Putting active design at the heart of new development
‘Creating healthier communities’ has been a priority for successive UK Governments throughout my 20-year professional career. The burden for delivering this enormous task however has usually been (unfairly) left at the door of healthcare professionals, despite the obvious imperative to develop actions to keep people away from the healthcare system.
The expectation for the healthcare sector to lead this work also downplays the essential role that new development has in supporting the health & wellbeing of residents and workers alike. As Sport England and the BRE state in their (relatively) recent report Active Design and BREEAM Certification Schemes: Principles into Practice:
“Good, high quality design creates opportunities for physical activity through access to green spaces, connection to walking and cycling networks and link to local community facilities. This is critical given the cost to the country of inactivity has been estimated at £7.4bn annually, including £0.9bn to the NHS.”
ACTIVE DESIGN is the headline term for creating these opportunities. As defined by Sport England:
“Active Design wraps together the planning and considerations that should be made when designing the places and spaces we live in. It’s about designing and adapting where we live to encourage activity in our everyday lives, making the active choice the easy choice.”
This report looks in detail at how development can utilise active design principles to improve the health & wellbeing of residents and workers on major new sites. It also reflects on new approaches being trialled in the North of England and the Midlands to deliver greater financial and social returns, whilst pondering what needs to happen to convince more developers to do the right thing and incorporate active principles into the design & implementation of their masterplans as early in the development cycle as possible.
WHY ACTIVE DESIGN MATTERS
‘Active Design’ as a concept has been well-defined for a number of years, with a phalanx of guides produced to help landowners and developers to build key principles into the masterplans of major new schemes. A cursory look over social media over recent months however finds an increasing number of people bemoaning poor examples of design in practice, acting as either a blocker on people becoming active or tokenism in extremis. The beautifully titled Sh*tplanning on Twitter regularly highlights examples of poor design, with the four photos below showing case studies in the last month alone!
This appears to resonate with the views of the Place Alliance, who undertook a hugely detailed Housing Design Audit for England in 2020 that evaluated the design of over 140 separate large-scale housing developments. 75% of the schemes considered were described as ‘mediocre’ or ‘poor’ with respect to design, with the following key conclusions:
• The least successful design elements nationally relate to overly engineered highways infrastructure and the poor integration of storage, bins and car parking. These problems led to unattractive and unfriendly environments dominated by large areas of hard surfaces;
• Low-scoring schemes performed especially poorly in the categories of the architectural response to the context and establishing a positive new character for development. Developments often had little distinguishing personality or ‘sense of place’, with public, open and play spaces being both poorly designed and located for social interaction;
• Some design considerations were marked by a broad variation in practice nationally. These include how well streets are defined by houses and the designed landscape, and whether streets connect up together and with their surroundings. Also whether developments are pedestrian, cycle and public transport friendly and conveniently served by local facilities and amenities; and
• The combination of the preceding factors influence how ‘walkable’ or car-dependent developments are likely to be. Many developments are failing in this regard with likely negative health, social and environmental implications.
At the same point however, there is a growing recognition amongst developers and regulators that good design, incorporating active design principles, marries doing the right thing with delivering stronger overall returns. But where should these organisations begin, what should they focus on and how can these principles be accelerated into practice?
This report looks in detail at how development can utilise active design principles to improve the health & wellbeing of residents and workers on major new sites. It also reflects on new approaches being trialled in the North of England and the Midlands to deliver greater financial and social returns, whilst pondering what needs to happen to convince more developers to do the right thing and incorporate active principles into the design & implementation of their masterplans as early in the development cycle as possible.
WHERE DO DEVELOPERS BEGIN ON ACTIVE DESIGN? HEADLINE PRINCIPLES
With the enormous number of competing demands on developers time and capital in bringing forward new schemes, designing them to ‘encourage activity in everyday lives, making the active choice the easy choice’ could appear to be an amorphous exercise – when do places suddenly become defined as ‘active’? How on earth do you end up measuring success?
This challenge was tackled head-on by Sport England and Public Health England in the early part of the last decade, creating the UK’s first ever Active Design guide for use at either the start of the masterplanning process or in retrofitting existing development to ‘promote activity, health and stronger communities’. This guidance built both organisation’s desire to improve accessibility, enhance amenity and increase awareness of activity and set out the ten principles of Active Design.
