The Hijacking of the DAS:
How a modest, technical document is being used as a manifesto
It was once the case that a Design and Access Statement accompanying a planning application for a residential development served a modest but useful role in the grand pageant of English planning. It was a technical instrument concerned primarily with the measurable and the visible such as the scale, height and mass of buildings and with explanations of how the analysis, design principles and concepts served to shape the proposal.
But like many modest instruments entrusted to committees, it has since been reimagined—first as a vessel for aspiration, then as a pamphlet for virtue. Today, the DAS is no longer content to describe a scheme. It must now mean something.
A local authority, for example, in a state of acute existential boredom, may seize upon the DAS not as a planning document but as a branding opportunity. Suddenly, it is required to become a manifesto—part corporate slogan, part civic sermon. Sustainability is evoked with all the sincerity of a toothpaste commercial. Diagrams are replaced by declarations. Fonts become larger, meanings vaguer, and the illustrative layout dissolves into what might best be described as a TED Talk with aspirations toward sainthood.
And lo! There appears “A Day in the Life” of a future resident—always implausibly diverse, improbably employed, and irritatingly fulfilled. She is, perhaps, a delightful British Syrian refugee-turned-cybersecurity-expert, who grows herbs on her balcony, starts a community composting circle, and bikes her ethically sourced children to school—through a masterplanned utopia, with its Suitable Alternative Natural Green-space, where crime, rain, and irregular bin collections no longer exist.
This fiction is presented, earnestly and without irony, as evidence of good design.
The DAS has transcended its function. It has become a vibe.
And yet, one might hazard the subversive suggestion that the original purpose—described plainly on the Planning Portal, confirmed by the NPPF—was better. A DAS was not supposed to predict the psychosocial flourishing of hypothetical tenants. Should we persist, producing florid literature where technical description should be, casting fictional residents and mistaking narrative for form?
One day, perhaps, we shall return to a world in which buildings are buildings, not metaphors.
Until then, the DAS has become a fascinating artefact of our age: part novel, part sermon, part smoke screen.
And where is Urban Design? It waits, patient and unnoticed, in the footnotes.
Image created by AI
