section introduces the two chosen case studies and discusses the method for data collection and analysis.
4.2.1 Defining the case studies
Fieldwork began with a series of exploratory visits to various types of new communities both in the UK and in Europe where exemplary eco-towns were being highlighted throughout policy documents of the Sustainable Community Plan (ODPM 2003a). Exploratory visits generated mainly visual material (photographs, sketches and community brochures or announcements) and acted as a phenomenological introduction to the experience of towns and neighbourhoods at different scales built under different typologies. An attempt was made to set aside my own views and experience the towns objectively, a technique referred to as bracketing (Petty, Thomson and Stew, 2012: 379) but these visits were aimed at being exploratory only, and to claim that bracketing was achieved would be misleading. For the same reason, an extensive analysis of these visits was not made because they served more as a means to identify the case studies than to act as material sources for analysis. A list of these exploratory visits can be seen in the Appendix B.
The next stage of fieldwork included formal visits to New Towns around England within the remit of the PAR discussed previously. This stage identified Hemel Hempstead as a well-suited mark 1 New Town case study. In the process of identifying
Hemel Hempstead, visits made to meet local authorities followed by guided tours through different New Towns, usually by car. Material gathered in these visits was mainly visual and textual. They included local authority publications, policy guidelines, local area plans and maps. A series of individual visits were made to the remaining mark 1 New Towns around the London ring. These were informal, self-guided and unstructured. A full list of the New Town visits can be seen in the Appendix C, with a differentiation of whether it was a local authority meeting as part of the PAR project, or an individual and self-guided visit.
Harlow New Town emerged as a second relevant and interesting case study.
Like Hemel, it was designated as a mark 1 New Town and was within the Growth Area of London-Stanstead-Cambridge-Peterborough (LSCP), identified under the Sustainable Communities Plan (ODPM 2003a, 2003c). Unlike Hemel, upon designation Harlow had a much smaller existing population, although both New Towns had the same projected population:
Figure 4-b: Population targets of mark 1 New Towns Source: Gibberd, Harvey and White 1980, p. 6
The main difference between the two case studies was that in 1946, Harlow New Town was expected to grow to fourteen times its original size, whereas Hemel Hempstead was only anticipated to expand by four times its original size.
4.2.2 Hemel Hempstead
Figure 4-c: Designation site for Hemel Hempstead New Town
© Source: Imperial war Museum, IWM ((MOW) T 9908) | Boundary line drawn by researcher
This is a mark 1 New Town designated in 1947 currently within the remit of Dacorum Borough Council. Its large pre-existing population makes it the less radical of the mark 1 New Towns, and provides an interesting perspective on how expansion may be an alternative to establishing a completely new community. Hemel Hempstead is nestled within the rural Hertfordshire countryside in the Gade Valley. It is a 20 minute train ride from London, but 61 per cent of residents live and work in Hemel Hempstead or the surrounding villages (DBC, 2005). The original master-plan was designed by Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1990-1996) but was overridden by the County Council and an alternative plan was formulated by the Hemel Hempstead Development Corporation (HHDC) in 1949. In Hemel, 81% of its pioneers were builders from London (Heraud, 1966: 11) who were offered a home and job in exchange for manual labour to build the New Town.
4.2.3 Harlow
Figure 4-d: Designation site for Harlow New Town
Source: © IWM ((MOW) T 9907) | Boundary line drawn by researcher
This was the first designated New Town in 1946 and its master-plan was prepared by Frederick Gibberd (1908-1984) who remained the principal Architect and Planner of the Harlow Development Corporation (HDC) from 1946 to its dissolution in 1980 (Gibberd, Harvey and White, 1980). Harlow’s pioneers were mainly residents from London’s East End with a strong Mosleyite tradition. Located on the Stort Valley, Harlow is within the Essex County bordering East Hertfordshire. Harlow provides strong case study material of how a completely new community emerged as a consequence of the New Towns Act of 1946. Harlow Council provided initial contact with a residents association called MAZE. The association represents three housing areas that belong to the Priority Estates project (initiated under the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher) formed to regenerate housing areas in decline. The
on the development of the town as well as very personal narratives. Their view on living in Harlow was passionate and persuasive, and offered a much more specific insight into the New Towns typology.
4.2.4 Primary sources: interviews
It was crucial to understand both the early days of the New Towns (1940s-1950s) as well as contemporary challenges. Although this represents a fifty-year history, a narrative developed by exploring the arrival of pioneers to the New Town followed by impressions on its formative years: what was the New Towns programme trying to achieve and how was it experienced by its residents? Most importantly, the case study was principally concerned with revealing local issues and moving beyond generalisations:
The local is also the site of obvious power struggles and conflicts, some minor and others not so, where fear and suspicion of the other is played out in everyday encounters on the street, in the park or shopping centre. It is the place where local government is mandated to manage the use of space by different groups, many of whom have contrasting needs, desires and hopes.
