1 Designing sustainable urban

neighbourhoods

A sustainable neighbourhood is one that has value as a place to live over many generations. The lesson
of the boom in estate construction in the 1960s and 1970s was that it was all too possible to get this
wrong.

Despite volumes of advice and some exciting new architecture, we are not yet building enough new
neighbourhoods that improve what we inherited from previous generations. Although we know a great
deal about what we ought to be doing, we are not putting it into practice. Guided walks round the new
communities in SUNN and subsequent discussions have discovered better ways of building healthier
communities, with safer streets and living places, a greater choice of homes and environmental features
that add value to living in a new neighbourhood. Our findings have been turned into a series of tests and
guidelines that can be used to assess proposals and improve the way neighbourhoods are planned and
designed.

Healthier communities

What we know

Consumer surveys have highlighted dissatisfaction in the UK with how we live, particularly wellbeing on
housing estates, and with what people can afford to pay (Cole, 1996):

Problems arise when too many children of the same age are housed together (Page, 1993).

Some of the UKs children are among the least happy in the industrialised nations, in contrast to the
Netherlands and Denmark, which have the happiest (UNICEF, 2007).

Stressed adults work away from home for long hours to pay the mortgage and other bills (Falk, 2010).

Isolated older people sometimes live in fear, and in houses that no longer suit their needs
(HAPPI, 2009).

Levels of community involvement are falling as many people are short of time, despite evidence that
we are quite civil to each other (Griffith, et al., 2011).

Some of these problems result from inequalities in both wealth and earnings, which are much greater
than in northern European countries such as Germany, Finland and the Netherlands (Wilkinson and
Pickett, 2009). Others stem from not building enough houses and from poor neighbourhood design. We
have some of the highest house price inflation levels in Europe, combined with a relatively low rate of
house building over the last three decades. Private house building stayed relatively constant after public
house building fell, leaving a big gap to be filled (Barker, 2006).

14 Designing sustainable urban neighbourhoods