Standardisation as an integral part of the design response can help to generate order through repetition while allowing greater construction efficiency.  But standard house types must be capable of meaningful adaption to local needs and context through the use of:

• Special types at prominent locations
• High impact components selected for ‘special treatments’
• Flexible elevational treatments
• Compensating for bespoke treatments through the density and tenure mix.

Each requires an in-depth knowledge of costs and value within the design team. 

Successful projects require strong design leadership.  While one party invariably takes the lead on pushing the design quality agenda, design leadership operates most forcefully when it is collaborative, with all stakeholders invested in the project and playing their part in supporting the vision.  It requires:

• Excellent team working
• Political will
• Aspirational client briefing
• Ultimately, commissioning good designers.

Taking on the leadership role in many of the stories were a range of dedicated delivery vehicles initiated by the public sector to deliver a proactive local housing programme.  These ranged from public sector housing companies focussed primarily on the delivery of affordable housing, to public-private partnerships with a wider cross-tenure remit.  These become highly effective and skilled entities that remove the day-to-day pressure of delivery from local government while addressing the multiple complexities of disadvantaged low value areas. 

Local planning authorities are rarely in a leadership position when it comes to delivering complex urban projects, but a lot of planning occurs elsewhere and is critical on the road to success.  This includes:

• Compiling integrated opportunities using proactive CPO powers
• Embracing housing authorities, their relationships and knowhow
• The public sector owning their own projects by taking direct responsibility for delivery
• Setting strategic quality expectations across all public sector plans and strategies.

The production of site-specific guidance, by different actors, represents a fundamental basis for proactive planning to fully articulate public interest design expectations.  Indeed, the absence of site-specific guidance leaves a vacuum which others fill, often with inappropriate design standards or limited design expectations.  Key tools include:

• Proactive codes and briefs
• Pre-application meetings with planning and highways authorities
• Design review
• Design competition briefs.

What is the right level of engagement in different localities will be a matter of judgement, but even if there is nobody living on or near a site, there are always people to talk to and value in engaging to enhance outcomes and processes through:

• Fundamental engagement where communities are being re-house
• Managing expectations
• Educating participants about the trade-offs
• Allowing time (but not too much)
• Engage directly (not through third parties)
• Embracing established community voices
• Utilising the gold standard of co-design.

Making the public realm and private communal spaces conducive to social interaction encourages neighbourliness and a willingness to be involved in neighbourhood management, with similar impacts delivered by facilitating multi-generational living.  There was an absence of models with community ownership at their heart, but almost all the stories put in place arrangements for the long-term management of developments that gave new residents a key steering role.

In disadvantages localities the market, if it exists at all, will be compromised, while costs, given the realities of development in complex urban areas, are likely to be higher.  Overarching the different strategies encompassed in the ten routes to success were a number of common strategies:

• Leveraging public sector land ownership to allay risks in challenging locations
• Densification strategies on council owned land
• Taking advantage of public sector freedoms to borrow to build
• Easing cash flow by building for a greater diversity of tenures
• De-risking with public funding (often small scale)
• Prioritising spend by investing in those things that matter and which last.

In many disadvantaged localities, unaffordability is less of a problem than ‘uninvestability’.  Rather than private equity requiring a short-term return on investment, patient capital is required, either from public or private sources.  Several factors need to be considered:

• A regeneration discount applied in the early phases of large projects to be recovered in later phases
• Rolling public investment (land, reclamation, transport, housing) to attract private fund
• Building the market slowly in depressed areas
• Building in quality that can mature and support later phases
• Managing risk by designing in a flexible delivery path
• Establishing opportunities to review the masterplan to reflect changing circumstances.

Design / development teams frequently wished to use narrower roads and less parking to facilitate denser development, reduce hard surfaces, and save money, while highway authorities, particularly in non-unitary authorities, were often resistant to departing from their adopted standards.  Highways authorities need to be engaged earlier in the design process to bring them on the journey of more people-centric, less cars-dominated urbanism, with the health and well-being benefits that flow from this providing a lever to encourage a more holistic view of highways responsibilities.  The alternative is to eschew adoption altogether and to retain management responsibility over roads, footpaths and associated trees and landscape, all compensated for by higher densities and more homes.

Circumstances change as do the cost pressures on different parties.  Value engineering is an everyday reality but can be conducted without dumbing down through:

• Anticipating cost cutting and pre-empting it
• Picking your battles, by identifying areas of no compromise
• Repeating viability appraisals to identify scope for redesign
• Whole life costing
• Removing contractual wriggle-room.

Avoiding design and build contracting, bringing design and construction functions inhouse, and more carefully selecting contractors (not only on price) were all utilised to help control standards, as was the use of modular production if enough predictable through-put could be guaranteed.

Taking on the leadership role in many of the stories were a range of dedicated delivery vehicles initiated by the public sector to deliver a proactive local housing programme.  These ranged from public sector housing companies focussed primarily on the delivery of affordable housing, to public-private partnerships with a wider cross-tenure remit.  These become highly effective and skilled entities that remove the day-to-day pressure of delivery from local government while addressing the multiple complexities of disadvantaged low value areas.