Posts Tagged Monarchy
The Prince of Wales, the Emir of Qatar and the £81m Chelsea Barracks lawsuit
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on May 17, 2010
Property tycoons take dispute over prince's alleged torpedoing of £3bn Richard Rogers residential development to high court
A bitter dispute involving the Prince of Wales, the Qatari royal family and architect Lord Rogers, who claims a multibillion-pound property project was wrecked by the prince, will come to a head in the high court this week.
Luxury property tycoons Nick and Christian Candy have lodged a claim for breach of contract over the withdrawal of plans for their Rogers-designed residential scheme at Chelsea Barracks by Qatari Diar Real Estate Investment, a property company backed by the emirate of Qatar.
The Candy brothers' company, CPC group, and Rogers had planned to develop the 5.2-hectare (13-acre) site, opposite Sir Christopher Wren's Royal Hospital Chelsea near Sloane Square, London, into a £3bn mix of luxury flats and more affordable housing.
But the planning application was dropped last June, after Prince Charles wrote to the head of the Qatari royal family's firm, which owns the site, branding the design of 548 flats in 17 blocks unsympathetic and unsuitable for the area.
At the height of the dispute some of the world's leading architects, including Frank Gehry and Lord Foster, criticised the prince for using his position to interfere.
While the prince, whose outspoken views against modern architecture are well-known, will not be called to the stand, his presence is expected to loom large in the proceedings as letters and other documents reveal his influence over development at one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the UK.
The brothers claim it was the prince's interference that persuaded the Qataris to abandon the project, and are suing for a reported £81m.
The controversy was sparked after the leaking of a letter the prince had written on 1 March last year to Qatar's prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jasim, the chairman of Qatari Diar. It emerged he had voiced concerns over "one more brutish development" and that, in May last year, he invited the Emir of Qatar and his wife, Sheikha Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missnesd, for tea at Clarence House.
In an interview last June after the project was scrapped, Lord Rogers told the Guardian: "Up to two months ago we were pretty convinced we were going to get out scheme through Westminster's planing committee. We enjoyed some of the strongest support I have ever had from Westminster and the Greater London Authority ... I thought we were home and dry. I just don't know what happened."
The scheme had been opposed by a residents' group, though much of the local opposition had been assuaged by changes to the scale of the blocks of flats.
The row carries echoes of previous disputes where Prince Charles has made his views on modern architecture plain. Twenty-five years ago he described a planned extension to the National Gallery by the architectural firm of Ahrends, Burton and Koralek as a "monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend".
Today, a spokesman for Clarence House said: "Prince Charles is entitled to his private opinions. Any dispute between the Candys and the Qataris is for them to resolve, not us. The prince knows the emir and his wife extremely well and the meeting would have happened anyway as part of his royal and diplomatic role.
• This article was amended on 17 May 2010. The original said that the target of Prince Charles's "carbuncle" remark was a Richard Rogers design for the National Gallery extension. This has been corrected.
How Prince of Wales’s aides tried to influence Labour ecotowns policy
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 16, 2009
• Letters and seminars pushed 'traditional' view
• Campaigners seek release of all correspondence
When Gordon Brown was campaigning to become prime minister in the early summer of 2007, he announced that he wanted to build more than 100,000 homes in 10 carbon-neutral ecotowns to create a "home-owning, asset-owning, wealth-owning democracy".
Royal aides looked on intently at the rapidly changing political landscape, and, eager to keep the Prince of Wales involved in the environmental issues of the day, seized their chance to influence the highest profile policy of the new Labour administration.
They moved fast. On 28 June 2007, 24 hours after Brown moved into 10 Downing Street, senior aides at one of Prince Charles's charities dispatched a letter about ecotowns to Hazel Blears, the Salford MP whom Brown had the day before promoted to secretary of state for communities and local government with responsibility for his town-building policy.
Dr Steven Parissien, the director of education and skills at the Prince's Foundation for the Built Environment, Charles's architecture and planning charity, wrote to Blears inviting her to its one-day symposium, Creating Eco-Towns.
