A Secretary of State, a Masterplanner and an Influencer Walk into a Room…

On 2nd July, we supported a Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) event hosted by Urban&Civic at their Alconbury Weald development. The event aimed to show how planning, design, construction and management processes contribute to creating high quality, sustainable and popular new communities to a group of content creators and social media influencers. On the day, our role was to outline what goes into the masterplanning process for ‘super strategic’ sites.

The brief was an unusual one. Over the years I've tackled design reviews, co-design workshops and public consultations, but explaining masterplanning to influencers and Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, was certainly a first. Stepping away from the ‘usual’ day job presented us with a rare opportunity, to look at the whole masterplanning process, explaining not just what we do, but how and why we do it.

We presented our approach to ‘super strategic’ sites (places that typically include thousands of homes, mixed-use centres, employment space and significant public infrastructure, such as schools and health facilities, delivered across multiple phases over many years), showing the journey from the first step; ‘observe’, through to ‘evaluate’, ‘make’ and ‘realise.’

We simplified what is a complex and often necessarily time-consuming process, understanding a place, identifying opportunities and constraints, designing and creating concepts and ideas, testing and refining proposals and ultimately helping deliver them. This work transcends years (sometimes decades), is rarely linear, involves many players through collaboration and engagement and requires an agile, creative and flexible mindset.

Explaining how good masterplanning evolves from a deep understanding of a site and surrounding area to the subsequent collaborative and creative process generated genuine interest. We talked about shared amibitions, what makes a good place, and how the process supports outcomes. It turns out that most of us define ‘good places’ in a similar way, and ultimately want similar outcomes.

The majority of people only get to see the ‘polished’ masterplan, with a small snapshot of the work that preceded it, and the group we spoke to were unaware of the timeframes and amount of work which underpins that final graphic. There is an opportunity for us as a profession to help raise public awareness and appreciation of what good design is and how it happens, which can in turn help generate support and ultimately deliver the high-quality places we need. A lot of the negativity towards development comes from a lack of understanding of what has been proposed and why. If we can better explain the entire process we can create greater appreciation of the complexity and care involved in creating successful places.

The proof of the pudding is always in the eating, and the setting for the day provided the perfect backdrop for us, and the audience, to observe daily life play out. Since planning consent was granted in 2014, Alconbury Weald has grown from a masterplan into a place people now proudly call home. It just goes to show what high quality masterplanning can achieve with vision, ambition and collaboration.