England’s Place Alliance has celebrated its fourth year, reporting on recent achievements in its Annual Review 2017-2018.
image: by Rob Cowan on Place Alliance website
Place Alliance writes in its Annual Review:
This year the Place Alliance continued with its strategy of bringing people, evidence and new thinking together as a means to support the case for place quality. Centrally much of our efforts have been spent on helping to fill gaps in the evidence-base on design, and in this report we outline three projects that have been doing just that. Respectively these have a focus on design review, place quality and value, and the role of local politicians in design decision-making. It is only with reliable, robust evidence that we and others can advocate for investing in a high quality built environment and so it was particularly gratifying to see that our recent report on design skills in local authorities proved to be influential. In particular, the announcement in late 2017 that part of the Planning Delivery Fund would be set aside to support urban design skills in local authorities across the country can be traced directly to our evidence on the issue. The fund is small and clearly more is needed, but it represents the start of a positive new commitment on design from Government.
Since then, the Government has been coming increasingly strongly round to the view that the quality of design matters. This came home most emphatically to us when the joint response that we coordinated on the consultation draft of the NPPF was picked up with key elements strongly reflected in the final adopted framework. In this context the proposed new Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission being established by the Secretary of State is also to be welcomed, but it is vital that its findings are evidence based. Moreover that evidence should be robust and balanced and not unduly influenced by any one set of interests or particular perspective on design. On top of our work centrally, which we will continue through into 2019, our affiliated Groups, notably Arts and Place, Generation Place and Urban Rooms have continued to do fantastic work by encouraging collaboration and the sharing of best practice. Big Meet 8 was, particularly inspiring and charged us with new energy to continue.
