ALTERED ESTATES How to Reconcile Competing Interests in Estate Regeneration
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ALTERED ESTATES How to reconcile competing interests in estate regeneration 2016 ALTERED ESTATES How to reconcile competing interests in estate regeneration 3 Contents Foreword Lord Kerslake Introduction Recommendations Chapter 1 Appraising the options Chapter 2 Engaging communities Chapter 3 Getting the design right Chapter 4 Achieving sustainable outcomes Case studies Appendix: Superdensity the Sequel summary of recommendations About the authors ALTERED ESTATES HOW TO RECONCILE COMPETING INTERESTS IN ESTATE REGENERATION 4 ALTERED ESTATES HOW TO RECONCILE COMPETING INTERESTS IN ESTATE REGENERATION 5 Foreword Lord Kerslake We have a desperate need to build As we embark on yet another more homes of all types and tenures, Government led initiative therefore, it particularly in London. Despite the is timely and valuable to have this wise regeneration successes over the last and sensible report. The prerequisites two decades, we still have housing for successful regeneration are estates in urgent need of regeneration particularly powerful. These are long that could take more housing. What game, big investment, big return could possibly go wrong with putting projects. They must focus on great these together? placemaking with new homes as a part of this. Above all, they must have the Well the answer is quite a lot, to active engagement and support of the which a long list of well-intentioned existing residents. but ultimately unsuccessful initiatives bears testimony. Sometimes the failure I would strongly encourage anyone who is down to viability. In others, it is the is involved in regeneration to read this result of rejection by existing residents. report. We may make new mistakes in Whatever the reason, the outcome is the future but there is no need to carry the same. on repeating the old ones. ALTERED ESTATES HOW TO RECONCILE COMPETING INTERESTS IN ESTATE REGENERATION 6 Introduction Estate regeneration in the spotlight advise communities and local authorities on estate improvements soon after the last concrete panel was In the 1960s and 70s nearly three million homes craned into place in the mid-1970s. Since then we were built by local authorities in Britain. Most of them have worked under successive political initiatives and incorporated new ideas about town planning, the funding models to improve, remodel or replace dozens design of the home and methods of construction. of estates in London and around the UK. We have It is these estates which have been - and continue to seen what works and what does not. be - the main focus of subsequent major regeneration initiatives, including David Cameron’s recent In response to the renewed political focus on estate declaration of action on ‘sink estates’. regeneration, this report contains a distillation of our combined experience into a series of The Prime Minister accuses the worst estates of recommendations on how best to meet the challenges ‘entrenching poverty in Britain - isolating and trapping of today. One intended audience is Lord Heseltine’s many of our families and communities’. Like many Estates Regeneration Advisory Panel, although our observers he believes that non-traditional design interest is broader than the government’s focus on is a significant part of the problem. Regeneration the ‘100 worst estates’. We hope our work will also be specialists know that the issues are far more complex, of interest to communities, local authorities, housing but most would at least agree that design can associations, our developer clients and professional contribute to the social and economic success or colleagues, including other architects who have come failure of places. more recently into the challenging field of estate The four architectural practices behind this report regeneration. have been involved with the regeneration of housing estates for four decades. We started to CROSSWAYS ESTATE BEFORE EXTENSIVE REFURBISHMENT, TOWER HAMLETS ALTERED ESTATES HOW TO RECONCILE COMPETING INTERESTS IN ESTATE REGENERATION 7 Whose estate is it anyway? Managing and resolving this tension has been a key objective of community engagement for the past 40 There is another reason why we have produced this years. report at this time. With care, patience and respect we can and should There has always been tension between the priority be able to do both. We have managed it in the past, to be given to the wishes of existing residents and and there are many examples of successful outcomes the potential of estates to provide a greater range of in a set of case studies in the back of this publication. housing opportunity for the wider population, but now this has become politicised and polarised into two Estate regeneration and Superdensity fiercely opposed positions. Our last piece of collaborative work was Superdensity: In one corner are those who believe that housing the Sequel (2015), which explains how to create estates belong to those who live on them and only successful neighbourhoods at high density, and also their views should count in determining the future - cautions against what we call ‘hyperdensity’ - very and increasingly their preference is to be left alone. high densities above the top end of the London Plan In the other corner are those who regard housing guidance. We focused on the importance of street- estates as public assets, which local authorities based urban design in the creation of successful have a right and duty to use to meet wider needs mixed communities and the advantages of mid-rise - including the growing clamor for more homes, at over high-rise development for integration of mixed- affordable prices, for middle-income households. The tenures and control of management costs. All of this views of both camps deserve respect. has become very relevant to estate regeneration. Part of the reason for this polarisation is obvious As London struggles to build enough homes to keep to those who have been facilitating successful pace with demand, attention is increasingly turning estate regeneration for decades: it revolves to the regeneration of housing estates to provide around the concept of ‘balanced communities’. A more homes as well as better homes. Often estates genuinely balanced community will contain a wide were built to a low density, at a time when London’s range of housing types and tenures for a wide population was falling, which potentially allows them range of households across the spectrum of age, to be updated in ways that create many more homes, ethnicity, income, occupation and household size. mixed communities and a better place to live for those It will also balance the needs and aspirations of already inhabiting them. all the stakeholders, including existing tenants and leaseholders, and also ‘outsiders’ who would However, the reduction of public investment in like to settle in the area and invest in it if only the regeneration is transforming the well-tried mixed- opportunity was there. funding model (combining market investment with subsidy) into an increasing reliance on market-driven The perception of many existing residents - and their solutions. This means that the provision of new champions in parts of the media - is that estate affordable homes on estates is becoming mainly or regeneration is no longer delivering balance: the entirely dependent on cross-subsidy from homes for proportion of affordable to market homes is dwindling, sale. Therefore, densities are being pushed up to the definition of affordability is shifting, the cost of create enough surplus income - with the risk that market homes is soaring, and the buyers of those some outcomes breach our guidelines for successful homes seem like remote aliens - far removed from superdense development and could be unsustainable being ‘people like us who have a bit more money’. in the long-term. They condemn estate regeneration as ‘social cleansing’ and a ‘war on social housing’. At the same time, other forms of low cost housing like shared ownership have moved out of reach for those In our view it is essential that we are clear about the on low incomes. These market-led developments, at objective of estate regeneration: is it to improve the a time of welfare cuts and depressed wages, all add lives of those who live on and around existing estates, to the perception that existing communities are losing or is it to make more effective use of public land to out. help solve the ‘housing crisis’ by creating additional homes and widening access to home ownership? ALTERED ESTATES HOW TO RECONCILE COMPETING INTERESTS IN ESTATE REGENERATION 8 No banlieues please - we’re British We hold to the principle that our cities prosper best In his study of mixed communities in England, Alan as places if we encourage the integration of mixed Berube of the Brookings Institute in Washington communities within them. Indeed, it is the essentially summarised the key disadvantages of neighbourhoods democratic and fair distribution of people from all of concentrated deprivation: walks of life, and the idea that citizens have free access to all areas on streets that are policed by High levels of worklessness limit job networks consent, that has endowed Britain with enduringly and employment ambitions popular and peaceful cities. Putting low cost Schools struggle to educate overwhelmingly housing at the heart of revitalised estates is a key poor populations demonstration of this principle. Poor neighbourhoods experience higher levels Established cities go through cycles of decline and of crime and disorder renewal, often without the benefit of any organised intervention. Sometimes urban pioneers colonise run Area-based deprivation exacerbates health down and low cost areas, creating a hipster brand inequalities that generates value. Sometimes environmental blights vanish, such as when electric propulsion Concentrations of deprivation reduce private replaced steam, lifting the smog from around the sector activity and raise prices for the poor. marshalling yards of Camden Town. Finally, we recognise the importance of the Gentrification is neither sensitive nor fair, but it is democratic process employed to plan and deliver an established and inevitable form of urban renewal any major project of urban regeneration.