Architect Peter Barber’s concern to tackle housing need in London with a massive shift to social housing is heart-warming (Capital Ring Master, M Star October 21-22). His proposal for a Hundred Mile City round the edge of London, however, is a wet dream for every predatory developer.

While Barber ticks all the boxes with his call for respect for the green belt and his invective against “the morons who want London to sprawl into the countryside,” his dreams will encourage just that destruction.

Barber’s proposals overlook the fundamental character of capitalist development, which is not just unequal vertically, between classes, but is profoundly unequal geographically — overdeveloping some regions, states and continents while underdeveloping others.

As capital constantly searches for areas where profits are higher than the average rate, it creates megacities like London, Sao Paolo, Lagos and Mexico City, while asset-stripping the natural resources of their peripheries and using their peoples as reserve armies of labour.

These megacities are fundamentally emptied of nature. For those in central London it can take a journey of up to 10 miles to reach significant tranches of wildlife-rich countryside, an obstacle which prevents most working people from having nature properly in our lives.

This drive to unequal development cannot be controlled by liberal reforms, such as green belts, regional tax incentives and penalties or infrastructure building, for it is as fundamental to capitalism as class stratification.

We see capitalism seeking to “leapfrog” the planning constraints of green belts, sites of special scientific interest, national parks and areas of outstanding natural beauty, with new towns in gorgeous Wealden and shire countryside or on bosky, nightingale-haunted hills (like the Hoo peninsula).

We see capitalism seeking to rationalise its centrifugal drives by making the so-called brownfield landscapes of the Thames estuary into a major development zone — the “Thames Gateway.”

Yet we know that its derelict quarries and industrial sites, mudflats and salt marshes are some of the richest wildlife habitat in both Britain and Europe, with concentrations of waterbirds and invertebrates that include significant fractions of entire species.

In my part of Sussex, the “green circle” of publicly owned countryside around Burgess Hill designed to delimit its expansion is now being leapfrogged. The original intentions for Crawley new town of a population of 50,000 were passed way back in 1959 and the area is still threatened by a further Gatwick runway and a further accompanying new town.

Capitalism plays a long game. Patterns of decentralised development in the early stages of its waves of expansion can seem relatively rational. The decentralised “techo-villages” around Cambridge, like the garden cities and suburbs of Hertfordshire and Middlesex, originated in dreamings very similar to Barber’s Thames Gateway new city or his Hundred Mile City. Yet they coalesce into new giants, such as the incipient London-to-Birmingham, Solent, Severn estuary or Thames estuary megacities.

The giant cities of Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow all started as scatterings of small and highly individual industrial towns.

Nature and our countryside can take no more of this hyperdevelopment. It is a paradox that much of the best wildlife habitat lies on the urban fringe Barber targets, where it forms a lacework penetrating London’s built-up area and expanding beyond it. Places like Hounslow Heath, Staines Moor, Croxley Common, Hainault and Epping forests, the Surrey Commons, Mitcham and Monken Hadley commons do not need new peripheral development. They are already walled in quite enough.

To break those fundamentally anti-social and anti-nature rules of capitalist development requires fundamental countermeasures. Alongside the socialist root-and-branch redistribution of resources between classes, ecosocialism requires the geographical redistribution of capital between regions, states and continents.

This task of redistribution is core to the socialist project. London does not need to grow. Rather, it needs to shift its resources to its working people and the poor. Over the long term — centuries maybe — it needs to shrink. No city should be that size (10 million), let alone the size of Jakarta (30m), Moscow (16m), Kolkata (15m) or Seoul (23m).

London is arguably twice the size any city should reach if we are all to have meaningful contact with countryside and nature. For us in south-east England and other hyper-developed countries and regions this means a long-term shift in resources away from our region and away from the British state. But such a shift has to take place at the same time as working people see a major improvement in our housing, employment opportunities and conditions, health and education. That is the square we have to circle.

It can be done. In the sectors on which this piece is focused, there are huge potential labour needs in restoring and rebuilding our housing stock, restoring shattered and broken nature, universalising sustainable local clean energy, and replacing agribusiness with a sustainable farm economy.

Capitalist Britain was the birthplace of the industrial revolution and in consequence has, with the Netherlands (which shares a similar history), aggregated around twice the density of population of the rest of Europe.

Its capitalist class seek to add to this problem with their insatiable demand for cheap labour. One price we have paid is that Britain is far more emptied of nature than much of the rest of Europe, with only 10 per cent woodland cover, compared to 47 per cent in the rest of Europe, and a strongly urbanised (and exceptionally long) coastline now much at risk from sea level rise.

In this framework our policies have to be fiercely redistributive if they are not to do more damage to our countryside and wildlife. To eliminate the lunacies of uneven development we need to expropriate capital on a far wider basis than just some infrastructure and services.

We need to be in sufficient control of the economy to direct capital to those regions, social strata and countries that most need it. Instead of new cities on the urban fringe or in our precious countryside we must reclaim low-density wealthy urban zones for re-development as public housing.

In my city of Brighton that would release 800 acres for council homes — the size of a small town. In London the reclamation for council housing of wealthy suburbs, central elite zones, and the new rash of posh high-rise blocks would generate a far greater public housing resource. Taken together with the expropriation of the private rented housing sector, the control of house prices, the ending of the right to buy and the lowering of rents we can really face up to housing deprivation.

The south-eastern region and London are the epicentre for hyperdevelopment in the UK, yet they have some of its most intact countryside and wildlife resources. Poor soils, hilly landscapes and tranquil floodplains have paradoxically gifted us a nature-rich countryside which is now faced with a new cluster of direct threats. More edge-of-town developments or the Labour manifesto’s new towns, new radial London-south coast rail route, HS2 and more airport growth will help to finally destroy the integrity of this countryside.

It is no exaggeration to say that such developments threaten great harm to the potential for our socialist future.

• Dave Bangs is a former co-leader of Brighton Defend Council Housing and co-founder of Camley Street Natural Park, Kings Cross.