It was to be more than a talking shop. Parissien made clear that the event would make the case that ecotowns should follow the model of Poundbury, the controversial neo-Georgian village built to Charles's vision in Dorset.
"The aim of the event," he told Blears, "is to frame a positive way forward to respond to Gordon Brown's recent, and extremely timely, call for the construction of new ecotowns throughout Britain, using the model of HRH the Prince of Wales's development at Poundbury in Dorset."
Two days later, another letter was dispatched to Blears, this time from Hank Dittmar, the chief executive of the foundation and an aide to the prince. He promoted the prince's view, vigorously disputed by many architects, that new towns should be built using "traditional" styles.
Dittmar asked Blears to consider the findings of a foundation research paper on increasing housing supply by building "mixed use, medium density settlements to traditional patterns" and requested a meeting with her "to explain the principles and tools promoted by the foundation which can deliver better, more inclusive neighbourhoods and town centres".
The letters, bearing the prince's heraldic badge, were effective. Yvette Cooper, the housing minister, agreed to speak at the seminar, while Blears invited Dittmar to join a "stakeholder reference group" which her department was assembling for the ecotowns project.
Evidence of the lobbying efforts emerged from a series of requests under the Freedom of Information Act from the Guardian to Whitehall ministries asking them to release correspondence from Charles and aides at his architecture foundation. It revealed that in the last three years, Charles wrote to ministers in at least eight government departments, and his aides were willing to engage with ministers on overtly political matters, often with success.
Campaigners for the abolition of the monarchy believe that ministers are likely to give a letter from the prince's charity almost equal weight to a letter from the prince himself. They believe that all the correspondence should be made public.
"The charity is little more than a soapbox for his views," said Graham Smith, campaign manager for the Republic campaign group. "It promotes his world view, which is quasi-environmental feudalism."
The departments refused to release the letters received from Charles, citing the need for the heir to the throne to be aware of government business and to be able to communicate with ministers on it confidentially.
In the past, Charles is reported to have told Tony Blair that farmers were being treated worse than black and gay people. He also allegedly told the prime minister he was destroying the countryside and urged him to drop the ban on fox-hunting. In another letter to Blair, he urged the government to do more to help families fleeing Robert Mugabe's brutal regime in Zimbabwe. His former deputy private secretary, Mark Bolland, has described how he saw "on many occasions … letters which, for example, denounced the elected leaders of other countries in extreme terms".
But the departments did release letters from the foundation, which revealed its lobbying of Andy Burnham, then chief secretary to the Treasury, Patricia Hewitt, then health secretary, and ministers at the communities department, the Foreign Office and the culture department.
In February 2008, Dittmar met Lady Andrews, the undersecretary of state with responsibilities including planning and planning inspectors, when they discussed opportunities for joint projects. In a follow-up letter Dittmar offered to run seminars for civil servants and planning inspectors using prince's foundation projects as examples of best practice. He also suggested a joint research project into what prevents the wider use of the prince's favourite planning techniques, and a research project to quantify how much time the techniques could save. He concluded: "I am very enthusiastic about your department and the foundation working together on these initiatives."
In May, Professor Anthony Hopwood, the chairman of the foundation, wrote to Andrews following a visit by her and senior civil servants to Poundbury. He sought to arrange a seminar for her and senior staff which would be led by Léon Krier, the prince's favourite planner.
He concluded: "It is my hope that the above will result in a more in-depth understanding of the work that the foundation does and the possibilities that it offers for developing a more sustainable and people-centred view of urban planning and design."
Dittmar said today: "As an independent charity, the prince's foundation occasionally exercises its right to communicate with government and others on built environment issues. This is a common activity for charities, and we neither do it on behalf of HRH the Prince of Wales nor ask for his approval before doing so."
What the charity wanted and what it got
Political background In 2007 Gordon Brown announced plans for 10 ecotowns across England with a promise they would be carbon-neutral.
