Seminar Series: Building Sustainable Communities

The Young Foundation is currently working with English Partnerships on a series of four seminars designed to examine how best the government’s planned programme of new house building can support the creation of sustainable and inclusive communities. The project is supported by the Housing Corporation, IDeA and CIH.

These meetings brought together invited representatives from English Partnerships and other key agencies involved in delivering the government’s targets.

The seminars were informed by research findings from a variety of case studies, looking at successful projects from the field of regeneration, and the experiences of the agencies and residents involved. They examined how principles of participation and involvement can be generated from the earliest stages of planning and also looked at how tensions between higher level policy-makers’ goals and the aspirations of tenants, over issues such as sustainable lifestyles, can be mediated. The seminars explored issues around sustainable communities both in environmental terms and in terms of building inclusive settlements, underpinned by viable local governance structures.

The results of the research and seminar discussions will be made available in the form of a toolkit, which will highlight the research findings and will discuss issues around the barriers and solutions to building participation into the design of new communities. The format of this toolkit will be shaped by the needs of practitioners in the field and might become an internet based resource.

Each of the four seminar will explore the following themes:

Seminar one
28th April - Building participation in new developments – what is known from good practise and research?

Seminar two
19th May - The tensions between aspirations and what people want – how can ways be found to negotiate solutions locally?

Seminar three
2nd June - The link between environmental sustainability and participation – how can sustainable lifestyles and behaviour-change be encouraged in new housing developments and how does this link to participation?

Seminar four
30th June – Constructing longer term stewardship and governance – through new mechanisms like community councils, neighbourhood charters, development trusts and different ways of generating income streams for community activity.

To see pictures taken of the case studies involved in this project and the seminars themselves, click here

For more information contact Liz Bartlett on liz.bartlett(at)youngfoundation.org