Roundtable: 5 starting points for new community planning

Making the most of new community planning

Our teams are informed by the principles we have always valued in placemaking. In 2014, in a submission as finalists for the Wolfson Economic Prize, our planners, economists, and engineers called for a rethink on how we approach the key elements of a successful new garden community. We outlined strong views based on evidence and experience. Our perspective? Things could be done better to deliver the end goal of delivering a garden city that is ‘visionary, economically viable, and popular’. 

A decade on, we convened a new conversation to inform an industry response to the new community planning challenge. We wanted to assess what has changed, understand how we can collaborate, and find interventions we can all make in pursuit of high-quality and successful new residential placemaking.  

To do this, we gathered a roundtable of leading voices and decision-makers. We also surveyed our teams and clients about their experience in building new communities. This helped us identify the key trends and challenges to inform the roundtable conversation. For the discussion itself, our own specialists were joined from the public sphere by UK chief planner Joanna Averley and Chris Curtis, Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North. Others around the table came from the investment, housebuilding, development, and advisory sectors. And we also had representation from a local authority  

Here are our five main takeaways.

1. The need for long-term leadership and vision in new community planning 

Around the table, a key area of agreement was the importance of a long-term vision for new communities. It needs to stretch beyond electoral cycles. We are not short of role models for this sort of civic leadership—such as the late Howard Bernstein. He was able to spearhead the regeneration of post-industrial Manchester over a generation. We cannot overstate the importance of having belief in the mission and sticking to it.

We also need to balance clarity with flexibility in new community planning. On the one side, a firm shared the vision that all partners can work towards through public-private collaboration. It’s a vision that won’t risk changing at every election over the decades these communities will take to deliver. On the other hand, we are now experiencing one of the fastest technological evolutions known to humankind, as well as other major changes to how people are living their lives. This means there must be the flexibility to keep pace and to accommodate the needs of the future communities that will inhabit these places and make them their home. No one has a crystal ball for exactly how people may want to live in 20 years’ time. 

Attendees recognised that the acute nature of the housing crisis means that speed of delivery is vital. Projects are more likely to be locally championed and gain momentum if they’re seen as part of a wider, long-term mission that is delivering results. Communities want to feel they’re contributing to the nation’s success. And that as they do so, they will also feel the benefits. 

This sort of balance will help restore public confidence in the development sector. It will show that these new communities aspire to be demonstrably better than examples that have gone before.

2. The importance of stewardship and community engagement in new community planning

Ultimately, people want to live in successful, thriving places. Those around the table agreed that at the heart of this is responsible development. As a sector, we can cast off negative stereotypes and show that we understand the importance of long-term responsibility. Our work at Urban & Civic’s Alconbury Weald project in Cambridgeshire was founded on this sense of responsibility. There was initial concern from the existing community near the site. But our team was committed to engaging, understanding any concerns, and involving the community in the visioning process. Working side by side over the long term, we were able to incorporate their ideas and explain our proposals and the benefits. Ultimately, we delivered a set of enabling infrastructure informed both by our engineering, transport planning, and environmental expertise but also by the community, which came to embrace the development.

New communities will not succeed if they are not sustainable, resilient, and economically productive. For new community planning, these criteria must be the watchwords for developers and government as they plan and deliver future schemes. And this doesn’t end at practical completion. We need to show we will be there for the long haul, supporting the community as it matures and develops.

Our team’s involvement at the Roman Fields regeneration project is one small example. This project brought 300 new homes to a former brownfield site around an existing village. We collaborated with Places for People and East Dumbartonshire Council. In the end, we helped revitalise the village through engagement with the community. The site delivers new homes, connectivity, drainage, and landscapes to the benefit of the wider area.

3. Financial commitment and viability is integral to success

The group at the roundtable also acknowledged that we can’t deliver new communities if they aren’t economically viable. High land values are a consistent problem in the UK’s development market. Government will need to balance the interests of landowners and developers. This will help sites come forward and see that development is deliverable.  

