Examples of large-scale developments

There is tendency to bracket contemporary UK communityled aspirations with a belief that these are going to be quite localised, principally modest projects for a few new ‘affordable’ units, in a very localised setting (provided by a body like a community land trust), which will be small in scale and rural in nature. The following examples should offer grounds to reassess how community-led initiatives have been coping with significantly larger scales of development.

A single example to take from the UK is the current Graven Hill housing development in Bicester, where the local authority has responded to local people's obvious appetites to be involved in planning and building new homes. The authority has acquired land on which it is currently planning for 1,900 properties to be delivered through a variety of forms of local and self-directed activity. The first phases of individual plots have been developed through self-build and custom-build developments and some structured development by housing associations and private developers could be taken up in the future. Initial plot prices are reflective of a buoyant local market, so it is not yet an obvious route for lower-income households to access the project. However, it is hoped that opportunities will materialise in due course.

Both in spirit and in substance, the Bicester approach has drawn from experience developed in town and city development on the European mainland, particularly from the suburban development established by the local authority and its partners at Almere in the Netherlands. Examples of high-quality community-led housing developments are now identified across Europe, and compilations like the European Co-operative Housing in 2015 pull together exciting experiences of collaborative developments across a range of countries (including some schemes from the UK).

What is illuminating within many continental projects are the core principles that challenge the manner in which large-scale speculative UK housing and neighbourhood developments are usually undertaken, providing accommodation for households that have yet to be identified nor engaged in any subsequent practice of neighbourhood creation. Continental examples offer some very real alternatives to this.