ENLIGHTENED PLANNING 109
increasing number of socially responsible developers. See the case studies for more details on these timely projects.
Tese schemes are welcome evidence of a sea change in local authority thinking that was first flagged when a Norwich City Council- funded housing project won the Stirling Prize in 2019. Mikhail Riches’s Goldsmith Street knitted together sustainable homes and a proper community, while minimising energy consumption and abolishing fuel poverty. Norwich is planning to roll out other council-
‘Many in the built
environment professions have had the time, energy and opportunity to brainstorm a blueprint for the future.’
backed schemes aimed at improving quality of life, boosting sustainability and widening access. Te developers TOWN – which worked closely with Mole Architects and its co-housing client group to create the multiple award- winning Marmalade Lane initiative in Cambridge (see the July 2019 issue of FX) – has been offered a Norwich site for Angel Yard co-housing, designed by Archio, where it is hoped work will start on-site in early 2022. TOWN’s Neil Murphy agrees that a new mood is filtering through to the more enlightened
CASE STUDY EBBSFLEET GARDEN CITY
How do you build a new 15,000- home community around creativity? Ebbsfleet Garden City (EGC) – the UK’s first new garden city in 100 years – is committed to ‘placing culture and creativity at the heart of its community’, and aiming to generate 30,000 jobs in the new town in the process. With a completion date of 2035, the scheme’s originators, Ebbsfleet Development Corporation (EDC), know that it will stand or fail on the strength of the relationships it can nurture with existing residents in the area, and those it can forge with the residents and businesses it hopes to attract. Key to that is a strong sense of identity – as well as the right opportunity – for these diverse communities to get behind. Laura Bailey, EDC’s cultural development manager, says, ‘This is the first of a new generation of garden settlements, and the idea is to build on the principles of the original garden cities but look at what that means today. What does a vibrant and holistic 21st century new town look like? We are working in an existing urban context with a brownfield site, surrounded by quite old, established communities, such as Greenhithe, Northfleet and some smaller villages south of the A2.’ Unusually, though, the area has been demarcated as a planning boundary: existing communities within it were able to opt in or out of this regeneration project. ‘It’s a slightly odd situation,’ says Bailey. ‘We’re the designated planning authority within the red line boundary, but from a placemaking point of view that boundary doesn’t exist. It is important for us to work with and for existing communities, otherwise this big thing is landing right on top of them.
‘The idea is it will have a
hugely positive impact. Community engagement is a really important part of our work. We are committed to be as community-led as we possibly can, and to establish some best practice processes for engaging local stakeholders and residents and others in the design process. We’re creating a place that people want and need, and facilities
that people want and need rather than – as a group of professionals – deciding that among ourselves.’ To help embed creativity into the very DNA of this new place, the scheme is benefitting from investment under the wider Creative Estuary umbrella; a consortium of public sector and cultural organisations including the South East Local Enterprise Partnership, Kent and Essex County Councils, the Greater London Authority and the 11 local authorities through which the Thames meanders on its journey out to the sea. With funding from this programme, in late 2020, EDC appointed architects RCKa and AOC to explore options for co-locating and co-producing new cultural facilities within the emerging site. Both practices have great track records for evolving buildings and spaces in partnership with users, but this role is unique, as RCKa director Dieter Kleiner has said, because it brings together ‘master planning and strategic placemaking with community participation and economic regeneration expertise’. The two practices will be working alongside Landscape Architects Studio, Fourth Street, The Planning Lab and Studiomakers to identify the community’s skills, needs, aspirations and character, as well as help to shape places for it to express its ambitions. In this, those organisations will be building on suggestions from Sarah Wigglesworth Architects (SWA)’s initial civic infrastructure study, completed back in May 2019. SWA and Turner Works are also in charge of identifying meanwhile uses – again, under the Creative Estuary umbrella.
Current civic investment proposed includes eight new schools, a hierarchy of civic buildings, seven city parks and a promised 44% of the landscape will be green and blue space. EDC is fast-tracking a public transport network centred around Ebbsfleet International station. There will also be a major health innovation and education campus, three employment zones in Northfleet, and a theme park has put in an
application for planning on the Swanscombe peninsula. As for the project’s geographical identity, the location, in a former quarry, is an advantage: anyone who has encountered Bluewater Shopping Centre – in the next quarry along – will know the craggy, milky-white moonscape that these special conditions present. This offers great scope to conjure a distinct sense of place, which has been explored in the initial overall master plan by Maccreanor Lavington and Aecom, and fine-tuned in the Ebbsfleet Central master plan by Weston Williamson + Partners, Allies and Morrison and German practice Jott Architekten – which is one of five neighbourhoods that will emerge across the site. But EDC has inherited housing sites with existing planning permissions, which means its ability to dictate design and quality criteria will be limited; already, around 2,500 homes have been completed, and about 5,000 new residents have moved in, with detailed planning permission for a further 3,600 homes.
Part of the challenge is how to knit these older schemes into the visual and social fabric of the new vision. ‘We are moving forward to make the best possible place we can using the right approaches,’ says Bailey. ‘That’s where our team comes in. Originally, there was no placemaking team when it was first set up. That has evolved over the last few years.
‘Some of the work we started doing was through an NHS- funded project, because EGC was designated a healthy new town in a major national pilot project funded by the NHS to look at ways to design health into the built environment, to encourage better, healthier lifestyles. This means everything from access to green space to having things going on in the community that can support people, [and] looking at new models of care. That NHS perspective still underpins what we’re doing. The idea is that this is a holistic place which offers you work, recreation, home, education, leisure – ideally all within walking distances.’
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