Sheffield G a r d e n C i t y ? Sheffield Garden City? Options for long-term urban growth Report by URBED for Sheffield City Council November 2015 Sheffield A report by URBED for Sheffield City Council G a r d e n C i t y ? ii Sheffield G a r d e n C i t y ? Contents Summary 1 Introduction 3 Part 1 The Growth of Cities 8 1a. Urban Renaissance 9 1b. The Development of Sheffield 11 1c. Planning for Growth? 13 1d. Sheffield Today 15 1e. City Comparisons 17 Part 2 Growing Sheffield 20 2a. The Opportunity 21 2b. The Shape of the City 23 2c. Scope for Change 25 2d. Urban Capacity 27 2e. Urban Intensification 29 2f. Remodelling 31 2g: Neepsend - Case Study 33 2h: Attercliffe - Case Study 35 2i. Accretion 37 2j. Extension 39 2k: Waverley - Case Study 41 Part 3 Making it Happen 44 3a. Housing & Jobs 45 3b. Growth Scenarios 47 3c. Policy Approach 49 3d. Housing Development Corporation 51 3e. Next Steps 53 3f. Conclusion 55 URBED 10 Little Lever Street, Manchester, M1 1HR 0161 200 5500, [email protected], www.urbed.coop For URBED: David Rudlin with John Sampson, Sangeetha Banner and Vicky Payne For Sheffield Council: Dave Caulfield, Maria Duffy, Simon Vincent, Rob Thompson, Chris Hanson and John Stonard This report has been financially supported by Sheffield City Council. The views expressed are however solely those of URBED and should not be taken as those of Sheffield City Council or its officers. iii Sheffield A report by URBED for Sheffield City Council G a r d e n C i t y ? Summary ngland somehow seems to have mislaid a national housing shortage and stress within the housing its second city. In most nations there is a market which meant that housing became a major issue in second city that is roughly half the size of the the 2015 general election. There is a great deal of debate Efirst city which, in England, would mean a about the extent to which the planning system is part of population of around 4 Million. In the Victorian era the the problem or part of the solution, but it is certainly the potential second city was Manchester, in the 1960s it was case that many authorities are struggling to find the space Birmingham, and for a short period it could even have to allocate land to meet their projected housing needs. been Sheffield. Without this second city we find ourselves If we place the argument that our provincial struggling to do everything we want to do; business, cities need to grow alongside the requirement for Government, media and culture in the overheated, substantially more housebuilding then the solution seems crowded capital, while in the Midlands and the North obvious. Rather than foist housing on unwilling rural there are cities able and willing to step up. It is not just a authorities, why don’t we build within our cities, replace second city that we lack – all of our provincial cities are their lost urban populations and use their ‘vast reserves’ under-sized and under-perform economically. They all of brownfield land? When URBED won the Wolfson need to grow. This report considers how one of them, Economics Prize in 2014 by setting out proposals for the Sheffield, might do that. expansion of a prosperous medium sized city onto its The problem of course is that far from growing, surrounding green fields, we were accused of ignoring all of our provincial cities in fact shrank in the second this urban agenda – even though our essay did say that half of the 20th century. A combination of economic 60% of all new housing should go onto brownfield land. restructuring, This report for Sheffield has allowed us to redress the suburbanisation balance by looking in detail at how the principles in our If we place the argument and the economic Wolfson essay might be applied to a major city. that our provincial cities draw of London The starting point for this has been to need to grow, alongside the saw all of understand the area that we are dealing with and the requirement for substantially our cities lose level of growth that we should be planning for. Neither more housebuilding then the population and question is as easy to answer as it may seem. In terms solution seems obvious. economic activity of the area, we decided early on that the city region was particularly going to be too large to study, while the boundary of Manchester and Liverpool (and Glasgow in Scotland). Sheffield City was too small. In Uxcester we confined Sheffield’s population loss occurred later, and was less our proposals to a 10km circle drawn around the city pronounced but the city is still a smaller city than it was at centre and in Sheffield we decided to expand this to its peak in 1951 when it was home to 577,000 people. 15km to take in the functional conurbation of Sheffield, However in the last ten years something Rotherham, and small parts of North East Derbyshire, remarkable has started to happen. All of the UK’s Chesterfield and Barnsley. provincial cities have started to grow again. Sheffield In terms of housing numbers our starting point gained nearly 50,000 people between 2001 and 2011. was the proposals being developed in the City Region to A combination of economic revival in the early 2000s create 70,000 jobs over 10 years. These employment tar- combined with a resurgence of city centre living and gets are generating housing requirements based upon as- the renewal of inner city districts, saw a period of rapid sumptions about who will take these jobs, how many will growth, reversing the trend of the previous decades. True be local and how many will be in-comers. These assump- the pace of growth has slowed since the 2008 recession tions produced a spread of housing requirements for but it has not gone into reverse. the city region up to 200,000 new homes, half of which Set alongside this is a national housing crisis. We would need to be accommodated within our 15km radius. need to be building around 240,000 homes a year to deal It is true that the more recent population projections, with population and household growth and in the last few following the recession, have reduced these numbers, but years we have managed less than half of this. The result is we have stuck to the higher figure of 100,000 new homes 1 Sheffield G a r d e n C i t y ? within the 15km area circle around Sheffield. This is a bourhoods could be remodelled as in-town Garden Cities combined figure for both Sheffield and Rotherham, and (or Sustainable Urban Neighbourhoods). These two areas is higher than the housing projections currently being we estimate could accommodate 20,000 homes. considered by both authorities. We have used this higher figure because we This gives us 70,000 homes within the conurbation’s believe that growth is good, as we describe in Part 1 of urban area, leaving us 30,000 homes to accommodate this report. We believe that the Sheffield conurbation elsewhere. Here we suggest two possibilities: needs to pursue a much more ambitious growth agenda, as Manchester is doing. Indeed, like the Centre for Cities, we Accretion: The response of most planning authori- believe that population growth is a catalyst for economic ties to this problem has been either to look at the next growth rather than vice versa. Growing the population, field around the edge of the settlement or to seek to increases catchment spending power – supporting projects export growth to surrounding districts. Neither are very like the New Retail Quarter. It generates income for the sustainable forms of development and cannot easily be Council and makes the city’s workforce more attractive to served by public transport or existing services so become employers and more likely to generate new businesses. car-dependent. We suggest that there may be some small The question we ask in Part 2 of this report is scope for accretion (5,000 homes) where sites are near to how we can we accommodate this level of growth over 20 existing centres. years? Where would we build 100,000 homes? How much could be accommodated on brownfield land and how Extension: Which leaves us with urban extensions. As much, if any, would have to spill over onto green fields? we suggested in our Wolfson essay we believe that it is We do this by looking at five potential sources of housing better to take a confident bite out of the Green Belt capacity: rather than nibbling around its edges. We therefore sug- gest that the majority of the remaining growth goes into Urban Capacity: We start by looking at brownfield urban extensions and suggest Mosborough (which was housing capacity that has been estimated by the Councils planned as an extension in the 1970s), Waverley (which is at a little over 20,000 homes. There are much greater areas already being developed by Rotherham) and three smaller of brownfield land in the city region, but only a small pro- extensions at Bassingthorpe (also allocated by Rother- portion of this is within the city itself where land tends ham), Oughtibridge and Stocksbridge in total accommo- not to stay vacant for long before it is occupied by low dating 25,000 homes. value uses like parking and yard space. We do however assume that brownfield land is a dynamic resource that is This achieves 100,000 homes and in Part 3 of this report created as quickly as it is used up.