Housing-led Regeneration

 

01.10

Barry Munday

Article for Planning Magazine.

Think of your favourite town or city and then think of a place within it. The chances are that it will not be a shopping mall, an office campus or a civic centre. It will probably contain a mix of uses including residential. Vibrant towns and cities rely on people, activity and movement. More often than not that activity will happen throughout 18 hours of any day.

We got this badly wrong in the 1960s and 70s when we segregated our housing into estates on the edge of town or within the inner suburbs. My career over the past few years has been spent in picking up the pieces in one `regeneration’ project after another. Early efforts at housing-led regeneration simply saw the task as re-providing homes in different and hopefully more suitable forms for families. We retreated from Corbusian visions of towers in parkland to more traditional forms of terrace housing, often lowering the density in the process. But little else changed. The same or similar people lived there and were no more integrated into the wider community than previously. In terms of built-form we often created some singularly inappropriate suburban models within the city.

Gradually Government realised that the whole business of regeneration was a lot more complex and that segregated communities would never work. The whole place-making agenda also changed, spurred on by organisations such as the Urban Villages movement and later by Richard Rogers Urban Renaissance report. The basis for funding also changed. Rather than allocate huge sums of public money to replicate the failures of the past, public and private sectors were encouraged to join forces to see how best to learn from each other and to lever in the maximum private investment for the minimum public funding.

The system also became more competitive, with only the most effective local authorities being allocated funding. An early example of this model was Hulme in Manchester where we were involved in designing one of the early phases of what was to become the first major housing regeneration scheme in Manchester. Visiting the area again recently I was struck by how segregated the design still appears. Hulme’s ‘High Street’ in fact comprises a number of large retail shed outlets sitting in a sea of car parking and is nothing like a traditional town or city.

So the agenda needed to move on and the lessons of ‘Urban Renaissance’ taken more seriously. Guidance eventually came through in the form of PPG3 which set a new agenda of ‘joined up’ thinking on housing. It began to preach the messages of mixed-tenure and mixed use. Only now are we beginning to understand how to put together effective area-wide regeneration with housing as the key (but not the only) component. To do this requires a wide range of skills; much wider than is within the normal span of a single organisation. Effective and sustainable regeneration relies on a mix of the physical, economic and social which come together as a proposal only after many iterations and extensive consultation.

Key to any project is the local authority which must involve and bring on side all of its interested departments. Estates, planning, housing, highways all need to be pulling in the same direction, ideally spurred on by visionary leadership at Chief Executive and Council Leader level.

On the consultant side, PRP has developed a multi-disciplinary approach which is often led by project managers from a non-design discipline. They may come from a local authority or private development background and can identify the key drivers behind the project. Without proper understanding of the financial and political issues the project will not get off on the right footing and much time can be wasted in proposing the undeliverable.

Once this framework is understood the design team can begin their work. This will involve thorough, on-the-ground analysis by photographic survey, observation and consultation. Frequently, housing development of the 60s or 70s will have obliterated earlier road patterns at the cost of good connections with the wider area. Historic maps will often provide a clue as to how any area developed and how connectivity and permeability can be regained.

Monolithic local authority housing will frequently have created a downward economic and social spiral within an area and new life and spending power needs to be injected. At Plymouth Grove (the UK’s first housing PFI in Manchester) we established that the demand for social rented housing was in decline and that the local authority was able to release approximately half the site for new, private sector, development. This allowed us to propose radical change to the street patterns, design an integrated mix of tenures and effectively change the character of the area. The local shopping parade was badly sited and in a terminal state, but by moving its location to the main road frontage and combining it with community uses, we were able to create a new focus for the area which, because of the increased spending power of the residents, would be sustainable.

Some of our recent regeneration projects have not started from a housing perspective. At Seven Sisters in Haringey we were initially appointed by the New Deal for Communities to look at the environment of the area. In fact we found that although the area contained several local authority estates, the real issue was the poor quality of the short term private sector rented accommodation and how all the housing functioned in terms of access, open space and community safety.

Our work in Somerstown, Portsmouth, started as a community based masterplan. The area lacked any kind of focus and was dominated by poor post-war public sector housing. It was disconnected from the adjacent city centre by an inappropriate dual carriageway. Schools and play facilities were inadequate as was the local public transport. Our proposals were for a careful series of interventions to knit together the area. The main concept was to humanise the dual carriageway, lining it with homes and shops. Running at right angles to this would be a sequence of linked spaces including a new town square, health and community buildings and replacement housing. The whole proposal was carefully costed using our in-house resources and the deliverability of the component parts was checked in terms of decanting and programming.

It is our belief that housing-led regeneration will only work if it is undertaken in this painstaking and sensitive way. It is not about grand architectural gestures (although sometimes these can be used to generate interest), but about fully understanding the issues and taking local residents and stakeholders along with the proposals.