Rock Townsend’s concept for new Green Urban Centres has been shortlisted in the New Ideas for Housing London competition run by New London Architecture (NLA) in partnership with the Mayor of London. The competition is looking for fresh thinking and innovative ideas that would help to improve the speed, scale and quality of housing supply in London and forms part of NLA’s forthcoming Autumn Insight Study.
Our proposal adopts a holistic view of the challenge being faced by London, considering not just design and product but issues of planning, land, funding, construction and procurement, understanding each of these aspects to be crucial to realising a step change in the quality and rate of delivery.
As a shortlisted entry, our proposal will form part of an NLA exhibition and accompanying events programme hosted at NLA’s galleries in The Building Centre from 15th October to 17th December 2015.
The results of the Insight Study will be presented to key government representatives and future mayoral candidates; while a selection of winning entrants will be offered access to a high-level GLA working group to explore how their ideas can be delivered on a real London site.
A summary of our idea is included below and the full written proposal and accompanying images will follow shortly. To read NLA’s press release and summaries of the other shortlisted entries, please click here.
GREEN URBAN CENTRES
“We propose establishing a new Social Enterprise Development Vehicle (SEDV) that will retain a long-term commitment to housing supply and affordable urban living by delivering high-quality ‘Green Urban Centres’ in the ‘spaces in-between’ outer London nodes that are experiencing only gradual intensification.
The SEDV will realise the opportunities that brownfield and urban-locked greenbelt sites present to increase affordability, through a higher pace of delivery, and desirability, through redefining the periphery condition from low-density mono-functional urban sprawl to mid-density live-work-leisure City Edge.
This will create a stronger relationship to a better defined greenbelt and establish London as a multi -nuclei networked city.”