Layering Ingredients For New Towns – How Collective Past Experience Can Build Success For Future Generations
By Roland Karthaus
A great deal has changed since the first Garden Cities at the beginning of the Twentieth Century – the ways we assemble land, fund infrastructure and develop housing have clearly shifted. But the movement for Garden and New Towns has always been about people and places first and building them well depends on understanding how we combine all the key ingredients to enable good lives and successful places.
It was a great pleasure therefore to contribute to the Housing Forum report: 'New lessons for new towns - What can we learn from large-scale settlements under development to shape the next generation of new towns?' which brings together a wide range of disciplines and expertise to generate deep discussion about what works and how to avoid pitfalls when bringing together housing, infrastructure and other elements. The case studies bring these lessons to life, illustrating how different challenges and opportunities play out in different places and the driving forces behind them.
What this report shows – and what we know at ICC from deep experience of the work - is that there is no single recipe for a great New Town and no individual case study has all the answers. The value of this experience is collective. We can understand all the layers that need to be brought together so that places work for the people that live in them. Whilst the physical layers of infrastructure, housing, landscape and facilities are incredibly important, the non-physical layers are equally so and their phasing and integration with the built environment is crucial.
My colleague Lucy Webb has written about the importance of participation and democratic engagement in the development of New Towns – a subject we’re exploring with the think tank Demos. This is about something much deeper than allowing people a say in the design of their places: it means creating structures for stewardship that endure over time. The most successful places are those that are loved and looked after by their communities, but that doesn’t mean simply handing over a maintenance burden to new residents after delivery. It means building participatory practices into the commissioning of New Towns from the earliest stages. We’re doing this at Inner Circle Consulting where we’re working with Cornwall Council to create the local stewardship body for Langarth Garden Village, ensuring the future of the place before spades hit the ground.
A common challenge of New Town stewardship is: how do we create representation for people who are not yet there? In Langarth, there are local parishes who can provide that local representation ahead of new residents. Nowhere exists in a vacuum and many of the 12 recommended New Town locations in the recent taskforce report are in or adjoining existing urban areas. The key is creating the structures for community representation, with the people and organisations that do exist in a place and ensuring that they are sufficiently open and democratic to accommodate the participation of future residents.
Everything I’ve written here applies to any development at scale: the ingredients of a successful place are found in that place itself. Our task is to ensure we enable the layering of those ingredients early enough in the process so they aren’t left out. The New Towns programme is an exciting opportunity to create great new places – yet they will include only a portion of the housing we need. The thinking and lessons learned from the Garden and New Towns movement should be applied to everywhere we develop new places.