The ten principles were developed to inspire and inform the layout of cities, towns, villages, neighbourhoods, buildings, streets and open spaces, to promote sport and active lifestyles:
1. Activity for all neighbourhoods. Enabling those who want to be active, whilst encouraging those who are inactive to become active.
2. Walkable communities. Creating the conditions for active travel between all locations.
3. Connected walking and cycling routes. Prioritising active travel through safe, integrated walking and cycling routes.
4. Co-location of community facilities. Creating multiple reasons to visit a destination, minimising the number and length of trips and increasing the awareness and convenience of opportunities to participate in sport and physical activity.
5. Network of multifunctional open space. Providing multifunctional spaces opens up opportunities for sport and physical activity and has numerous wider benefits.
6. High quality streets and spaces. Well designed streets and spaces support and sustain a broader variety of users and community activities.
7. Appropriate infrastructure. Providing and facilitating access to facilities and other infrastructure to enable all members of society to take part in sport and physical activity.
8. Active buildings. Providing opportunities for activity inside and around buildings.
9. Management, maintenance, monitoring & evaluation. A high standard of management, maintenance, monitoring and evaluation is essential to ensure the long-term desired functionality of all spaces.
10. Activity promotion & local champions. Physical measures need to be matched by community and stakeholder ambition, leadership and engagement.
The ten principles in a more user friendly form
This guide has subsequently influenced other documents that attempt to address the same issue(s). This includes Sport England and BRE Global working together to map the individual issues and criteria in each BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, a key sustainability assessment) Scheme with the Active Design principles outlined by Sport England. The framework stresses that it provides ‘a point of conversation when designing activity and movement into projects….. a critical piece of this is ensuring that local communities are engaged and empowered as part of this process to help shape their local environment from the outset.”
Similarly, Public Health England have developed a Health Impact Assessment in spatial planning as a guide for local authority public health and planning teams with either their own developments or in guiding or regulating third party development, for example in design codes. They believe Health Impact Assessments:
“offer local authorities a powerful lever to improve public health and wellbeing, and ultimately reduce inequalities…. HIA is a tool used to identify the health impacts of a plan or project and to develop recommendations to maximise the positive impacts and minimise the negative impacts, while maintaining a focus on addressing health inequalities. By bringing such health considerations to the fore, HIAs add value to the planning process.”
The expansive process to put in place a Health Impact Assessment, even before action is taken to implement any findings into any future development, is shown on the flow diagram opposite.
There’s no shortage of effort then in guidance or toolkits being created. But are they actually being noticed or used by the people that ultimately create new development?
Convoluted theory in action
IS THE GUIDANCE ACTUALLY BEING USED?
Sadly the answer at present to both questions is an overwhelming ‘no’, either by developers or by local regulators.
Part of Waverley’s 7km perimeter loop, Rotherham
A small number of master developers are the exception, making some attempt to weave active principles at the start of designing development – with a limited number of successful examples to point to. Harworth Group has successfully developed a number of Country Parks on former Colliery sites, utilising spoil heap land unsuitable for residential or commercial development. At the former Orgreave Colliery, now known as Waverley, it has redeveloped 300 plus acres of land into a pretty remarkable mosaic of heathland, lakes, footpaths and cycleways that included an excellent 7km running route (and a number of humorous segment names on Strava). It has undertaken a similar job at its Logistics North development in Bolton (the former Cutacre Surface Mine), developing 550 acres of land into ‘Cutacre Country Park’. As the photo below shows, this is a central part of an 800 acre development that boasts over 6,000 employees – proving active design can be properly applied on either residential or commercial-led development.
The 800 acres of land at Logistics North, Bolton
Similarly, Homes England can point to schemes it has either master developed or part funded as exemplar active design developments. Its excellent guide Building for a Healthy Life, jointly produced with NHS England and NHS Improvement, provides the most comprehensive list of practical examples of good practice in active design across the UK for others to learn or take inspiration from. Its collaborations with Urban & Civic, particularly at Houlton Park in Rugby, are especially noteworthy for the quality and sensitivity of design in practice.
Well designed play at Houlton Park, Warwickshire
The same guide however also shows hundreds of examples of identikit, bland and car-led development acting as obvious impediment to anyone wanting to be active; see pages 19, 25 and 31 of the guide for some examples that will make you wince, weep or question how those developments were ever brought to pass…..
The public sector has also struggled to implement its own guidance as regulator or developer to uphold active design in development. Of the 333 local authorities in England, just two are regularly held up as active design guide exemplars in influencing what is eventually delivered – Essex County Council, which created this guidance; and Lancashire County Council, which offers this guidance. It is fairly thin gruel elsewhere.
