The government has pledged to reform the planning system so that new garden cities can be built and one site at Ebbsfleet in Kent has already been identified.
The 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize, the second most lucrative economics awards after the Nobel Prize, asked entrants to design a visionary and economic garden city and received almost 300 entries from all over the world.
Now it has announced the shortlist of five finalists and revealed that a new poll shows that 74% of people believe garden cities are a good way to meet Britain’s need for more housing.
The five shortlisted designs, which were judged anonymously, are made up of entries from planning consultants Barton Willmore, housing development expert Chris Blundell, urban design specialists URBED, housing charity Shelter and planning company Wei Yang & Partners.
Miles Gibson, director of the Wolfson Economics Prize, said that if all five of the proposed garden cities were built, they would provide homes for 400,000 people and construction jobs for 400,000 workers.
‘There are opportunities to improve the quality of people’s lives by building garden cities, rather than tacking 50 odd houses here and 100 houses there on to the end of an existing settlement,’ he said.
‘We can’t continue shutting people up in what are the smallest homes in Europe at just 76 square metres. People are entitled to aspire to better quality housing for themselves and that does include a reasonable amount of outdoor space,' he added.
Gibson explained that a garden city must be green and have plenty of open space. ‘It has to be a mixed use place with jobs and offices and retail facilities to create a community. It needs to be well connected to the existing transport network but not necessarily so well connected that it becomes a commuter town. It’s got to have a life and an identity and a community of its own,’ he pointed out.
‘We haven’t done garden cities in the UK for 100 years and we haven’t done new towns in the UK for 40 years, so there’s no doubt there’s a skill and collective memory issue that would have to be addressed if any of these were actually to be built,’ added Gibson.
‘Nobody is expecting anything overnight and this takes careful planning. We hope that what the prize has done is make people feel it is possible. Our entrants all argue that this can be done and what it needs is a national political consensus that it should be done and then it will happen,’ he said.
Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, whose shortlisted design proposes a development at Stoke Harbour that could eventually accommodate 150,000 people, said that creating new garden cities is an essential step towards building the homes we need.
‘From families struggling to keep up with their housing costs to young couples seeing the dream of a home of their own slip away, we’re all feeling the effects of our housing shortage.,’ he explained.
Rising property prices are caused by a shortfall in new builds, according to Shelter, who say 250,000 homes need to be completed each year to meet demand. It said Britain is short of that target by about 100,000 houses a year.
‘New garden cities can’t solve the housing shortage on their own. They must be combined with other measures that will get us building the homes we need right now, from helping small and medium sized builders access the finance they need, to ensuring that land is made available for building new affordable homes,’ added Robb.
The Barton Willmore entry sets out a 10 point plan for the delivery of a new garden city, arguing for the development of a cross party consensus and the production of a National Spatial Plan to identify suitable locations for new garden cities. Garden City Mayors, heading up Garden City Commissions, would be appointed to champion garden cities and find specific locations for development.
Blundell, who is director of development and regeneration at Golding Homes, has entered in a personal capacity with the support of Golding Homes. His entry argues that a garden city should accommodate between 30,000 and 40,000 people, about the size of Letchworth, and that its delivery should be led by Garden City Development Corporations.
The URBED entry argues for the near doubling of an existing large town in line with garden city principles, to provide new housing for 150,000 people, about the size of Oxford or Canterbury, based on a fictional town called Uxcester.
Wei Yang & Partners put forward plans for an ‘arc’ beyond the London Green Belt stretching from Portsmouth to Oxford to Cambridge to Felixstowe as the best location for the development of new garden cities. It calls for the government to publish a New Garden Cities Strategy identifying broad ‘areas of search’ for suitable locations, with a 30 year timescale.
The finalists are now being asked to refine their submissions in the second round of the completion and have until 11 August to develop and resubmit their entries, from which the Judges will choose an overall winner for the £250,000 prize.
Meanwhile, leading housing and planning charity the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA) has launched a new document setting out what the Garden City principles mean in the 21st century, and calling on the government to play an active role in enabling and coordinating the delivery of inclusive and sustainable new communities.
The standards consolidate the key lessons learned from the TCPA's previous research into the challenges of delivering Garden Cities, explicitly detailing what each of the Garden Cities principles entails, and provide guidance on what we believe the principles should deliver to new communities. Later in the year, the TCPA will publish guidance on the practical implementation of the Garden Cities principles to offer additional clarity to local authorities, the private sector and communities interested in creating new Garden Cities.
‘With planning in England currently in a precarious state, we strongly believe that the Garden City principles can offer a framework for good planning for the benefit of all communities. We feel that it is vital that all who wish to be involved in the delivery of Garden Cities have a thorough understanding of what the principles mean today and how, with the correct level of preparation and organisation, they can be used to create the types of beautiful inclusive new places that can deliver significant benefits for current and future generations,’ said Diane Smith, TCPA interim chief executive.
According to Gerry Hughes, senior director of Planning Development and Regeneration at GVA said that while the government has identified potential sites where it believes new Garden Cities can be built, experience suggests there are a range of challenges holding up the delivery of these new developments.
‘The government's own policy briefing is light on details when it comes to how these challenges can be overcome,’ he said.