(Thompson, 2006: 21).
In using case studies to reveal local voices, this research addresses what Imrie and Raco (2003) call the ‘policy paradox’ where ‘local residents know best, outsiders know better’
(Imrie and Raco, 2003: 214-217). They claim that despite New Labour’s emphasis on community engagement and promoting community leadership, a paradoxically low level role has been accorded to them through policy evaluation processes. This was discussed briefly in the introductory chapter as a key characteristic of the Sustainable Communities strategy, where the ‘sustainable citizen’ plays a fundamental role (Mulgan 1998; Levitas 1998; Raco 2007; Imrie and Raco, 2003). In this respect the case studies served to reinforce the need for engaging local residents, both for policy formulation and programme evaluation. The workshops conducted in both Harlow New Town and Hemel Hempstead revealed that the pioneers had never been questioned, interviewed or participated in any kind of New Towns research. This made recording their concerns and anecdotes all the more urgent and relevant.
Contacts within Hemel Hempstead and Harlow New Town local authorities helped to negotiate access. This was a useful way of gaining the residents’ trust since they had previous experience with the Council representatives. The physical boundaries of the case studies were easily identified because of the New Towns feature of
self-containment. The Modernist New Town typology had very defined characteristics that consisted of six layers: commercial, industrial, residential, road networks, educational and open spaces. These layers were thematic sections in the original 1946 New Town master-plan, and they also became the areas of resource allocation to Development Corporations throughout the New Towns development. Understanding these provided a key starting point for the case study data collection because they acted as thematic variables that could be used between the two case studies (Petty, Thomson and Stew, 2012: 379).
Figure 4-e: Hemel Hempstead and Harlow represented through key New Town layers, 1963
© Source: Museum of Harlow Archives
Predefined New Town layers also helped develop prompts for the interviewing of local residents. It was clear that a series of important ‘load-bearing questions’ had to be discussed with the interviewees as a way of establishing some initial parameters. These questions were critical, especially for informal group discussion and to encourage ‘good
thinking because it prompts more than a descriptive account’ of living in the New Towns (Cousin, 2005:423-424):
(1) What is different/the same about shopping in the local neighbourhood as opposed to the town centre shopping area? (Commercial);
(2) What was made possible by your relocation to the New Town and why? In what way did your family’s main source of employment change throughout the New Town development? (Industrial);
(3) Tell me about where you live: is it a house or a flat? Did the New Town provide a good quality home? And how did this differ from where you relocated? (Residential);
(4) How is mobility (walking, cycling, public transport, private car) different in New Town neighbourhoods? (Road networks);
(5) What type of teaching, learning and adult education has been made available in the New Town as the industry has changed? (Educational);
(6) In what way are recreation, safety, leisure and lifestyle choices enhanced or deterred with the vast amount of parks and open spaces in the New Town?
(Open spaces).
In both Harlow and Hemel Hempstead, a neighbourhood unit was used as a focus because it represented both self-containment as an ideology and as a planning principle.
Interview techniques varied and consisted of one-to-one or one-to-many (as in the case of the community workshops developed under PAR). Interviews were further classified ranging from highly structured to informal group consultation. Adopting a variety of techniques provided breadth (Yin, 2003, 2011; Denscombe, 2007) and a ‘thick description’ (Cousin, 2005: 424; Geertz, 1973; Ponterotto, 2006) of the case studies.
The interview referencing system employed was highly specific and relied on a code being generated next to an interview type. Both of these systems can be understood in the following diagram:
Figure 4-f: Diagram of interview hierarchy Source: Produced by researcher
Figure 4-g: Diagram of Interview Reference Source: Produced by researcher
4.2.5 Local voices
Structured interviews were conducted within a 12 month period between 2010 and 2011 and differentiated between two groups: local voices and experts. For local voices, interviewees were limited to residents or civil servants in the case study town. In order to classify as an appropriate local voice, a protocol was established wherein the subject had to answer ‘yes’ to one of the following questions:
• Have you ever lived in the (said) New Town?
• Have you ever worked in the (said) New Town?
• Were you or one of your parents an original New Town pioneer that voluntarily relocated to the (said) New Town?
