Kathryn Tombling, Principal and Head of Housing at BDP shares her viewpoint from our Housing Londoners report, exploring design innovation for sustainable, progressive homes.

Design has a crucial role to play in combatting the housing crisis, reducing housing inequality and the climate emergency. It’s time for us to stop regurgitating figures and start bringing disruptive innovation to the housing sector.

By bringing together collective skills, expertise, and resources across our industry, we can deliver an attractive, equitable and sustainable urban model for future cities. We are studying the potential and we believe that by working within existing transit and planning frameworks, we can create complete communities in an environmentally and socially sustainable way that enhances quality of life. Vibrant mixed-use communities help to tackle many of the challenges society faces and create places people want to call home. They also create jobs and places to come together as a community, enhancing a sense of civic pride and belonging.

We should be looking at development sites holistically, understand how to unlock land and the potential adaptive re-use of existing housing stock, create community spaces and increase biodiversity. At Tollgate Gardens in Maida Vale, for example, the urban design plan shaped the residential terraces to activate street activities to one side, and south facing communal gardens to the other. The existing ground levels were used to accommodate car parking with the garden forming an oversailing green plateau above. The plan and the design, within an existing site, achieved carbon and resource reductions and created much needed gardens for the community, whilst enhancing space for nature.

Innovative solutions can be replicated in multiple locations to speed up the delivery of much-needed housing. As an example, our Gap House concept, which proposes affordable, eco-homes on disused garage plots and has the potential to revitalise neighbourhoods and provide more homes up and down the country. We need to strive to create a regenerative and circular economy; we need to reuse, adapt, and decarbonise to ensure our homes and neighbourhoods are future-fit and support happy, healthy communities that thrive.

New energy strategies will be crucial in the future of housing in London. We should continue to explore the use of innovative technology such as air source and ground source heat pumps and deliver community and district heating through well-designed energy networks such as the one we are currently building at Plumstead, West Thamesmead.

At a global level, this innovation in energy generation is already happening. At North America’s largest mixed-use development — The Well in Toronto — a below ground cistern connects to an Enwave Deep Lake Water Cooling (DLWC) system and a newly built hot water loop provides heating and cooling to the 11,000 people who will live and work there. It has a two-million-gallon capacity, measures a staggering 50ft in diameter and extends 260ft below ground level. This is quite literally a world first and will serve as the hub of future expansion as the city grows.

By investing in new ideas, we connect people, history and nature with developments and support the financial, environmental, and social values of developers, housing associations and local authorities as well as the communities we design for. In our experience, we know that strong, collaborative innovation can help blend housing typologies, increase quality and break down hierarchies. And that is something we can all believe in.