Building back better to embrace better living

Consultant Editor

Building back better to embrace better living

London could ‘build back better’ by incorporating ideas that ranged from creating a truly mixed use city with flexible buildings to building high line, high street walks to taking steps to radically improve indoor air quality.

Those were some of the key sentiments to emerge from a Pechakucha session involving five presenters in this week’s session on ‘Embracing better living’, viewable here.

dRMM associate Will Howard showed ‘how a healthy, prosperous and liveable London is a city shaped by all who use it’, with districts, neighbourhoods and buildings needing to become truly mixed use. ‘We want to see an end to mono-cultural places’, he said, with more facilities on people’s doorsteps and reimagined industrial enclaves with flexibility in mind and buildings able to react to changing needs.

Air quality is key, though, said Airflow’s Ian Palmer, and given that we spend 90% of our time indoors whether at work or home, it was important to shift the focus from always talking about outdoor pollution. Pollutants can cause ‘toxic home syndrome’ said Palmer, while some units just recirculate air. The solution is to bring in fresh, filtered air from outside to aid better health and productivity.

Cohousing Harrow © Community Led Housing

We are seeing how important our homes are during this period of COVID, raising what Community Led Housing’s Rowan Mackay called ‘fundamental questions about how we live’ and the kinds of homes we need to build back better. ‘We need to rethink not only what we build, but the way we own, manage and control the homes we live in’, he said, with new models of housing formed from residents coming together and partnering across public and private sectors, underpinned by long term stewardship. ‘This is the new normal for housing’, he said. ‘These are not radical ideas and they exits today’

Levitt Bernstein’s Vinita Dhume gave a presentation on ‘smarter food, healthier people, happier societies’, looking at crop diversities, interdependencies between the western and Asian worlds, obesity, the Green Belt and bringing more green into the city, with food grown on a local scale and an emphasis on the circular economy. ‘You could start having greenhouses in derelict areas or industrial areas which are not very space hungry where you could start growing food locally’, said Dhume.

From Vinita Dhume Associate Director, Levitt Bernstein's presentation

Or perhaps an answer to climate and health problems added to struggling high streets and town centres could come from building ‘High Street High Lines’, said Nexus Planning’s Shaun Andrews. With a 15 degree microclimate difference between Peckham High Street and Hampstead, such a project might be a possible urban intervention transforming existing infrastructure with an above ground nature walk, modelled on the success of New York’s High Line. ‘We are drawn to nature because it regenerates us’, said Adams. ‘There is a nature deficit disorder in many of our poorer areas’, he went on. The project could help too with health outcomes such as diabetes, include outdoor seating and play host to after school education spaces, even getting older people back out of their small homes and back into society.

View the full event details here.
View the webinar recording here.

David Taylor

Consultant Editor

Building back better to embrace better living

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