“From red tape to red flags”: The “abundance” agenda and the risks of the race to build

My latest article, “From Red Tape to Red Flags”, has just been published in the March–April 2026 issue of the Town and Country Planning Journal.

It engages with the renewed zeal to “build, baby, build” and with supply‑side visions of abundance that present construction as the cure‑all for housing, infrastructure and economic malaise. In the piece, I put the UK government’s promise to “get Britain building again” in conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s abundance agenda, ask what this new politics of building leaves out, and argue that for planners the real task is not to smooth the path for “more and faster”, but to be explicit about what – and whose – abundance we want planning to deliver.