How should New Towns be designed for long-term success

By refocusing our approach to development, a blueprint for great placemaking can be used to attract new communities, creating homes and vibrant towns where people want to live. Approaching the design of a new town holistically, as a comprehensive network of interrelated systems will offer overarching benefits, enhancing quality, speed of delivery and cost savings.

Incorporating social infrastructure and quality design is key, ensuring viability, economic growth, and community cohesion while enhancing wellbeing and reducing opposition. By consulting and using data analytics, community needs will direct the building of mixed-use towns where everyone can access vital amenities.

­­Accommodating large numbers of homes per new town requires consideration of density, housing size, and mix. Using an established framework of layouts can release time while achieving efficiently designed, quality neighbourhoods. Additionally, innovative approaches to off-site manufacturing provides more certainty to development pipelines, supporting industry and supply chain.

But how do we ensure they successfully integrate into existing towns, cities and regional networks? An early approach to integrated infrastructure planning for transport, utilities and energy provision reduces risk, provides certainty for the supply chain and opportunities for innovation.

New towns also present a unique opportunity to create sustainable communities, ensuring long term resilience, affordability and energy security. Factoring in Local Area Energy Plans and the implementation of sustainable energy solutions, reduces reliance on the grid and costs for residents.

It’s also vitally important that new towns are resilient to climate change, overheating, flooding, and extreme weather to reduce the impact of these events and enable communities to recover quickly. By taking a regenerative approach, which considers new towns in a holistic and comprehensive network of interrelated systems, we can develop thriving, inclusive neighbourhoods that replenish resources and realise long-term savings.

By supporting partnerships to prioritise ambition, understand local needs, reduce risk and enabling development certainty, we can create thriving places that consider design quality, sustainability, connectivity, climate resilience, and community wellbeing – bridging the challenges of scale, speed, viability and funding.

Our new towns strategy sets out how can we design and deliver new communities that will provide a long-term legacy of well-loved and resilient places, while delivering pragmatic design solutions that can be achieved within the funding mechanisms and timelines needed to mitigate our housing crisis.