On this much we agree: A shared definition of good placemaking is emerging in policy – it won't be enough

I n late 2018, when James MacLeod and I sat down to write the entry criteria for The Pineapples awards for place, one of our first tasks was an agreed definition of “place”.

 

Place is a slippery concept – an amorphous boundary that can be conjured by folklore, catchment, branding or social connection – one that can morph over time. Its limits might be a constituency or parish, the local school, a shared cultural heritage or a train station. It’s a word like bread; it comes in various shapes and grains.

For The Pineapples, we settled on a mixed-use development or cluster of developments that create a neighbourhood, large or small – one that includes public realm such as a public space or street.

 

But the government has yet to define ‘place’, even if the term is appearing with greater frequency in planning guidance and reports. Policy is increasingly ‘place-led’ or ‘place-based’. While the definition of ‘mixed-use’ and ‘out of town’ appear in its glossary, the draft National Planning and Policy Framework (NPPF) leaves ‘place’ and ‘placemaking’ open to interpretation.

What a good place should deliver, however, is being defined, not only by the draft NPPF, but in the Design and Placemaking Planning Practice Guidance and the recently published House of Lords’ Built Environment Committee report, New Towns: Creating Communities.

 

What makes a good place, then? Mixed-age and mixed-income communities with social infrastructure such as schools, green spaces and train stations within walking distance; safe, playable landscapes with clean air and resilient to climate change. 

The draft NPPF’s “key principles for well-designed places” include: context (responsive to local history and character); liveability (healthy, mixed, vibrant and integrated communities); climate (adaptation and resilience); nature (blue and green infrastructure); movement (walking, cycling and transport); built form (prioritising compact development); public space (social connection); and identity (attractive, distinctive and characterful). While there’s no preferred aesthetic style of architecture, the draft NPPF claims when it comes to places, “heritage assets are an irreplaceable resource”. 

 

The New Towns report concurs: “Where possible, existing structures and buildings should be retained or refurbished to support heritage and imbue the New Towns with an identity connected to a sense of place.” It also describes “human-scale design, crafted elements, natural materials and a robust landscape strategy” as the “foundations of successful places” alongside local identity and community-focused design.

If place policy is a blueprint for society, it’s heartening to see the past debate on style wars and aesthetics give way to a meaningful conversation about the kind of places we want to live in – from child’s play to active travel. It feels like progress, if on this much, we can agree.

One issue with ‘place’ is that it doesn’t fall under anyone’s purview – there’s no Ministry for Place. It cuts across sites and departments, from transport to housing and through all levels of government. So who can be held accountable for failures of place? It’s not as tangible as housing targets or educational achievement.

 

There’s another problem. A disconnect. We can draw up masterplans along these guidelines, but we can’t improve places without social policy to match. The built environment can make a positive impact on people, but it can’t make a stronger society on its own. To claim otherwise is to set the industry up to fail – on New Towns, net zero, housing, all of it. We need to make this clear. Otherwise we are setting up urban planning as a straw man – just as architecture took the blame for the decline of 1960s council estates.

 

 

Today, 1 in 4 children in the UK live in poverty after housing costs, according to newly published government data – that’s 4 million children.

 

While it’s important to have a shared vision for placemaking, those children are integral to that future. For places to be successful, beyond infrastructure, we need social policy that ensures people can afford to live after housing costs and remain in their chosen community – near work, childcare or family. And we need this to happen now, not at the end of the next development cycle.

 

Housing allowance is supposed to enable people to live in a local area of their choice and is expected to cover the cost of the cheapest 30% of rented homes. Yet the government has frozen Local Housing Allowance (LHA) rates for a second year in a row – despite rents across the UK rising by 19% (as much as 28% in Colchester) in the year to September 2023. For the past decade, the government has been freezing and uprating LHA rates on an ad hoc basis, something the Institute for Fiscal Studies calls “incoherent policy design.”

 

As the Women’s Budget Group said in response to the freeze, building social housing at scale will “reduce reliance on a private rental market… but those homes will take time to appear.”

 

“Families on the brink of homelessness, including women trying to leave abusive relationships, cannot wait for bricks to be laid. They need social security that meets reality now.”

Inequality and displacement have characterised urban regeneration over the past 25 years, which has seen large numbers of social housing units demolished and replaced with fewer affordable homes.

We know development doesn’t always improve communities – it can also break them. To prevent displacement, even before regeneration is announced, affordability must be enshrined and community assets secured in case of market speculation.

 

The process of placemaking has too often proved extractive – increasing land values while swapping poorer residents for better-off ones in prime locations as prices rise. The increase in house prices has created a generation of renters in neighbourhoods with precarious social infrastructure fractured by nomadic residents.

 

While it’s good to see quality placemaking being prioritised in planning, we can’t lose sight of a simple fact: It’s people that make a place, create society and form communities. To be successful, planning reforms need to be accompanied by social policy changes that lift people out of poverty. Action is past due.

 

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Christine Murray is the founding editor-in-chief of The Developer and founding director of the Festival of Place and The Pineapples awards for place.