strategic urban design and site allocations
We need a paradigm shift towards compact, sustainable and distinctive urban growth.
- Strategic thinking from the outset can prioritise identity, sustainability, accessibility and public health to create more holistic and resilient places.
- Car-dependent planning and poor site allocation weaken town form and negatively impact health and economic outcomes (1.).
- Shaping growth requires a structured approach: building a robust evidence base, openly testing options, and defining a shared vision with communities.
- Multidisciplinary Design Reviews bring design thinking at the outset and help integrate sites into their broader context, ensuring long-term sustainability.
- Larger developments should be seen as regenerative opportunities, delivering social, cultural, and ecological benefits.
considering places as a whole
The foundation to successful growth in Cambridge is Cambridge Futures (1999) an ambitious participatory strategic planning exercise that led to the adoption of a growth plan for the city in 2004. (More on this in a later post). The UDG report Achieving Good Town Form (2024) makes a critique of how prioritising a ‘call for sites’ doesn’t readily lead to coherent planing. Instead, they describe a three stage process of evolving a town vision and plan:
- Building a sound evidence base.
- Exploring and testing options – being open.
- Defining a town vision with the community.
Suggested priorities are to; have an understanding of how a layout will contribute to the settlement history and shape urban form, make sure good transport infrastructure linking to school/work is deliverable, define a clear landscape framework, that works with a legible primary street network (with an emphasis on streets and their relationship to topography) and shape an accessible neighbourhood structure with good connectivity to existing streets and paths.
learning from strategic Design Review
Design West and Design Midlands have been supporting local authorities to make a Strategic Design Review of key sites. This process can inform site allocation policies making sure that design is considered from the outset. Ongoing learning from these multidisciplinary reviews is to;
- Make meaning in shaping places.
- Enable net zero, nature recovery and sustainable mobility.
- See sites as destinations in the wider context.
These reviews also reflected on the process of setting out a high level vision – what’s distinctive about the site and how can local communities and stakeholders be involved in shaping the vision? What’s the long-term view?
shifting the paradigm?
Larger sites have a regenerative potential, creating a new destination in the ‘town’ and can improve access to and quality of amenity in wider area. It’s important to consider them from the inside out and from the outside in.
Places need to be more hybrid, self-contained and adaptable – integrating social/cultural activity and employment. Should we even consider ourselves to be post – suburban in our thinking about place?
Generating nature recovery creating ‘bigger better and more joined up’ landscapes is an opportunity (Lawton Review). Build evidence around the four ‘ologies’- typology, ecology, hydrology and archaeology (Peter Neal).
Design transport and movement to promote modal shift to walking, cycling and public transport, break free from the default of offering 2/3 (land hungry) car spaces per dwelling.
Make the best use of valuable land, quantify whole life carbon early on and consider strategic shifts such as; using more compact and denser built form, reducing land profiling and grey infrastructure.
a situated conceptual framework
Across an area its important to create consistent visualisation at a strategic scale. Teams who worked collaboratively across landscape and urban design to set out a conceptual framework for their initial approach are often the most convincing. The RTPI & RSPB research from 2022 Cracking the Code, Designing for nature recovery depicts a fictional District Design Code that captures how sites can contribute to town form and landscape character to shape and extend the identity of places.
The learning from strategic design review was also captured in and RTPI webinar – De-risking site allocations (link below).
References:
- Kiberd, E. & Stranak, B. (2024) Trapped Behind the Wheel, How England’s New Builds Lock Us Into Car Dependency – New Economics Foundation
- Evans, R. (April 2024) Achieving Good Town Form, Strategic Urban Design, Laying the foundations for successful place-making. UDG
- RTPI & RSPB (2022)Cracking the Code, Designing for nature recovery
- RTPI West Midlands RTPI East Midlands & Design:Midlands De-risking site allocations – Webinar 3
Title image – Cambridge Structure Plan 2004.
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February, 2025