WIREDGOV

People are travelling much further nowadays in their daily lives, for work and for shopping and for leisure.

This means that housing and job markets now operate at a larger scale. Hospitals and higher education institutions also have bigger catchment areas.All this affects the way in which places should be planned and designed.

CABE has spent two years trialling a flexible framework, Getting the big picture right, which advises a new approach to large scale urban design, with more working across local authority boundary ‘red lines’ on a map. Housing and job markets do not observe those red lines, nor do people notice when they are crossing them in the car or on the train.

In the same way the solutions to many urgent environmental issues, such as water management, flood prevention and low carbon energy generation, are arrived at by thinking and working across boundaries. 

Large scale urban design can inform decisions on where to invest limited resources for infrastructure, or where to focus the energies of private developers and public service providers.

Working at this scale can strengthen local prosperity, for instance by linking specialised centres together to support a knowledge economy. It can tackle inequality, for instance by directing investment in transport infrastructure to connect failing areas to thriving areas.

The framework offers a way for councils to take forward the idea of local enterprise partnerships (LEPs), recently announced by the government, particularly with regard to their role, size and governance.

CABE used a mix of UK best practice, international research and workshops to produce this guidance. It describes the distinctive features of large scale urban design and who benefits most, before setting out exactly how organisations and partnerships can implement the three-stage process. Those whose lives are directly affected, in the community, need to be closely involved.

More about large scale urban design 

Getting the big picture right

How do we deal with economic, social and environmental challenges that affect the lives of people over large areas and cannot be solved through local action?

Large scale urban design

A step-by-step guide to the large scale urban design process with examples from projects around the world.