Tag: Placemaking

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Report

New Neighbourhoods in Cambridge

This report evaluates housing schemes in Cambridge and the role of the Cambridgeshire Quality Panel in maintaining quality. It aims to determine if the high standards seen in Cambridge can be replicated elsewhere in the UK.

The report highlights the success of Cambridgeshire in delivering high-quality new neighbourhoods through strategic planning, innovative design, and collaborative efforts. Given the support of the local community, the lessons learned from Cambridge can be applied to other areas in the UK to improve housing quality and meet growth targets. The involvement of the Quality Panel, adherence to the Quality Charter, and early planning are critical components for replicating Cambridgeshire’s achievements.

Author: Stephen Platt

Publication date: June 2024

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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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Guidance

National Design Guide

The national design guide sets out the characteristics of well-designed places and demonstrates what good design means in practice.

It forms part of the government’s collection of planning practice guidance and should be read alongside the separate planning practice guidance on design process and tools.

Author: Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government

Publication date: October 2019

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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

Place Value and the Ladder of Place Quality

The types of places we inhabit have a profound impact on health, society, the economy and the environment. This report distils 271 empirical research studies to uncover the truth about the qualities of the built environment that are good for us and deliver place value.

The Ladder of Place Quality is a simple tool for decision-makers to use when considering: are we making a great place?

Author: Place Alliance

Publication date: March 2019

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Book

The Housing Design Handbook: A guide to good practice

Everyone deserves a decent and affordable home, a truth (almost) universally acknowledged. But housing in the UK has been in a state of crisis for decades, with too few homes built, too often of dubious quality, and costing too much to buy, rent or inhabit. It doesn’t have to be like this. Bringing together a wealth of experience from a wide range of housing experts, this completely revised edition of The Housing Design Handbook provides an authoritative, comprehensive and systematic guide to best practice in what is perhaps the most contentious and complex field of architectural design.

This book sets out design principles for all the essential components of successful housing design – including placemaking, typologies and density, internal and external space, privacy, security, tenure, and community engagement – illustrated with case studies of schemes by architecture practices working across the UK and continental Europe.

Written by David Levitt and Jo McCafferty – two recognised authorities in the field – and with contributions from more than twenty other leading practitioners, The Housing Design Handbook is an essential reference for professionals and students in architecture and design as well as for government bodies, housing associations and other agencies involved in housing.

Read a teaser for the book here.

Author: David Levitt, Jo McCafferty

Publication date: October 2018

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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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