The UK government has resolved to put beauty first to create better homes. Shame no one can agree on what that means

The UK government thinks it has got to the heart of the housing crisis: the problem is, new homes just aren’t beautiful enough. “Build beautifully and get permission,” says the housing minister, Kit Malthouse. “Build beautifully and communities will actually welcome developers, rather than drive them out of town at the tip of a pitchfork.”

If only housebuilders would make their product more visually appealing, the thinking goes, then opposition to them would fade away, more homes would be built, prices would drop and we would all live happily ever after. The simple solution, Malthouse says, is “putting beauty at the heart of our housing and communities policy”.

Hence the new Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, which was established in November to interrogate the question of beauty in the built environment and met with howls of outrage and derisive sneers. It’s not hard to see why. A parliamentary debate that preceded the announcement played out like a parody of Victorian mores, as successive MPs lined up to lament the state of modern architecture.

Whereas people once anticipated development with joy, they now very often look on it with despair John Hayes

The long-dead Le Corbusier was attacked as a man “who is responsible for many bad things”, planners were accused of having “not learned their lesson” since the war, and it was brazenly asserted that “where modern design does succeed, that is largely by accident”. Some reached for the words of Philip Larkin, while others clutched at scientific research on how the “specialised cells in the hippocampal region of our brains” are attuned to beautiful geometry.

Matters weren’t helped when Malthouse tweeted a photo of a glazed commercial building on Oxford Street and a neoclassical stone courthouse in Alabama with the caption: “Both built in the last 10 years. One will stand for centuries, one won’t.” If the comment was intended to troll the architecture profession, it worked. The minister was slammed for being out of touch, anti-progress and “pandering to rightwing populist nostalgia”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Built to last? Marble Arch Park House in London, referenced by Kit Malthouse on Twitter. Photograph: flik47/Getty Images

It’s easy to dismiss the endeavour as a distraction from the real issues at stake, such as developers’ monopolies on land or the absence of a mass council house-building programme. But might there be something in it? John Hayes, the Conservative MP who called the parliamentary debate, might have had a point when he said: “Whereas people once anticipated development with joy, they now very often look on it with despair.” Ed Vaizey put it more succinctly: “The quality of building is shockingly bad.”

The government may be keen to put beauty at the top of the agenda, but whose idea of beauty are they talking about?

There is more to housing quality than beauty alone, but if there is indeed a gulf between what developers are building and what people want, then it makes sense to look at how this might be bridged. Are architects out of touch with popular taste? Is there an obsession with new development being “in keeping” at the expense of it being good? And is a planning system even capable of regulating beauty?

These questions will be tackled in a forthcoming series of public debates at Central Saint Martins art college in London, intended to raise the level of discussion beyond the realms of parliamentary platitudes. The chair of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission, Sir Roger Scruton, will thrash it out with housebuilders, modern architects will debate with traditionalists, while planners will wrangle with developers and campaigners.

The government may be keen to put beauty at the top of the agenda, but whose idea of beauty are they talking about? Is it the beauty of Malthouse, MP for leafy North West Hampshire who, as deputy mayor of London, suggested funding the annual demolition of a building voted for by the public? The same man who is proud of his role in seeing the pioneering Pimlico comprehensive school bulldozed while he was a Westminster councillor? Or is it the beauty of the people who campaigned to save that building, not only on the grounds of its architectural merit, but that demolishing such a large concrete complex was a hugely wasteful act?

One person’s masterpiece may be another’s carbuncle. But is there at least some public consensus on what is welcome and what constitutes blight? If so, how can we find out what it is?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Masterpiece or carbuncle? Poundbury, Dorset – a ‘traditional’ village inspired by the Prince of Wales. Photograph: Dave Penman/Rex Features

Some campaign groups, such as Create Streets, swear by their methods of public polling, in which people are shown photographs of different kinds of urban environments and asked which they prefer. But such exercises are prone to distortion: do you prefer a tree-lined terraced street in sunshine or a tower block glowering under leaden skies?

Others think that artificial intelligence is the answer. Researchers at Warwick Business School’s Data Science Lab have developed a “deep learning” model that can determine what makes a location beautiful, based on a database of 200,000 images of places in the UK that had been rated for their beauty by 1.5 million people on the website ScenicOrNot. The groundbreaking result that meadows and old monuments are nice, while motorways and hospitals are not, doesn’t suggest that we’ll be seeing a future of automated urban planning any time soon.

Perhaps aware of the difficulties ahead, Malthouse has said: “It’s totally critical to our mission of building 300,000 homes that we get this design conversation – this beauty conversation – correct.” If parliament is incapable of debating the question with the rigour it deserves, then come and make your voice heard at the alternative public forum.