By ITP
Why are transport planners talking about place making?
Integrated Transport Planning was formed 24 years ago, with the name encapsulating the vision that transport needs to be properly integrated with planning to deliver great places. We remain committed to that vision today and have set out below our thinking on how to deliver it for Garden Communities and New Towns, as well as explaining how ITP have developed a series of tools to help deliver truly vision-led transport planning.
Are we delivering great places?
The conventional stages of the development process for strategic sites are pretty well rehearsed. Find available and deliverable land, allocate the site, do some due diligence, find a developer to plan it, and then, onboard all the other technical consultants needed to prepare a planning application. It’s functioning to some degree – new places are getting built, and people are being given the opportunity to move into new homes up and down the country.
Despite this, we believe that the current system isn’t delivering the best outcomes possible and too often the places built are fuelling climate change; perpetuating inequalities and social exclusion; delivering low value for money for people and local authorities; and resulting in poor quality places and an inadequate contribution towards the national housing shortage.
Now more than ever, in the face of the climate emergency, cost of living crisis and political and planning system upheaval, each of these issues is surely right at the top of all of our agendas. So what can we do differently?
What are the ingredients for success?
We have done a lot of work around the scale needed to deliver great places, as well where and how they should be delivered. These are critical factors and if they’re not right, the chances of delivering great places are reduced. We have been part of some really progressive teams working to break the mould. Our experience suggests that successful and sustainable developments are the product of a small number of very important building blocks, all requiring consideration at the first visioning of a development proposition.
Thinking about these as the building blocks of successful places; without one, it all crumbles. Consider, for example…
- If we work against the grain of the landscape, we lose a place’s identity and fight (literally) an uphill battle to squeeze in homes, gardens and infrastructure;
- If we ignore blue and green corridors, we risk removing important natural habitats; and
- If we don’t prioritise integrated, direct and sustainable transport networks into an attractive public realm, people come to rely on expensive road infrastructure, and we lock in less active lifestyles, congestion and car dominated places.
Failing on any of these fronts also builds resistance in existing communities for future projects. Would the push back to major growth be so fierce if most people’s experiences of new development were of high-quality places that provided services of genuine use to the wider community?
We are always learning and always thinking about how to do things better. Inspired by our involvement in Garden Communities such as Harlow and Gilston Garden Town and Tendring Colchester Borders Garden Community, we have condensed our experience into a range of tools that can deliver the best outcomes for a site, informing a robust masterplan and respond to the potential challenges identified above. These include a Multi-Criteria Assessment Toolkit to test the local transport network, a Transport Measures Toolkit to formulate viable transport strategies and a Mode Shift Model that can quickly demonstrate what the outcomes might be of the transport strategy. These tools can address the challenges presented at every stage of the planning process, which we call ‘vision-led’ transport planning (read our blog here). As a result, almost every stage of the planning and delivery of strategic sites can be re-imagined.
What is the opportunity of strategic development?
Unlike smaller infill or bolt-on development, there are lots of ways in which strategic development sites – if located in the right place – allow us to address risks, and plan and build better. Large scale developments in the form of Garden Communities and New Towns often present a perfect opportunity to lay these foundations robustly, especially in terms of transport:
ITP, and our parent company RoyalHaskoning DHV, specialise in planning, designing and delivering every aspect of mobility strategies and movement networks needed to support great new places, right from the initial planning stages up to construction and delivery.
If you need fresh ideas, a robustly evidenced ‘vision-led’ transport strategy and the people to deliver it who thrive in multi-disciplinary teams, then get in touch! We can add real creative value to any project, alongside industry leading technical capability. Our work spans all aspects of the planning process, delivered by professionals with a passion for what they do.
ITP’s Nicola Siddall and Geoff Burrage will be at the Garden Communities conference on the 13th of September to talk about where to go next with your Garden Community or New Town. In the meantime, you can read about some of the developments we’ve helped shape: Local Plans & Infrastructure – Integrated Transport Planning (itpworld.net).
The post Garden Communities and New Towns: delivering great places – what’s the role of transport planning? appeared first on Built Environment Networking.
