Colenutt, Bob

Bio Sketch

Bob (Robert) Colenutt is a planning and housing researcher based at the University of Northampton (Northampton Institute for Urban Affairs / Collaborative Centre for the Built Environment), long-time co-investigator with Allan Cochrane and Martin Field on the ESRC-funded growth-region studies of Northamptonshire and Milton Keynes. He is the author of The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis (Policy Press, 2020), an in-depth critique of "the nexus of power of landowners, house builders, financial backers and politicians" that perpetuates the UK's cycle of low supply and high prices — the book-length development of the house-builder/viability critique he co-authored in the 2015 article (web-verified via Open Research Online and Policy Press).

Key Works

• *Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region* (2015) — with Cochrane & Field; the suburbs repositioned as central to urbanism (Built Environment 41.4, pp. 567–578)
• The Property Lobby: The Hidden Reality Behind the Housing Crisis (Policy Press, 2020) — the property nexus behind the UK housing crisis
• "Governing the ungovernable: spatial policy, markets and volume house-building in a growth region" (with Cochrane & Field, Policy and Politics 43.4, 2015)
• "The rise and rise of viability assessment" (with Cochrane & Field, Town and Country Planning 84.10, 2015) — the viability critique behind the 2015 article's developer quotes
• "Developing a sub-regional growth strategy: reflections on recent English experience" (with Cochrane & Field, Local Economy 28.7-8, 2013)

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• suburbanism — the growth-region research programme the suburbanism cluster is founded on
• home-ownership-democracy — the property-owning-democracy settlement the trio audit
• nimbyism — the contested label at the centre of the growth politics
• neoliberal-metropolis — the "market-driven utopia" of house-builder-led growth and the viability regime

Relevance to the Core Research

Colenutt carries the growth-critique register of the suburbanism cluster: his Property Lobby thesis and the trio's viability-assessment papers give the wiki its evidence that the "new suburbs" were "re-imagined as providing the basis of a market-driven utopia" — house-builders freed to supply housing, infrastructure deferred, viability displacing sustainability. This connects the suburban cluster directly to the wiki's neoliberal-metropolis and housing-finance discussions, and to the planning-for-growth politics (nimbyism) that the design disciplines usually encounter only as "community opposition."

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Living on the Edge: Building a Sub/Urban Region (2015) — with Allan Cochrane and Martin Field