What the Prince's Foundation wanted To persuade ministers that the settlements should be like Poundbury, a town in Dorset built to neo-Georgian designs approved the prince.
What happened Yvette Cooper, the housing minister, agreed to address the foundation's Creating Eco Towns symposium, and Hazel Blears, the communities secretary, invited the foundation's chief executive, Hank Dittmar, to sit on a stakeholder reference group for ecotowns.
Political background In early 2007 Patricia Hewitt, the secretary of state for health, gave the green light to seven new hospitals at a cost of £1.5bn.
What the Prince's Foundation wanted To encourage NHS trusts to use a planning technique favoured by the prince that it had pioneered, called Enquiry by Design.
What happened In January 2008 the foundation produced a design briefing for hospitals based on Enquiry by Design, which was to be used by the Department of Health as best practice guidance.
Robert Booth
Freedom fights: Act's history of controversy
The secrecy surrounding the Prince of Wales's letters to ministers is the latest controversy to hit the freedom of information legislation.
Labour politicians brought the Freedom of Information Act into life in 2005, but complain that they have not reaped the full political credit for introducing greater transparency into government.
Instead, they grumble that ministers have been criticised for concealing information that many thought should really be made public, or have been on the receiving end of flak when embarrassing secrets have been disclosed.
The saga of the MPs' expenses was a prime example of how political reputations were damaged. MPs, backed by ministers, fought tooth and nail to block freedom of information requests. In the end, MPs were ordered to disclose the details of their expenses, but when MPs came to publish the files – after they had been leaked in full – they were accused of engaging in a cover-up as they had blacked out what they believed to be sensitive parts of their claims.
Many government departments have been accused of using bogus arguments to hide information deleterious to their interests. Ministers have resorted on two occasions to deploying their veto, which overrides all independent decisions on the release of information, to stop disclosures. The first, in February, related to the decision to invade Iraq; the second, last week, to cabinet discussions over Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997.
Delay is the act's biggest problem, with members of the public waiting months and even years for documents they had asked for. Much of the responsibility for this lies with the information commissioner, the independent regulator who adjudicates whether public bodies are entitled to keep requested information under wraps.
Figures produced by the Campaign for Freedom of Information in the summer showed that the public had to wait more than 18 months on average for the commissioner's verdict. One decision took more than three years to deliver.
The campaign's director, Maurice Frankel, said: "Overall the act has been a good thing. It has been heavily used by a wide range of people and is an increasing part of public life." But he said Labour ministers had damaged themselves by mounting an unsuccessful attempt to restrict the public's use of the act and for taking eight years to implement it after being elected in 1997.
Robert Booth and Rob Evans
Mukul Devichand: Prince Charles’ view of Mumbai’s slums would be well-received by the poor who live in them
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 6, 2009
In 2003, Prince Charles visited the teeming lanes of Dharavi in Mumbai and, according to remarks he made this week, he was impressed at the intuitive "grammar of design" in Asia's largest slum. From my own experiences in the slum last year, making programmes for BBC Radio 4, I'd say many of the slum's residents would agree with him – but only up to a point.
I remember very clearly how the atmosphere changed when Raju Korde took me into his chawl. He is a left-leaning slum politician, born in Dharavi's lanes. I was appalled by the stench, filth and dense humanity of the slum on my first day. As my guide, Korde wanted to show me where he lived – his chawl – which he said was an example of redevelopment done well.
On our way there, we picked our way through piles of rubbish, open sewers and sub-standard shanty homes packed so tightly they cut off the light. But then we turned through a gate and – as if by magic – the noisy clamour and fetid stench faded away.
The chawl represents a vision of the future that I think both the Prince and Dharavi's poor would support. Rather than building vertically, the architects of this scheme have recreated ground-level slum dwellings. But unlike the sprawl that dominates the rest of Dharavi, these were well-built, planned homes of two rooms and an indoor toilet, arranged around a clean courtyard centred on a banyan tree.
