sustainability

Feilden Clegg Bradley Architects won the competition to design a sustainable living quarter in London's New Cross Gate in February 2006. The New Deal for Communities New Cross Gate sponsored the design competition based on a brief to provide health, educational, community, creative and performing arts facilities together with a new public square and residential units. The project is one of the Mayor's 100 Public Spaces Programme

Supported by CIPFA, the LGA and the IDeA, Financing Local Futures is a web-based resource designed to help those involved in local government financial decision-making to develop their own organisations' contributions to sustainable development.

Many relief roads have been built with seemingly little or no thought given to what will happen when the town or city centre they skirt needs to expand, says John Dales...

Juliet Carpenter reflects on her three days spent at the Summit last month and wonders whether she gained anything else apart from a suitcase full of publications. It was most certainly a significant gathering, with around 2,000 delegates, mostly UK-based, a great many drawn from the private sector, but with a fair representation from various public sector bodies, central Government and Whitehall, local authorities, and the spectrum of public agencies, from RDAs through English Partnerships and the Housing Corporation, to representatives from the UDCs

At Chelmsford Borough Council's recent Beacon open day on improving the quality of the built environment, the council's chief executive made a statement which would have been startling to many of the urban designers and planners present.

James Dark investigates why Chelmsford Borough Council won the Beacon Award for the Quality in the Built Environment and its success in achieving high quality design.

Whenever a conference is held to discuss delivering sustainable communities, the usual suspects of Poundbury andBedZED are generally trotted out as exemplars and there is much hand wringing about why these sort of projects can't be delivered on a wider basis. However, the tone of the latest meeting of the Associate Parliamentary Group for Design and Innovation was rather different.

For several years the UK government has been promoting brownfield land as the development site of choice, most boldly with the 60% sustainability target for new housing to be built on brownfield sites by 2008 in Planning for the Communities of the Future (February 1998). This push to increase brownfield development was strongly reinforced with the sequential planning test once used to curb the spread of out of town shopping, now being applied to brownfield land as set out inPlanning Policy Guidance Note No.3: Housing, PPG3 Housing (2000)paragraphs 22 and 23 and Annex C.