Why is this the case? In the case of local authorities, they have been hamstrung by priorities lying elsewhere over the past couple of years. As Sam Stafford’s excellent Life on the Front Line blog points out, the marked decline in local authority budgets over the past decade has hit planning policy teams hard. Stafford points to ‘a 38% real-terms fall in net current expenditure on planning functions between 2010–11 and 2017–18’, resulting in both a reduction in what can be delivered (with Local Plan work rightly taking precedence) and an extremely alarming decline in staff morale. At the same point, Council’s have acted as the backstop in the UK’s formal response to COVID-19 since 2020, with recovery plans such as this one from Haringey produced to support communities to bounce back – particularly those working in the retail sector.
In the case of developers, primary evidence suggests that many still put the incorporation of active design principles into masterplans in the ‘too difficult’ pile. As detailed by the Design Council, there is a strong perception that it solely brings extra costs without generating any further returns, thus acting as a financial drag on development. As Nick Hamilton, Principal Research Fellow at the Centre for Sports Engineering Research (CSER)at Sheffield Hallam University stresses:
“The active design movement in the UK is currently let down by a lack of examples of what works. This is a circular argument; developers won’t try things beyond their appraisals that are uncertain, yet without evidence that masterplans with active design principles and interventions deliver greater returns, resistance will only continue.”
WHO’S PICKING UP THE BATON TO INFLUENCE INDUSTRY? A NORTHERN EXAMPLE
Fortunately, people like Nick Hamilton enjoy a challenge and are not easily shaken by present orthodoxy. A Sports Engineer by trade, his CV prompts a number of ‘how did they achieve that?’ type questions; the example of Nick’s work that we’re particularly fond of is him designing the world’s most aerodynamic shuttlecock, as these patents show….
A key member of Sheffield Hallam University’s (SHU) Sports Engineering faculty and with a 20+ year career in sports engineering and design, Nick wanted to move beyond applications for elite athletes into work that generated greater returns for a wider number of people. As he puts it in his own words:
“I didn’t originally know what the opportunity was…..but I’ve seen the personal benefits of regular sport and physical activity on me and my family and want to replicate it elsewhere. I also see the way active principles have been designed out of office spaces and on the streets….the problem is a lot of people are sedentary. How do you shift perceptions so that physical activity re-appears as a central element of everyday life?”
Back in 2017, Nick teamed up with Maxine Gregory from SHU’s Sport Industry Research Group, and working with SHU’s Professor Steve Haake they began to look in detail at Active Design. Nick and Prof Haake applied their understanding of movement and performance from elite sport, in ways as the former describes “that went beyond improving 1% of the 1% (marginal gains for athletes). We understand movement and performance and wanted to apply that to a nation to become healthier.” With no obvious partners to work with, they cast the net far and wide for people in the industry to work with, and came across Harworth Group’s Waverley development as a starting point.
“With active design, you should really start from an early a point as possible in the masterplanning of development to influence what is built and how people move from their properties or places of work both within and outside of a site. It is possible however to retrofit principles in existing development though, and in Waverley you had 740 acres of land, with 340 acres given over for public space alone. If we couldn’t make some form of further active design work in that environment, then we’d be struggling elsewhere.” (Nick Hamilton, SHU)
In the autumn of 2017, both Nick and Maxine had successfully approached Harworth Group’s Major Projects team and began work on a specific Active Design programme to boost and promote physical movement throughout the development, utilising a mixture of funding through Innovate UK, Higher Education Innovation Funding (HEIF) and Harworth’s own money to create an initial funding pot for research, testing and implementation work. By the end of the year it had designed an ‘Active Towns’ programme for initial testing at Waverley but with the ability to be applied on sites of all sizes at different points in the masterplanning process.
The start of the programme at Waverley began with Sheffield Hallam and Harworth considering three critical elements.
1) Using open access data to understand the area and its people. Using information from public health teams, Nomisweb and other key open access public sources, this data is essential in understanding the extent of health challenges in the locality, alongside gauging existing levels of participation and the facilities and activities currently available for people to use.