The residents here could continue to work from their ground-level dwellings – the stitching, processing, weaving that allow the slum to be a place where the poor can work their way out of poverty. The chawl retained the old sense of community lost to people rehoused in multistory blocks.
It's an older vision of redevelopment: this chawl was built over 30 years ago. But when I asked Korde whether he would want all of Dharavi to be re-made this way, his answer surprised me.
"No," he said, "of course, we don't want redevelopment like this. We don't want to ask for what's not possible."
In fact, Korde and others in the Dharavi Bachao Andolan, the coalition fighting the current private sector redevelopment plan, are not fighting the creation of tower blocks per se. They just want bigger flats and more public space in those blocks.
Their reasons for taking this stance are purely practical. While the private-sector plan involves tower blocks being built by companies, the reality is that government-funded schemes and even some in India's NGO sector are building tower blocks as a solution to the slum problem.
The tower block appeals because, in the end, Mumbai's problem is one of space. Redeveloping Dharavi in the fashion of Raju's chawl takes up lots of it and, ultimately, everyone – government and private sector – wants to reclaim the vast swathe of the city currently taken up by the 60% of Mumbaikars living in slums.
That may be wrong, but it's an attitude that doesn't show any sign of changing fast. So Korde and his fellow residents have made a compromise. And this is what separates them from Prince Charles' more idealistic view.
The Prince, of course, is in a position to take bold and often laudable stands – such as his campaign to save the hutongs of Beijing. The hope is that such intervention opens up a space for pause and reflection for the leaders of development-obsessed Asia.
But the surging political and economic pressures of India and China mean the poor themselves don't have the same luxury. As Raju Korde puts it: "Agitation without an alternative is baseless. Agitation with an alternative is worthwhile."
Charles declares Mumbai shanty town model for the world
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on February 6, 2009
The Mumbai shanty town featured in the film Slumdog Millionaire offers a better model than does western architecture for ways to house a booming urban population in the developing world, Prince Charles said yesterday.
Dharavi, a Mumbai slum where 600,000 residents are crammed into 520 acres, contains the attributes for environmentally and socially sustainable settlements for the world's increasingly urban population, he said. The district's use of local materials, its walkable neighbourhoods, and mix of employment and housing add up to "an underlying intuitive grammar of design that is totally absent from the faceless slab blocks that are still being built around the world to 'warehouse' the poor".
The prince's comments are likely to be seen as a criticism of western developers who export plans for large-scale, often high-rise buildings to developing countries. They will also come as a boost for residents of the Mumbai slums who protested against Slumdog Millionaire for characterising them as "dogs" and fought attempts to demolish their homes to make way for skyscrapers.
The prince was addressing a conference at St James's Palace organised by his Foundation for the Built Environment. The charity is attempting to involve local people in the redesign of slum areas in Freetown in Sierra Leone, Kingston in Jamaica and impoverished areas of New Orleans which were hit by Hurricane Katrina.
The prince, who visited Dharavi in 2003, said the adaptation of traditional settlements would deliver "more durable gains than those delivered through the present brutal and insensitive process of globalisation that is shaping so many aspects of how we live".
He warned that a soaring urban population - rising from 50% of all the world's inhabitants today to 70% by 2050 - could only be accommodated without disastrous social and environmental consequences by developing local urban design rather than "a single monoculture of globalisation".
"I strongly believe that the west has much to learn from societies and places which, while sometimes poorer in material terms are infinitely richer in the ways in which they live and organise themselves as communities," he told planners, charity workers and government officials.
"It may be the case that in a few years' time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have a built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living."
He shared a platform with Jockin Arputham, founder of the National Slum Dwellers Federation of India, who attacked attempts by foreign investors to clear large parts of Dharavi and replace them with 23-storey apartments. "I am a slum dweller, not a slumdog," he said, in reference to Danny Boyle's film.
"Many developing countries look to the west as a model but that cannot be the model. These [western] buildings use too much power and would not be affordable for us. In India the population has gone beyond all control and it is wrong to expect western development to help us."