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ODPM Design Seminar
Marion Bowman, director general of the LI, joined a small group of key figures in the built environment sector at a seminar on urban design arranged by leading Government Ministers last month.
The seminar, arranged by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, drew in house builders, professional institutes, policy analysts and advisers, and focused on how to raise standards of design in new housing developments.
“The Minister for Communities and Local Government, David Miliband, and Yvette Cooper, Minister for Housing, are both concerned to deal with some of the issues raised by CABE’s recent audits of design quality in new housing developments in the North and South East of England,” reported Bowman. “The drive to increase housing supply and the challenges set by huge projects like the Thames Gateway, mean that we are a generation with far reaching responsibilities to make the built environment work, look good and be life enhancing."
She continued: “This was an important opportunity to share recent experience and current thinking. The seminar explored everything from the structure of local government finance, to the need for greater design literacy amongst decision-makers and better feedback from the Planning Inspectorate, to the need to make places rather than housing estates and do better thinking at the masterplanning stage.”
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