A better way to masterplan garden towns and villages
New garden towns are needed to meet UK housing targets. But developers face numerous challenges when building them, leading to extra costs and delays. Masterplanner Patrick Clarke and cost manager Paul Wilcock have developed an integrated, evidence-led way to masterplan garden towns, leading to more efficient and cost-effective delivery.
The government committed in its 2017 Autumn Budget statement to building 300,000 new homes per year in England by 2021, including the construction of five new garden towns.
While this could bring the UK a step closer to bridging the national housing gap, building new large-scale communities on greenfield sites is a complex and challenging process. Often, garden towns and villages cost significantly more and take longer than planned to design and build.
Key challenges include: a long and uncertain planning and development process; public objection issues; assessing and mitigating potential environmental impacts; and difficulties in accurately forecasting short-, medium- and long-term physical and community infrastructure needs.
Successful delivery depends on environmental, cost, planning, engineering and construction teams working together across disciplines. Key to this is creating a more sophisticated, holistic masterplan framework.
A more integrated design approach
We have developed the ‘Masterplanning ie’ methodology to help developers overcome typical challenges and resolve associated risks so they can deliver garden towns and villages within timescales and resources available. The ie element stands for integrated and evidence-led masterplanning.
Our integrated, evidence-led approach involves starting with a longer initial briefing and evidence-gathering process, leading to smother masterplan completion in less overall elapsed time compared to a more conventional masterplanning approach. It also brings together around 20 different professional skill sets typically required to develop a new community masterplan, collectively addressing the environmental, economic, social and physical aspects of sustainable large-scale development.
‘Masterplanning ie’ in practice
We’ve used the approach to gain approval to develop an 8,000-hectare site in Manydown, Hampshire, UK, into 3,400 homes, part of Basingstoke’s long-term development plans as one of the government’s identified nine garden towns across England. Here we were able to speed up the overall masterplanning process whilst developing it on a robust evidence base.
We’ve analysed the key challenges when designing and building a garden town or village to create a cost model as part of our ‘Masterplanning ie’ approach, that helps ensure efficient and cost-effective delivery. It’s based on a new garden village with 5,000 residential units in a 400-hectare greenfield site in the South East of England.
Download it here.