Creating communities
In May 2019, attendees to the Cambridgeshire Development Forum considered and debated how to deliver more successful new communities in the years ahead; looking to increase the quantity and the quality of new schemes across the region.
Involving planners, councillors, architects, developers, builders and advisers from several disciplines, the ‘brainstorm’ approach to questions, after compelling presentations from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), Design Council and LDA Design, gave impressive insights into how this process should be structured for the future.
In this short article, I want to highlight three conclusions that I found useful in thinking about the future new settlements we must create in our region.
First, the vision for a new community must be owned by the community. Currently, there is no community in the design stage. The democratic input is vital, both to national and local policies, but how are we to reflect the interests of the community from the earliest stages, through the life of this community?
The Local Planning Authority (LPA) can do this by creating Citizen’s Panels: structured groups can be involved right from the decisions on sites with ‘permission in principle’ in local plans, through to consultations on the design brief (masterplan) stage. Communities can have input to the principles driving the vision: sustainability, biodiversity and the environment; future-proofing; health and wellbeing; and in defining the ‘sense of place’ and its character.
Second, it is clear that diversity can be a central driving force in creating sustainable and successful communities, in several respects:
Diversity of people; real communities include extended families, long-term residents, incomers, the well-off, the ‘just getting by’, the young, middle - aged and older people.
Diversity of tenure: owner-occupied; social rented; shared equity; buy to rent; rent to buy; affordable homes; and privately rented.
Diversity of housing types: communities show a sense of place, recognising vernacular styles, with recognition of how settlements, such as market towns, have developed over generations, and have responded to the topography of their location and the neighbouring settlements.
Diversity of providers and developers: public and private sector, social housing providers, SME as well as large-scale development and builders; with flexibility in allocating plots and sectors to support creative development ideas, embracing future-proof designs (garages that can be converted to homes as mobility changes); and accepting custom-build and self- build, not just in peripheral locations.
Third, building a sustainable and successful community requires trust. Trust between the LPA and promoter/ developer; trust in the integrity of the consultation and engagement; trust in processes that must be simplified and accelerated to deliver the homes we need; and trust in a viability assessment that delivers the support for infrastructure, community facilities and services, and affordable homes. It must also act as an incentive to landowners and developers, recognising the realities of cost and market uncertainties (remembering that, often, the profit is in the last 10 per cent of housing sold, as long as it is sold); and for each part to buy into quality of design, infrastructure and homes.
As a forum, we found this workshop valuable for the further practical suggestions about improving the processes for planning and design. The government is looking for these ideas in an engagement process of its own, ad we were glad of its involvement throughout this event and for taking the ideas on board. We want to see more homes delivered, more quickly, more effectively, and for us to do so with quality design that achieves successful and sustainable communities of which we can be proud.
Cambridgeshire has some great developments and some that you could not differentiate from anywhere else across the country. We are leaders in Cambridgeshire in so many ways; this workshop gave us great ideas for how we can carry forward that leadership into our design of new settlements in this, Britain’s fastest-growing area.
The Cambridgeshire Development Forum looks forward to working with colleagues across Cambridgeshire to make this happen.
About the Author
Andrew Lansley is Chair of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. He is a former Cabinet minister, MP for South Cambridgeshire between 1997 and 2015 and now an active member in the House of Lords.
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The content of the blogs represents the views of the author only and is his/her sole responsibility; it cannot be considered to reflect the views of the Cambridgeshire Development Forum. The Cambridgeshire Development Forum does not accept any responsibility for use that may be made of the information it contains.
