Design quality will be vital to the new planning regime in which the Government is insisting we say ‘yes’ to proposals for sustainable development; that was the message from over 60 delegates at a summit meeting jointly hosted by MADE and Homes and Communities Agency.

Klaus Bondham, former Mayor of Copenhagen, talked about how that city was striving to become a world class sustainable city.  This was being driven through two strategies: for an ‘eco-metropolis’ and ‘a metropolis for people’.  But these documents were not simply high level visions with ambitious targets. They were followed through in a whole series of goals such as ‘By 2015, Copenhageners will spend 20% more time in urban spaces than they do today’. 

Klaus talked about the one area where Copenhagen has already been spectacularly successful; in encouraging use of bicycles.  Klaus said: “The lesson that I have learned during my years in urban politics is that to achieve results like these  you need to have political will, courage and stamina. You got to have measureable targets and transparent reporting. You need very concrete policies, the help, support and advocacy of skilled professionals – and a lot of public participation and debate. This is how you create a sustainable city!”

Louise Wyman, an Area Manager and urban designer for the HCA, talked about the current context in which the Agency is seeking to deliver housing.  The HCAs design and quality standards and a minimum requirement for Code for Sustainable Homes Level 3 remain in place.  Louise explained the practices they had developed for encouraging quality design in the Affordable Housing Programme.

The framework for thinking about this is described in the Urban Design Compendium which was produced by the HCA’s predecessor organisations.  Creating places for people, enriching the existing, making connections, mixing use and form, working with the landscape, managing the investment and designing for change are the seven principles that guide their work and Louise showed examples of how these principles had been put into practice at the Meadows, in Nottingham, Upton in Northampton and locally at Park Central, Birmingham.

Peter Taylor, a partner in DLA Piper concentrated on changes in the planning system.  He argued that the new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) would not be the ‘developers charter’ that the Daily Telegraph and campaigning organisations had claimed.  Drawing on his knowledge of planning history he reminded the summit that there had always been a presumption in favour of development at the heart of planning policy and that common definitions of sustainability were available such as that provided by the Brundtland Commission in 1987.

The range of factors that planning authorities were being asked to consider in the NPPF had not changed, and even where local authorities had not got their core strategies in place they could refer to a range of saved policies from their previous local plans.  For planning authorities that wanted to push for high quality design as part of their definition of sustainable development there was ammunition to rely on in the NPPF.  The new framework even suggested the use of design codes provided these were not unnecessarily prescriptive.

David Tittle, Chief Executive of MADE, focussed on the Government’s objective of achieving growth through the planning system.  He put forward four reasons why design quality was essential for achieving a more successful equality.  The first two were about the role that the quality of development and the quality of the public realm can have in improving property values.  The third reason was to do with retaining educated, skilled and ambitious people in an area to help grow the economy.  Quality of place is a key factor in achieving this objective and is summed up by the phrase “people who can choose better places to live”.

Finally David drew on the work of leading economists, as well as illustrations from Birmingham, to show that dense and complex urban places in our cities and towns are the drivers of our economy.  Achieving this type of environment for business growth relies on design quality.

The summit then broke into four discussion groups which approached the question of how to deliver quality sustainable development from different angles. 

The housing group felt that the mechanism for allocating land for housing was currently not working and that an integrated approach was need to infrastructure.  In order to say ‘yes’ to sustainable development we needed to say what we were saying ‘no’ to.  They talked about the need to challenge the practices of the six suppliers who build most of the housing in the UK.  They discussed the question of internal space standards, which, as RIBA has recently pointed out, are among the lowest in Europe, but the current culture of the housing market means that land is used inefficiently, using a lot of space to create small houses.

The sustainability group discussed how reducing planning policy to 52 pages would put pressure on local policy to fill in the details.  This required local definitions of the ‘sustainable development’ and needed different local authorities to undertake their own analysis of what makes their place sustainable or unsustainable, and therefore what issues need to be addressed by local policy.  Copenhagen had developed the idea of the ‘eco-metropolis’ but cities, towns and villages needed to find their own way of encapsulating their ambitions for sustainability and quality.

The tensions between localism and growth were discussed by the third group.  After examining what was meant by both localism and growth, they concluded that for localism to be made compatible with growth, leadership and vision were needed for an area.  There is currently a lack of examples of how local action has lead to more successful economies and resources and expert support is need to help communities achieve this aim. Drawing on Klaus Bondam’s presentation about Copenhagen the group were impressed about how many different stakeholders had signed up to and were working for the vision to transform the place.  Leadership seemed to be the key.

Perhaps the answers lie in the concept of ‘smart growth’ which was discussed by a forth group. Coming from the USA, the idea of smart growth was a way of demonstrating that urbanist ideas actually reinforced economic performance.  There were a lot of overlaps between the definition of smart growth and that of sustainable development with density, the mix of uses, and building on existing resources seen as key ideas.

As the summit reconvened the discussion turned to whether we could achieve high quality sustainable development with ‘less planning’.  Some had their doubts but perhaps what is needed is ‘smart planning’: concentrating on the issues that will really make a difference to quality and sustainability.  The Government is making us think for ourselves,which requires locally-specific visions, standards, definitions and policies.

Download the presentations

Klaus Bondam presentation