Design for life – the smart regeneration journey to 2030
Work in progress
Approaches to regeneration necessarily vary across the country and within regions to respect the genius and distinctions of place across our cities, towns and villages. This is as it should be. However, as we enter the end of one political cycle and await the start of a new one, what lessons, both broad and particular, should our placemakers be drawing from and putting into good practice from now until the end of the decade?
Design for Life will be a research programme examining current and future best practice to place-based regeneration through an interdependent set of operational and strategic lenses and setting out a guide charting a route for local leaders to pragmatic yet visionary placemaking.
Research themes
Our research will be split over three key strategic and operational themes for the effective place-based reform of regenerative placemaking:
Operational Concerns:
- Sustainable design – with an emphasis on how councils go about commissioning and resourcing, examining how commercial or insourcing models shape up.
- Decarbonisation – with an emphasis on what net zero regeneration entails for a full range of operational requirements, including performance monitoring, tenant and stakeholder engagement, training and handover, maintenance and repair, energy management, annual reporting, ECP and condition surveys.
- Property and estates partnerships – with an emphasis on leveraging land and property resource rather than disposals.
Strategic Concerns:
In addition to these operational concerns, Localis will also address strategic considerations that have a commercial bearing on matters such as workforce planning challenges, and skills shortages and the potential for new technologies to offset these known problems.
- Place leadership – re-examining the convening power of local government.
- Financial capability – looking at the proven routes to fund regeneration, amid well understood constraints and hardening attitudes to council commercial approaches.
- Net zero and climate change as strategic drivers for change and the role local councils and their partners can play in decarbonising with specific and particular focus on local government use of their land and property asset portfolios.
- Role of the private and third sectors for injecting innovation, new ideas and wide array of benefits (cultural, leisure, health, housing etc) alongside maximal environmental and social value capture into regeneration schemes.
