Tag: Healthy Placemaking

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Report

How Shall We Live? New Settlements, New Imperatives, New Models

The Human Nature Places Foundation has convened a group of experts and practitioners to explore ‘How Shall We Live?’

“Our aim is to reconsider the role of large new settlements — including New Towns — in a modern, sustainable economy and society. We do so with the understanding that the second quarter of the twentyfirst century presents an entirely new constellation of environmental, social, and economic imperatives. Against this backdrop, we propose strategies, plans, infrastructures and designs that respond thoughtfully and ambitiously with the long future in mind.”

The report explores two questions:

  1. What problems are new settlements actually designed to solve?
  2. How might we rethink the role of new settlements as tools for tackling some of the most profound, deep-seated challenges facing British society, the economy, and our relationship with the natural world?

Contents:

Place Missions & New Imperatives
How Shall We Live?
A Pattern Language of Place
Wild at Heart: A New Landscape of Living
It Takes a Village: A Network of Commons
Genius Loci
Connectivity, Active & Sustainable Travel
Darwin’s Sandwalk & The Better Everyday
Growing a Place
A Place to Start Out in Life & a Place to Stay
Radically Affordable, Radically Better
Disruptive Delivery: Think Slow, Act Fast and… Mend Things
The Whole Place: Remarkable Outcomes

Author: The Human Nature Places Foundation

Publication date: April 2025

Find out more: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7326216852156604417/

To request a copy of the report, contact

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Report

Insights from Marmalade Lane: 5 years on

In 2019, TOWN completed its first built project, Marmalade Lane in Cambridge, working in partnership with Swedish housebuilder Trivselhus, landowner Cambridge City Council, Mole Architects and Cambridge Cohousing, a group of people who would go on to become the residents of this new development.

Five years on, Marmalade Lane has carved out a prominent place in the dialogue around alternative housing models. It has been covered extensively in the press, featured in government policy and guidance, and has won over ten national awards across architecture, planning, sustainability and social value. Over 400 households have signed up to its waiting list in the hope of living there in the future.

Over the last year, TOWN, working with social value experts at Greengage, have produced a post-occupancy report – Insights from Marmalade Lane. In this report, we gain an insight into life at Marmalade Lane – exploring how the 100 adults and children who live there today make use of the shared spaces, resources and facilities. We reflect on how the design encourages sustainable living and fosters connections with neighbours, examining how the unique closeness of a cohousing community adds to resident’s quality of life.

Author: TOWN

Publication Date: 2024

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Further information (and full report): https://www.wearetown.co.uk/insights-from-marmalade-lane/

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Article Guidance Report

Building Social Cities: Learning From What Works

It is fifteen years since Professor Sir Peter Hall and Dr Nicholas Falk drew on study tours run by the Town & Country Planning Association (TCPA) to Dutch and German urban extensions to recommend what needed to change in the UK. David Rudlin and Nicholas went on to apply lessons from cities such as Amersfoort and Freiburg to win the 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize. They showed how a city like Oxford could double its population by applying garden city principles without depending on government subsidy. With a Labour Government committed to boosting economic growth and building affordable and sustainable homes, the URBED Trust has compiled articles from Town and Country Planning on practical solutions. Please read and ask yourself and your colleagues Why not now?

This document is a compilation of nine papers orginally published by the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) and reproduced in this report with their permission. Each article has links to other relevant material.

The new introduction provides a valuable summary and the final article, written by Richard Simmons in 2024, looks at how lessons from these articles could be combined with other opportunities to deliver growth and new homes faster.

Contents:

  • Funding large-scale new settlements
  • Urban policy and new economic powerhouses
  • Achieving smarter growth in London and the South East
  • Planning for posterity
  • Location, location, location – funding investment in local infrastructure
  • Sharing the uplift in land values (executive summary)
  • Planning rapid transit for urban recovery
  • Harnessing towns and cities for better growth
  • Why not here?
  • Six steps for accelerating delivery by Dr Richard Simmons

 

Authors: Nicholas Falk, Richard Simmons.

