In the last few months we've completed our latest round of assessments of the impact of regeneration on Woodberry Down and Grahame Park - and started new projects in two new (for us) major regeneration schemes, on Clapham Park Estate in Lambeth and Cambridge Road Estate in Kingston-upon-Thames.
As housing policy shifts and we focus on how to build more homes we can learn from our work on regeneration schemes - and develop policy for the future that creates homes and communities, building on local areas' social and environmental assets.
What do our experiences tell us about how we work to enhance the strengths of communitires, how we meet the needs of people in very different life circumstances and how we make better decisions about the balance between social,environmental and economic trade-offs?
We have long-term ongoing relationships with these places, communities and agencies. We've been in South Acton and Woodberry for nearly a decade. We have been exploring how change in the built environment is affecting residents’ wellbeing, their social relationships, their sense of belonging and agency. These factors in themselves underpin quality of life and also shape wider outcomes, including health and education and resilience to future shocks.
Our experience shows that can track the impacts of built environment change on communities and on local social relationships. It is possible understand and quantify how this affects individual and collective experiences and to learn from this to create places that work better for everyone.
The measurements we use most often – sense of ability to influence, belonging, strength of relationships with neighbours, social integration and community cohesion, wellbeing, loneliness, fear of crime and financial precarity – are central to social impact strategies that focus on place and community.
It matters for us that our work makes a difference. In all the places we are working we see agencies using the findings of our research and social impact assessments to make better decisions and to improve their plans, strategies and ways of working.
In all these areas we are looking at the impact of estate regeneration programmes that started over 15 years ago. They are the products of their time and the imperatives that drove past housing policy. As well as lessons for each area there are important messages for regeneration programmes being developed today, that are responding to our current concerns.
We need to pay more attention to:
These are transferrable lessons for new housebuilding policy. We need to make sure that investment today works for the future of communities and neighbourhoods and avoid the mistakes of the past.
