Urbanism
Environment
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In Sunday's Guardian letters (2nd April 2017), Nicholas Falk of the URBED Trust responds to an earlier piece on house prices. 

We have been working with a group of stakeholders in Wisbech on plans for a Garden Town over 18 months. The aim is to transform the town of Wisbech with substantial new housing developed linked to reopening of the railway line to March. Through our work this has been framed as a Garden Town with a series of garden city extensions to create sustainable new neighbourhoods. The problem is that most of these are affected in some way by flood risk. A study tour to Holland was therefore organised for all of the key stakeholders to see how the Dutch address these issues.

A new paper by the URBED Trust's Dr Nicholas Falk, originally prepared for the Royal Society of Art's Inclusive Growth Commission, is available to download. You can view the executive summary below.

Sharing the uplift in land values

Smarter urbanisation and inclusive growth  

A new report launched today by the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) explores the barriers to reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions, looking at how these can be overcome in a way that could bring a wide range of additional benefits.

‘Zero Carbon Britain: Making it Happen’ brings together a broad range of evidence from academic literature and grassroots projects to create a picture of the inter-related solutions that we need to reach zero carbon.

We were delighted to hear earlier this week that the West Bar scheme in Sheffield secured outline planning permission. This is a site we've worked on for many years alongside Urbo and most recently with 5plus architects. Urbo and delivery partner Peveril Securities Limited will now be working towards detailed planning applications for buildings as well as working to secure investors and occupiers. Work has already started on clearing the site and we look forward to seeing some construction soon!

The Academy of Urbanism welcomes the broad thrust of the housing white paper. The way we develop new homes has a huge effect on the quality of our towns and cities and the failure to build enough homes in recent years and the poor quality of much of what has been built has undermined the quality of urban areas and turned the public against the very idea of development. The initiatives to broaden the number of housing providers including more rented housing, direct development by councils, encouragement for smaller builders and self-build and custom-build is all very encouraging.

We recently took part in a workshop with Jamie O'Brien, Senior Research Associate at The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, looking at the ways in which visual tools can support our reasoning about mapped data, and to find out how they could help us to discover new patterns and relationships. This work is part of the centre's current research project 'Visualising Community Inequalities' which is funded by the Leverhulme Trust. 

The URBED Trust's Nicholas Falk writes about garden cities for the 21st century in the latest edition of journal Urban Design International: 

Yesterday's (25th Jan) property section in the London Evening Standard featured a piece by the URBED Trust's Nicholas Falk on building new homes on the London fringe and how transport and housing must come as a package. You can view the piece online here.