suburbs

Are more compact, higher density and mixed use urban forms more environmentally sound, more efficient for transport, more economically viable and more socially beneficial?

Following five years of detailed analysis across five UK cities, the CityForm consortium came up with rather surprising insights. Professor Mike Jenks of the CityForm consortium explains its findings

This report was commissioned by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the Commission for the Built Environment (CABE) in order to examine the suburban context and discover what policy and practice solutions could be developed to enable suburbs to respond appropriately to the climate change, social cohesion, affordable housing and sustainable development ambitions laid out by Government.

For the purposes of this scoping study we have focused solely on the English context, but will extrapolate our findings to the wider UK context in subsequent work.

Avoiding a self-fulfilling prophecy that focuses on residential or retail-based development solutions is not simply a challenge for recently planned settlements. The critical problem is the extent to which existing suburbs can adapt for future growth. There is an urgent need for designers, planners and policy makers to recognise how suburbia contains a great variety of distinctive places for living and working.

Creating a ‘sense of place’ in suburban lower to medium density housing developments, where public transport is limited and streets are traditionally dominated by the car, remains a challenge for designers and policymakers. On the site of the former hospital at Harold Wood, Essex, developer Countryside Properties and architect and masterplanner Scott Brownrigg set out to create attractive new neighbourhoods defined by open spaces.