22 COMMENT
ACHIEVING QUANTITY AND QUALITY
Patrick Mooney
Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance magazine, asks: has good design been squeezed out by our eff orts to increase housing supply?
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Too many housing estates are designed for nowhere in particular. They can be soulless and dispiriting.” That rather damning verdict was written by a Government Minister responsible for planning in an offi cial guide to better housing design.
It was in fact written just over 20 years ago by Lord Falconer (when he briefl y held the reins as Housing Minister), but seeing it again a week or two back, I was struck by how similar it is to many of the comments I regularly hear made about more recently built housing developments across the country. So can we achieve quantity without compromising on quality?
CAN WE ACHIEVE QUANTITY WITHOUT COMPROMISING ON QUALITY?
WWW.HBDONLINE.CO.UK
Good design is often said to be a matter of personal taste but we all recognise that poor or bad design in housing will very quickly have a detrimental impact on residents and local communities and whether they succeed and thrive, or not. The Government’s new Levelling Up policy recognises this issue and even goes further by saying bad housing damages our health, and can contribute towards years being taken off our life expectancy. Therefore good design and construction should logically be something we all aspire to when planning or building new housing schemes. With so much new housing required to meet our current and future needs there is a lot of pressure on local authorities and developers to get properties built as fast as possible, but mistakes can be extremely costly and none of us wants to see relatively new housing demolished within just a few years of construction. Cutting corners to speed things up rarely produces sustainable and long lasting solutions to any problem, including a housing shortage.
BLAND ARCHITECTURE Fast forward 20 years from Lord Falconer’s withering assessment and one of the country’s leading academics and teachers in planning
and urban design has made similar criticisms of England’s new housing, describing its quality as “generally mediocre or poor.” In a report written for the Place Alliance, Professor Matthew Carmona of University College London has concluded that housebuilders are (still) churning out sub- standard housing schemes, creating poor living conditions for residents. He describes bland architecture, with estates dominated by access roads and parking spaces at the expense of green areas and playgrounds. Other failings include few public transport links and a lack of amenities such as shops, pubs and cafes. Over the past couple of years Professor Carmona has conducted research on volume housebuilding and surveyed 2,500 households on their attitudes and experiences. This had a particular resonance during lockdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, which forced many of us to stay inside our homes for extended periods. It showed that one in six of us said we were either ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘very uncomfortable’ in our homes during lockdown.
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