We need to talk about SLOAPs: Sites Leftover After Planning

We’ve all seen them, corridors of tarmac or patches of grass with seemingly no purpose or social life – the backend edges and nothing spaces of the city. 

SLOAPs – Sites Leftover After Planning – are everywhere. The climate emergency gives us an imperative to put this land to use. That’s the view of Soham De, co-founder of EcoResponsive Environments and Valerie Beirne, founder of Where Pathways Meet, who have teamed up to highlight the potential of SLOAPs.

They want to spark an industry-wide conversation about the mapping and transformation of leftover spaces into sites of care, biodiversity and creativity. What if we collectively reimagined and retrofitted this patchwork of lawns and pavement?

For De, the preoccupation with SLOAPs started with a project on a social housing estate in Tower Hamlets. The ambition was to intensify the site with rooftop extensions and infill housing development. 

Improvements to the public realm was not part of the remit which meant new and existing residents would be sharing a diminished amount of public space. A bit of desktop research revealed that approximately 30 to 40% of the site was comprised of SLOAPs. De found himself asking how these fragments of land could serve a growing community – as sites of biodiversity, food growing, flood resilience, urban heat mitigation, play or social connection.

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“We realised that there’s so much leftover space between buildings with no meaningful purpose,” says De. “A lot of these open spaces were designed as defensible open spaces with no other function… yet people are paying for them in management fees to cut the lawn.” 

De began discussing his findings with Valerie Beirne, landscape architect and founder of Where Pathways Meet, who is interested in residual spaces and how they might work harder to support urban resilience, prosperity and civic life.

“Over the last ten to fifteen years there’s been a real dialshift in how we are redesigning to support environmental resilience for drainage or biodiversity. There’s a critical mass of work moving in the right direction, including the pedestrianisation of the Strand.” 

“But on housing land, the spaces around the buildings are being overlooked,” adds Beirne. “So much discussion is going into the retrofit of the housing, but there is the opportunity to retrofit those external spaces to be more resilient.” 

One challenge is a lack of imagination, sense of ownership and ambition for these small spaces. Another is the fact that many have convoluted access – “They’re hard to get to, so no one ends up using them,” says De.

“We could generate a menu of potential improvement strategies for different sizes and qualities of existing open spaces,” says De. “It could be a linear swale, a rain garden, a mini-pond, a patch of green…” 

De and Beirne hope they can initiate a conversation that will encourage people to see these sites afresh, and are calling on others in the industry to raise awareness and spot the potential of SLOAPs on their sites. “There are really great examples out there on housing land,” says Beirne. “But it feels like the exception and it needs to be the norm in the climate and ecological emergency.”