Innately linked is affordable housing. The 1.5 million new homes target is really about making housing more accessible and affordable. It is about social opportunity as much as physical delivery. Therein lies a key conundrum: housebuilders build homes, not the Government. So, the Government will need to be consultative and adaptable to work with the sector on realistic levels of affordable housing. Following our roundtable, the New Towns Taskforce launched a call for evidence for potential settlements that can offer over 10,000 homes, at the very least. And they want 40 percent of the new homes on these sites to be affordable. The ambitions are loud and clear. Striking the right balance will be critical for getting schemes moving and ensuring they meet viability thresholds.

4. Context is key in new community planning

It was agreed that many factors should help us identify sites for new communities. It’s not a simple ‘top down’ solution with ‘people picking locations’. Instead, any evaluation of suitability needs to calculate a site’s current properties, attributes, constraints, and context. These include:

• Existing and planned transport networks and infrastructure
• Proximity to education and health facilities
• Impact on and access to the local environment
• Other, wider economic drivers  

We need a more sophisticated measure of site suitability in new community planning—not just what it is now but of its future potential. Spatial considerations and an appreciation that any suitable site would have access to water, energy, and nature were discussed. But there was also a strong view that site identification should be transport-led as well as land-led. Recognising goals on climate change and health—and the need for modal shift and increased active travel as outlined in our Bridging the Gap report—the discussion challenged traditional ways of thinking. The role of cars and traditional forms of transport must change if we’re to meet our climate goals, so accommodating this is essential in new community planning. 

Equally, the group hoped that the New Towns Taskforce would help to identify ‘low hanging fruit’—current schemes in the system that can be progressed rapidly. One example is Lands Improvement Holdings major urban extension project at Linmere in Bedfordshire. The project is set to deliver up to 5,150 new homes alongside new parkland and community infrastructure. More than a decade of planning and development is complete. We hope that we can quickly unlock further delivery. 

5. We must collectively make a strong case for new communities  

Even if we deliver well-connected, viable new places, people must want to live there. The group’s view was that our sector can do more to champion the benefits from placemaking, development, and new communities. There was agreement at the roundtable on the need for good landscape design in new community planning and creating places where people want to live.

We need to engage deeper with existing stakeholders and neighbours. This will make the development process collaborative and representative. Then we can create communities will work for everyone—those there now and in the future.

It was suggested that we start to think of good new communities like a sandwich. Top-down vision and direction is essential. And we also need bottom-up local involvement and support.  

But what will make it all stick together are the specialists and practitioners in the middle of new community planning, balancing competing objectives so it works in practice. They have all the knowledge and tools required to make the new administration’s vision a reality. 

More conversations, more collaboration

For this new generation of new communities to succeed, we need to draw on the lessons of the past. We must harness the political imperative. And then work with policymakers to share new community planning expertise across the private and public sectors.

This roundtable was the first of what we hope will be an ongoing conversation. We want to bring leading thinkers and decision-makers together to talk about new communities.

The industry is brimming with ideas and knowledge. When you put that together with political leadership, there’s every opportunity to make this next generation of new communities a lasting example of the best of placemaking.

From our discussions, we’re motivated to play our part in new community planning. Yes, we do think we can turn that ambition into delivery and reality.

Participants: 

• Chair: Ben Copithorne – Managing Director, Camargue 
• Joanna Averley – Chief Planner, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government 
• Chris Curtis MP – Member of Parliament for Milton Keynes North 
• Andrew Davie – Assistant Director, Development & Infrastructure, Central Bedfordshire Council 
• John Eldridge – Group Director of Project Management, Urban & Civic 
• Tom Hegan – Partner, Turner Morum 
• Michael Knott – Director, Stantec 
• Hannah Leary – Planning Director, Stantec 
• Fionnuala Lennon – Head of New Settlements & Garden Communities, Homes England 
• Michael Parkinson – Director, Stantec 
• Simon Ricketts – Partner, Town Legal 
• Dinny Shaw – Head of Planning, Places for People 
• Mark Skilbeck – UK Planning Director, Taylor Wimpey 
• Andrew Taylor – Group Planning Director, Vistry Group 
• Kathryn Turner – Planning Director, Lands Improvement Holdings