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Assuming you don’t spend spare moments pleasure-reading your way through Planning Inspectorate letters you might have missed this about the Swiss Cottage tower. Buried away in its multiplex arguments is more evidence of the profound and systemic ‘design disconnect’ which divides most design and development professional from the general public and which the current conceptually-flawed British planning system not only fails to manage but actively exacerbates and exaggerates.  Read our article here or here.
Across London residents are becoming increasingly frustrated by the ways in which the planning process has ceased to represent most people's preferred housing form. But there are signs that the Direct Planning Revolution might just be beginning...
So, from left and right, from community organisers to national think tanks there is a growing realisation that resident preferences need more constructively to influence what gets built in London and how we build it. Here are some recent examples.
  • On 25 January London Citizens’ Housing Manifesto 2016 called for “a decision-making steering group made up of local people affected by a development must be included to work alongside the developer.” We were delighted to sit on the independent panel that fed into London Citizens’ manifesto
  • On 17 February the Centre for Social Justice (chaired by member of Create Streets network John Moss) published Home Improvements, a Social Justice Approach to Housing Policy which reflected the importance of design and of co-design for estate regeneration and picked up on much of our research and evidence
The Mayor's Design Advisory Group recently published their report, Growing London. Importantly, for the first time in a GLA document, this conceded that ‘policies in the London Plan and associated Supplementary Planning Guidance’ might have unfortunate intended consequences on what we build including ‘poor quality street frontage [and] the “poor door” phenomenon.’ Much more to be done but a very welcome step in the right direction…(We gave evidence to the Advisory Group last year)

The House of Lords Select Committee on National Policy for the Built Environment have just published ‘Building Better Places’. This (very rightly) encouraged streamlining and simplification of the neighbourhood planning process, steps to encourage the establishment of neighbourhood forums in areas with low take-up and urged the Government to ‘give stronger weight to emerging neighbourhood plans in planning policy’ and to make ‘good community engagement a material consideration in major planning decisions.’ (We submitted written evidence to the Committee and our research was also cited by other witnesses in oral evidence to them.)

Up and down London Neighbourhood Planning is (finally) starting to take off. Our research shows there are now 44 Neighbourhood Forums in inner London and community groups are also increasingly taking design matters into their own hands – here is an important recent example from Cressingham Gardens in Lambeth.
 
We hope that our work is an important part of this Direct Planning Revolution. We are currently working with three Neighbourhood Forums and one community to help them form a Neighbourhood Forum to impact a likely estate regeneration. We will be shortly be unveiling some of our recent community design work in South London. We will also imminently be launching a public design competition for one prominent site. Meanwhile our work at Mount Pleasant for the local community to submit a Community Right to Build order continues. Watch this space for more…
On 16 February City Metric published an article by Create Streets’ Kieran Toms setting out our seven key challenges for good estate regeneration. Kieran argued that regeneration needs to make “better & popular places that...function as an integrated part of the city," and needs to properly, not tokenistically, engage the local community.
Other news from Create Streets
  • We e-published the short form of our London manifesto in a book of essays by Policy Exchange which you can read here. The long version is coming on 8th March. Thank you to Instinctif Partners for sponsoring our launch breakfast (no more places we fear!) and thank you to Chris Walker for editing down the short version.
  • Thank you to the Royal Society of Arts for publishing a call for evidence on our Economics of Place research. If you are interested in correlation analysis and valuation you can still book a place at our RSA round table discussion on 15 March !
  • The Government kicked off the Estate Regeneration Panel. Co-chaired by Lord Heseltine and Housing Minister Brandon Lewis it will be reporting to the Prime Minister and Communities Secretary Greg Clark. We are sitting on the 15 strong panel and are pleased to say there is a major focus on community engagement. We will continue to urge that this is done in the right way and with an understanding on the correlations between built form and wellbeing
  • We will shortly be announcing our support for a new University part time MA course in Applied Research in Urban Design. Get in touch if you would like full details when we have them….
  • We have launched our BIMBY service to support communities wishing to deploy the BIMBY toolkit from the Prince’s Foundation. We hope to use elements of this toolkit with a Neighbourhood Forum next month
  • You can book a place a talk being given by our Director at the London Society on 3rd May here
Many doors, narrow fronts. The most popular way to achieve high density city living but the London Plan needs to change. Please support our work here
DCLG Permission in Principle (PiP) Consultation
Finally, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) have opened a technical consultation on implementation of planning changes, which covers planning permission in principle (PiP). It asks respondents ten questions about the proposal including what the qualifying documents capable of granting permission in principle should be; whether PiP should apply to minor developments, and about community involvement. For those (like us) interested in such things, the full consultation is available here
Create Streets is a social enterprise encouraging the creation of more homes in conventional terraced streets rather than complex multi-storey buildings. We do this via research, working with communities, arguing for policy change and consulting to developers, councils and landowners. 

Create Streets Ltd company number: 08332263

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