Three types of groups emerged under the local voices: residents, local authority officials and professionals. A total of seventeen (17) people were interviewed in Hemel Hempstead, and twenty-one (21) in Harlow. The majority of interviews were recorded and transcribed, and a full schedule of these ‘local voice’ interviews is available in the Appendices (Appendix D, Appendix E, Appendix F). The key question that steered the direction of the conversation in the interviews with local voices was:
To what extent do local perceptions differ from or confirm existing literature/expert stereotypes on New Towns? And if it differs, in what way?
This was a gentle process, one of revealing the nuances of the New Towns narrative, illustrated by small-scale examples and specific personal anecdotes. For every interview conducted and every anecdote revealed, a record was also made of the year in which it took place, in order to piece together a chronology of events. Some of the pioneers have lived in the New Towns for over 40 years and could very skilfully jump in their narrative from their arrival in 1952 to the hardships they faced during the mid-1980s.
4.2.6 Expert voices
To balance the knowledge of lay people, Gaventa and Cornwall (2001:71) advise that there must be a declared knowledge of experts. A second series of interviews were conducted to establish the expert knowledge and for this, any of the following questions had to be answered as ‘yes’:
(1) Have you ever taught or published about New Town history within the academic field of planning or urban geography?
(2) Have you ever been commissioned to develop or bid in New Town project or expansion scheme?
(3) Have you or your institution been involved in the preparation or analysis of New Town or Sustainable Communities (2003) policy?
(4) Do you have an official academic or non-‐academic relationship to this doctorate research?
Having satisfied any of the aforementioned prerequisites, three main groups of experts emerged: planning academics, urban geography historians, professionals (architect/planner), government representatives and third-party policy enablers. As a collective they share the characteristic that they are central actors in the political process
framework. This includes academics from Oxford Brookes University, the London School of Economics (LSE) and University College of London (UCL). A representative of the government Homes and Community Agency (HCA) offers the perspective of a government body whose function can be traced back to the Development Corporations (DC). There is a group of specialists who have directly influenced government policy by leading special panels: firstly that of the Urban Task Force (UTF) and secondly within the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). Another category of expert voices comes in the form of an independent advisor for the former Centre for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). Lastly, planners and architects make up the practitioners expert group, three of whom were interviewed and wished to remain anonymous.
In total, 11 key experts were interviewed in semi-structured individual interviews that lasted between 60-80 minutes. For the expert interviews, a formal plan was prepared in advance and used throughout to guide the conversation in case it stalled, available in the Appendix H. Yin (2003) and Denscombe (2007) suggest that data collection should follow a formal plan, but the researcher needs to be prepared to deviate from this during the interview. In this sense, the plan was more of an interview guide that served as an orientation device to keep the conversation within the key areas of study: it was used as a project-specific protocol. The experts were being both generous and responsive in offering their time, and to avoid extending the interview beyond 60 minutes, the guide proved a useful tool. It separated the conversation into two parts: a ‘what has happened’ to reveal legacy aspects, and ‘moving forward’ to reveal opportunities and constraints of the legacy. The thematic discussion fell within the areas of policy, housing and community. There were key primary questions that needed to be addressed under each theme, and prompts for each question to maintain flow in the discussion (Sandercock, 2003). For example, primary questions were specific and aimed to obtain precise analysis that would counter or uphold previously read literature. Yin (2003) declares that there is a protocol for the general orientation of questions because they fall within a hierarchy of five levels. In Yin’s explanation, there is a hierarchy where questions at level one and two deal specifically with the researcher’s primary and secondary research question, whilst the lower levels of four and five are normative questions acting as prompts (Yin, 2003: 73-76). The prompts, on the other hand, were softer and more personal questions, aimed at negotiating access to the detailed stories of New Town life experiences that Petty, Thomson and Stew (2012) describe as a narrative research methodology. These lower level questions, although less
important in Yin’s hierarchy of question protocol, yielded the most interesting data with biographical stories and family histories that illustrated New Town life in a more practical and realistic way.
4.2.7 Document sources: moving image, parliament transcripts and The New Towns Record 1946-2002 (Burton and Hartly, 2003)
The case study approach was selected over other research methodologies because it encourages the use of multiple methods and enabled a qualitative thick description to emerge. Professor Clifford Geertz developed the anthropological use of the term ‘thick description’ in ‘The Interpretation of Cultures’ (1973). Geertz suggests
‘the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them’ (1977: 26). Thick description is understood as the richly detailed context that gives an understanding to the meaning and intention of cultural fieldwork. It allows the
‘the essential task of theory building here is not to codify abstract regularities but to make thick description possible, not to generalize across cases but to generalize within them’ (1977: 26). Thick description is understood as the richly detailed context that gives an understanding to the meaning and intention of cultural fieldwork. It allows the