2) Engaging with the landowner/developer on what the current masterplan for the area looks like and what opportunities exist to influence its design or to test interventions. In the case of Waverley, this was a case of Harworth’s Development Manager Duncan Armstrong-Payne spending a full day with the Hallam team, including a full site walk round, to explain how development had reached that point, what was planned (in Waverley’s case, for the next fifteen years) and how land at the site could theoretically be used to boost the participation levels of residents, workers and visitors. In the nicest possible sense, Sheffield Hallam’s role was to also challenge the developer on the latter……
3) Finally, considering the outcome of a series of focus groups with residents and workers at the development. Sheffield Hallam organised a number of 2 hour sessions with local people – those who ultimately know the development better than anyone else – to gauge what they believe the existing opportunities are, what acts as a barrier to their participation, what potential interventions could be delivered and what projects they would personally want to run to create locally driven active participation.
After considering this range of qualitative and quantitative information, Harworth and Sheffield Hallam subsequently thrashed out an agreed initial programme of work, incorporating masterplan changes and using the initial funding pot to deliver prioritised action on the following:
• The development of more parks and community oriented spaces, with greater wayfinding for each – including the design of a new central park;
• An increase in child friendly play spaces across the development;
• Increasing the number of walking and cycleways across the development, including better links to neighbouring developments;
• The development of a community garden scheme to better ‘infill’ spaces; and
• Trialling new methods of sport or team exercise to encourage participation during work hours, including outdoor climbing walls and the use of car parks as play spaces for sports including football.
After delivering a number of these actions in 2018, Harworth continued to support Sheffield Hallam and local people to run their own programmes in subsequent years – particularly in ‘gamifying’ running and cycling round the site (including the use of Strava to competitively engage runners and cyclists around the site) and in creating a more expansive community garden programme around the site. You can see the physical outcome of all of this work here.
Sheffield Hallam University’s renowned Sports Engineering team
Sheffield Hallam University’s work with Harworth illuminated the scope and scale of opportunities to design green spaces and residential and commercial spaces in ways that make it easier for people to be more active. Nick and Maxine went on to establish SHU’s Outdoor Recreation Research Group, which was the first of its kind to bring together diverse inter-disciplinary experts (behavioural scientists, economists, evaluators, environmental experts, healthcare professionals etc) to explore how best to address the challenge of inactivity through outdoor opportunities – and subsequently quantifying the economic and social value of creating active environments.
As Maxine describes:
“creating active environments is a win-win scenario. Getting more people more active makes a positive contribution to so many cross-cutting policy agendas. It does not need to cost more money to design things in more effective ways, it just requires people to think differently and embed physical activity opportunities into the masterplanning process in the same way that other aspects are routinely considered.” (Maxine Gregory, SHU)
Lakes at Waverley – further opportunity for active participation?
REINFORCING WHY THIS MATTERS
Nick and his team are continuing to work with Harworth on other sites, including the former Thoresby Colliery in Nottinghamshire, where the team is busy working with others including UK Cycling to effectively exploit over 300 acres of restored land in the heart of the Sherwood Forest. As Nick regrettably points out however, ‘it has been extremely difficult to engage others, who just see all this as an additional cost on a development appraisal rather than thinking ‘this is how great things could eventually be…..’
This is both an enormous shame and myopic beyond belief from the real estate industry at a time when it is rightly under increasing regulatory pressure to do the right thing in bringing forward new development.
There are two critical reasons why developers should engage the likes of Sheffield Hallam and others to create more active neighbourhoods.
As Sheffield Hallam’s own research has shown, every £1 spent on active participation through design returns nearly £4 for the wider economy – creates a clear economic and social return ‘in health and social care, improving wellbeing, building stronger communities and developing skills in the economy.’ The full report can be viewed here and explains the social return on investment framework used to extrapolate this headline figure.
Additionally, it is our belief that more active neighbourhoods are happier and more popular which should lead to an enhanced developer return in the form of increased land sales or higher residential or commercial rents. It is at this point however that the evidence runs out, forming an obvious area for social researchers and forward-thinking developers to work together to create an ‘Economic Return on Investment’ specifically for the real estate industry.
Without the latter, we fear that it will solely be willing industry horses that take forward the adoption of ‘active design’ principles in new developments, thereby locking the industry in an absurd chicken and egg scenario: developers will point to a lack of evidence that it is in their best financial or stakeholder interest to undertake the work, whilst active design proponents will point to developers unwilling to use or test their expertise to deliver what is required from development.
We think this is a big gap in making development in the UK better. If you have any ideas on how to take forward the building of such a model and want to work with Bellona Advisors in developing it over 2022, please get in touch with us here.
