Print

Guidance for green networks introduced

Catherine Deshayes

Ambitious guidance for allotments, community gardens, city farms to sustainable urban drainage schemes and flood storage areas - has been published in the latest eco-town worksheet on green infrastructure.

The Town and Country Planning Association, (TCPA) campaigns for the reform of the UK's planning system to make it more responsive to people's needs and aspirations and to promote sustainable development.

The TCPA launched the new guidance, which describes what constitutes exceptional green infrastructure for eco-towns and how this can be applied to eco-town planning and development.

TCPA chief executive Gideon Amos said, "From their beginnings new settlements have been able to provide a better and closer relationship between the natural environment, its ecosystems and the way we live.

"New settlements today could reinvent garden city living for a new, low carbon century. The guidance set out here is more demanding than for any other development. The challenge we now lay down for eco-towns in this worksheet is to deliver on this possibility."

Among the recommendations aimed at eco-town developers, the worksheet proposes that developers should provide at least one major, well-equipped park in the eco-town, offering a variety of facilities for all age groups and every eco-town resident should have access to land, private or communal, to grow their own food.

Developers should also look to forge supply links between eco-town residents, local food producers, processors and distributors to showcase the re-localisation of sustainable food production.

There should also be a network of greenways included to connect between larger or more expansive open spaces; safe-routes should be developed across a network of streets between open spaces and parks and homes and schools to encourage children to play without danger from traffic and open spaces should have a major role to play in contributing to sustainable transport, energy efficiency, water and drainage management, whilst ensuring a unique sense of place, heritage and local landscape character.

The worksheet also highlights the example of Hampstead Garden Suburb in North London, offering its success in developing an urban area that is dominated by green space as a model for eco-town developers.