How design patterns can help create more planning certainty for Brownfield land.

Blocktype co-founder, Euan Mills, writes about the need for a more certain planning system and how design patterns can help us get there.

Millennial planners might not remember how radical Richard Rogers and his Urban Task Force were when they started promoting development on brownfield land 20 years ago. Nevertheless, few planners today would disagree that a brownfield first approach is a good idea, at least in principle. Brownfield land is usually in a more sustainable location, better served by infrastructure and its development will have a lower impact on our natural environment.

The challenge is that over the last 20 years, we’ve learnt how difficult it is to develop on these sites. High levels of uncertainty, from unknown land contamination, poorly mapped underground services, rights of light and vociferous local communities, mean that only a small niche of developers will even attempt to bring some of these sites forward.

Government funding can help in some ways. It can pay to move infrastructure, remediate land and even give investors more confidence. But no matter how much money we pump into brownfield land, unless we address the uncertainty created by the planning system, the 21,000 brownfield sites we have today are unlikely to be developed any time soon.

Planning is political, so there will always be some uncertainty in the system. But this doesn’t mean that our planning policies themselves can’t be clear and explicit.? Yet, if you flick through any local plan you’ll see vague and non-committal language permeating throughout, with very few exceptions. Even when it comes to allocated land, you’ll be lucky to find site specific policies and even luckier to find a ‘design brief’ showing a vague layout, arrows representing routes and broad brush building heights. Unsurprisingly this creates a policy vacuum where the market is left second guessing what the Local Authority aspirations are.

There are two main reasons for policy vagueness: The first is that us planners fear the future. Policy takes so long to produce that we don’t want to create policies which might become out of date as soon as they are published. What happens if the market conditions change, or new technologies are invented which mean we can do things differently? While these are reasonable concerns, they don’t absolve us from needing to make decisions now. The future will always be uncertain, and as planners, we need to do what we can to create more certainty, not less.

The second is cultural. Planners are encouraged to leave room for architectural innovation, creativity and originality. We believe it’s the job of the architects to come up with propositions and to justify why a particular layout, height, or typology is appropriate or not. It’s not considered to be the job of the planners to think spatially or articulate how we want a site to be developed. But you don’t need to be an architect to create a clear and viable proposition for a site.

This is where design patterns come in. When it comes to architecture, more often than not, good design is not about originality and innovation. Often, by applying existing designs to a site we can test and communicate our aspirations better than any written policy, and faster and cheaper than having to develop a full design. Urban designers refer to these as ‘tissue studies’, Victorian and Georgian house builders had ‘pattern books’.? The Greater London Authority’s Optimising Site Capacity guidance states that a “design-led approach should be used to determine the most appropriate form of development on a site”. They then provide local authorities with 3D models of their preferred typologies so anyone can easily explore the potential layouts of any site.?

Design patterns give Local Authorities an opportunity to be specific about what they want on every potential development site without having to undertake detailed design exercises.? They can provide developers with enough information on? indicative layouts, building typologies, viability and infrastructure needs, and to give them confidence about the local authorities' aspirations.??

Providing this level of certainty doesn’t mean that what the planners are proposing is exactly what is going to be built. Developers and architects will always come up with alternatives. But as they do, they will know what the Local Authorities vision is from the start, reducing the levels of speculation and uncertainty our current vague approach to policy creates.?

Many of the risks in developing brownfield land will still remain, but most of these are beyond the influence of planners.? All we can do is make sure that our policies say what they mean, and mean what they say, and design patterns can give us the confidence that what we’re saying makes sense.?