The group’s final session concluded that the forum needs to continue to define provocative and meaningful ways to support London’s development. The width of specialisms on the panel created some great debate over our three full group sessions but it was felt that we were only starting on the journey and only just ‘getting our teeth into’ ways to combine and conclude steps for the New London Agenda.

 

A 10-point plan of what every scheme should address, devised from our earlier sessions, became the main subject of our concluding discussion, inspiring thoughts on how this list could become three main areas of focus for the next cycle, in order to create priorities for public realm.

 

We are all advocates of pilots and experimentation and believe this should form the basis of all new objectives so that we are always remaining creative and inspirational in terms of the quality of the public realm. However, we are all so familiar with the building assessment requirements to create more comfortable interior environments yet little to properly inspire and monitor the public realm. We believe in developing pilot schemes which will feed into requirements for the design of the external conditions of cities, understanding living infrastructure comfort in the spaces in between buildings and the impact of the public realm on the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Therefore, we devise a need for pilot experimentation, data collection and transformative requirements; across three specific areas addressing:

 

The importance of the Climate Change Emergency and the ability to demonstrate design benefits is especially important when, for example, not everyone can afford air conditioning or gardens. This area of study should begin with a pilot study but could also look to provide data analysis for three existing London conditions in a historic street, a modernist estate and new high-rise development – all areas we walk through daily in journeys across London.

 

The importance of a safe London for all is also high on our agenda and we concluded that the second area of more in-depth study could be to create improved awareness of safety at the design stage. We should advocate gender expertise on every delivery project and audit all users as part of any submission. Again data collection could be gathered on pilot and in-use schemes to better inform future design and implementation.

 

The fair and equitable use of public realm weaved through all sessions and is deserving of its own focus group in a second cycle. The health benefits of public realm and the need to consider ‘beyond the red line’ can again inform pilot ideas and data collection. This focus area should encompass inclusivity and ingrained communities but also changing living and work environments, with flexibility in the future evolution of neighbourhoods as well as connections across and through these.