The Planning and Infrastructure Bill is currently making its way through the House of Lords. It’s a large and complex bill and the Lords have so far tabled no less than 200 amendments! No doubt many of these will be concerned with ensuring that in the drive to deliver the government’s programme for 1.5m new homes, quality is not sacrificed.
It’s a striking fact that there are no members of the House with a professional grounding in architecture, Norman Foster having resigned in 2010, refusing to pay UK taxes on his foreign earnings. With this in mind, a small group of housing specialist architects, and previous collaborators on policy matters, have come together to suggest how the planning system can be adapted to deliver better quality housing, developed in the green belt especially.
We have called our report ‘Placemaking, not Plotting – towards a new generation of sustainable suburbs’. For the uninitiated, Plotting is the process used by many speculative housebuilders which sets the rules for layout design. The idea is to distance each home away from its neighbours and use disjointed geometries to accentuate detachment, the guiding principle being to maximise the sales value of each individual plot according to characteristics thought to attract buyers.
Placemaking as a term can mean many things and may be criticised for having lost meaning through over-use. In this context, and for a lay audience, we use it to invoke the idea that design of the neighbourhood as a whole, bringing together diverse aspects such as the design of streetscapes, public spaces, mixed uses, variety and landscape, with overall composition being the key to access wider benefits. Good design adds value through quality of place as well as individual homes.
We argue that the current planning system does not have the tools local planning authorities will need to ensure higher quality housing design and that minor changes to the development management process and the wider application of national standards can deal with this shortcoming. We have illustrated our report with schemes demonstrating that the speculative housebuilders can break away from their standardised processes to deliver high quality schemes if so required.
Read Placemaking, not Plotting – towards a new generation of sustainable suburbs