Publication date: July 2024

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Further information: https://urbedtrust.com/

 

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Report

Tackling Inequality in Housing Design Quality

While disadvantaged communities routinely put up with poorly designed housing development, it is not a given. Through presenting twenty stories which illustrate ten routes to success from across England, this study demonstrates that if the will is there, we can routinely deliver well designed new housing developments in even the most challenging locations. The economic, social, environmental and health benefits that flow from this will be substantial.

In too many disadvantaged areas, poor quality housing development is the norm.  The private market works less well in such places, with lower land prices leading, proportionally, to lower investment in all aspects of the design and delivery of new homes and neighbourhoods.  This happens to the point where all quality is squeezed out of private and associated affordable housing or housebuilding simply becomes unviable.  Too often it is perpetuated by the disengagement of the public sector from housebuilding and from the governance of design quality.

Authors: Matthew Carmona, Jingyi Zhu and Wendy Clarke, UCL & Place Alliance.

Publication date: February 2025

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Further information: https://placealliance.org.uk/from-inequality-to-quality/

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Report

At a crossroads: Building foundations for healthy communities

A new report published by APSE, researched and written by the TCPA, is calling on the Government to put public health at the heart of housing delivery; empowering local decision-makers to create healthy and high-quality places. The report condemns a decade of deregulatory planning reform which has failed to acknowledge the crucial role local authorities play in designing healthy places and driving up the standard of new housing.

Author: APSE, TCPA

Publication date: August 2020

Further information: https://apse.org.uk/apse/index.cfm/news/articles/2020/at-a-crossroads-building-foundations-for-healthy-communities

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Video

Delivering Healthy Homes: Tutorial 3 Placemaking

Content available for Good Homes Alliance members only.

If you are already a GHA member, please Log In or Sign Up for an account. Check our Member Directory to see if you are a member.

Find out the benefits of membership and sign up as a GHA member to access this content.

If you have any queries, please contact richard@goodhomes.org.uk.

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Report

Distinctively Local

This report focuses on new suburban and rural housing, including urban extensions, suburban infill and completely new settlements. It aims to inform and inspire those who may be planning, designing, delivering or hoping to inhabit new developments, including the latest generation of garden towns and villages. It includes guidance and case studies showing how to create genuinely distinctive and popular places. In doing so we hope it will help foster a positive perception of new development that can in turn help smooth the path for boosting housing supply.

This report is the product of collaboration between four architectural practices, specialising in the design and delivery of residential and mixed-use neighbourhoods:

Author: HTA Design, Pollard Thomas Edwards (PTE), PRP, Proctor & Matthews Architects.

Publication date: May 2019

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Further information: http://distinctively-local.co.uk/

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Report

Making spaces for play: on new suburban and town developments

It looks in detail at play (a proxy for overall social activity) and relates this to a simple mapping exercise that scores four physical characteristics of new developments. Though only a pilot exercise the methodology shows promise as a way of predicting, at an early stage in planning, future social outcomes. Where beneficial features are absent, social activity and play may be a small fraction of that observed on the developments with the higher mapping scores.

Author: ZCD Architects, NHBC Foundation

Publication date: December 2017

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Report

Housing Design for Community Life

This report presents data about how people are using external spaces in residential areas on recently completed schemes in England. Inspired by the work of Jan Gehl Architects, it is a study of numbers of people, their activities and the time they spend outside as an indicator of what Gehl calls ‘life between buildings’. It presents new maps that show access to external spaces in relation to dwellings and the streets in between and reaches the conclusion that the layout of a development may have a significant impact on how well spaces are used.

It incorporates theories of child development, play and children’s independent mobility, in part to quantify some of the health and wellbeing concerns that need to be addressed, but fundamentally to highlight the value of children’s use of external spaces: both for their own bene t and as the generators of community life. The report reveals the social nature of these spaces, the importance for children and the challenges for other age groups, while also highlighting the damage that anti- social parking behaviour can have on otherwise well designed schemes.

“The report’s work in trying to understand how we use public space cannot be ignored. It is a vital manifesto for new planning policy and a cultural shift in our obligations towards people and the new communities we are creating.”

David Montague, Chair of G15 and Chief Executive, L&Q

Author: Dinah Bornat, University of East London/ZCD Architects

Publication date: November 2016

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