I've been thinking about affordable housing, urban design, community involvement and climate change.

I think back to the aerial photographs of Headington Quarry tucked away in the Coach House taken in, if memory serves, 1930. The familiar streets we know today as Weyland Road, Margaret Road, Mark Road, Wharton Road and so on are laid out in plan form with half built houses dotted about. Clearly a big estate in the making.

And I recall also reading of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century development of much of inner suburban Oxford, like the terraces and semis around Summertown and between the Iffley and Cowley Roads that were carried out in swathes by organisations, often mutual, like the Oxford Workers' Temporary Building Society.

Until the past few decades the development of our cities has been through big waves of development on what were at the time greenfield sites, effectively concentric rings rippling out from the centre, both public and private sector development, often side by side, at least in adjacent streets. Of course most of any public sector ones in these parts of town are now private, and the only big areas of publicly owned housing land are in the large council estates, now largely around the edges of the current built up area. And of course, since right to buy, even these have been peppered with privately owned plots.

All very obvious really. Add a green belt to all of this though and the ripples no longer have anywhere to go. Big waves of development are not really possible any more. And often for good reason. We want to avoid sprawl. We want to have countryside around us. We want to be near the centre of things.

The only place for new development is through the conversion of existing sites within the built up area, first from non-housing use and then, in theory at least, redevelopment of existing residential land to meet different market needs.

But it is this latter that causes problems. Whereas the estates themselves were developed as a whole, because of the growing preponderance of private freehold ownership of housing plots throughout the second half of the twentieth century in the main, so called "site assembly" is now difficult and expensive. So you tend to end up with small scale conversions - you know the sort of thing - a pair of semis divided into six flats with a couple of big extensions into the garden, not enough parking space and often rented not sold so a "fear" of short term residents with little interest or connection with their area. Or, often viewed as even worse, small scale infilling, backland development and just generally "squeezing things in".

Some would no doubt say that such piecemeal development is the best way because things only change slowly, there's no sense of major disruption for a neighbourhood or community. But given the number of times concerns about even a small number of conversions are raised it's clearly not terribly comforting to neighbours. And far more dangerously in the long term, it produces a hotch-potch of development, by squeezing things into existing patterns of development you're really reducing quality not enhancing it. A steady erosion of the overall quality and coherencce of the built environment.

Whilst it may be possible, as is being done with Oxford's Rose Hill, for large landlords such as in that case Oxford City Council to embark on large scale redevelopment because ultimately they retain, until now anyway, a controlling interest in the land, this simply does not happen in private housing areas, regardless of how decent or fit the general state of the stock in those areas is. At least not until, as in the case of some of the well known examples of whole terraced streets in northern towns standing empty, there is complete failure in the local land market - unlikely anywhere there's a shortage of affordable housing.

Now here's the shocker. We all read about the problems of the public sector housing stock in meeting the so called "decent homes" standard. In fact the ambition at least extends to all housing, private, public, social. All of it. But according to the English House Condition Survey for 2004 nearly 30% of all private tenure housing fails the decent homes standard as well as the just over 30% of the social sector stock. Most fail on the energy efficiency criteria. And it's easy to see why. For most of the history of mass house building in this country we didn't apply greatly different standards to public and private sector development. The houses of the thirties and forties are pretty similar whether they are council estate or private, at least technologically in areas like energy efficiency.

And these energy standards are in turn the standards of yesteryear. If we are approaching or past "Peak Oil", if we are going to start to demand that our housing stock should enable us to live on significantly smaller energy supplies than previously, even the decent homes standards will seem pretty tame. We probably only have a relative handful of homes that would cope, for example, with running on 10% of the current average household energy consumption.

And whilst it might be possible technologically to adapt some of such housing to late- and post- oil-age requirements, it would not address the other pressing issue of market renewal and adaptation to modern demographics. There's little point in spending a fortune making a five bedroomed house fuel secure if there is no market for five bedroomed houses, in the longer run anyway.

So, a whole bundle of issues are putting unprecedented strain on our housing stock. And this is not just in the south east of course. Some of the issues will vary in importance. In some cases there may be too much housing for the market which in turn makes it difficult to improve properties for an energy efficient future because there's no profit in it. But it is still, wherever you are, difficult to picture the sort of investment needed in our housing stock or the difficulties we face bringing it about in a way that does not lead to a helter skelter of haphazard piecemeal development.

So you see why I have great trouble with the philosophical basis for freehold land ownership. Because tenure is of an indeterminate length, unlike a well managed leasehold estate for example, no great number of adjacent plots come up for recycling at once. The fragmented market and land amongst so many different individual owners means that there can never really be, without drastic change, the sort of phenomenon like the great public health acts stimulating large scale redevelopment of slum areas and so on. Not that I'm saying that Headington Quarry is anything like a slum - but come the day say high energy consuming homes are socially unacceptable perhaps or seen as below standard there is no mechanism, without huge scale intervention at least, for major redevelopment, for remodelling whole estates. Because they are not estates, they are rows of "Englishman's Castles" and therefore untouchable without the consent of the owner effectively.

Now, this is not a call for some kind of Stalinist land grab, centralised planning and massive public subsidy. Nor for a return to landlordism or for people to lose their biggest asset somehow. Somehow we need to find a voluntary solution whereby communities can build on their social capital, quite literally, and mutually gain from redevelopment. An incentive for people to pool some of the "sovereignty" in their own plot in return for more involvement and control in the development of their own neighbourhood.

Even if that were achievable, could one reasonably expect a whole neighbourhood, even a whole city block, to agree to a redevelopment scheme when their own familiar home in on the line? Is there any real alternative on both environmental and housing shortage grounds to some radical change in our relationship between land, occupier and community? I say without such change our cities are destined to slowly die. Unable to breathe and heave and sigh in response to the different pressures and trends its citizens put on them.

I believe there is a vehicle that could achieve such change - Community Land Trusts

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