The importance of making successful places has come to the fore in recent years. It has been suggested that place-making should be the central function of all local authorities who should marshal the skills necessary to create and sustain healthy communities.
Urban design and masterplanning – the art of making places – is the root of all value, in economic and other terms, and it must resolve and provide the armature for the delivery of those economic, physical and social aspirations expressed for an area.
The need to get the mix of uses right to generate a multi-faceted community with all the appropriate infrastructure and an ability to accommodate reasonable growth requires a great deal of thought and consultation, and the ability to see ‘the big picture’.
Private sector teams working on large scale development or regeneration projects, which are usually mixed-use schemes today, need to be able to demonstrate an understanding of this ‘big picture’ approach to accommodate the wider community’s needs and the context for major schemes.
Only this approach will help to generate broader sustainability by embedding major schemes in their contexts. The more successfully this is achieved, and the more such schemes compliment their context, the greater and longer-lived the added value will be.
A masterplan needs to reflect a broad constituency and meet the economic, social and environmental aspiration of the community it will house and sit within. A process has to be constructed that enables stakeholders to contribute to and participate in the development of a set of ideas for a major scheme.
Cartwright Pickard have created successful methods for engaging with local communities and stakeholders including design workshops, exhibitions and other forms of engagement that go well beyond the statutory requirement to consult in order to construct a brief that delivers sustainable urban design solutions.