(August 2024)
The government’s recently announced New Towns Taskforce has a unique opportunity not only to explore lasting solutions to the housing crisis but to deliver complete communities that enhance people’s health and wellbeing. Combining the objectives of the Garden City to secure human flourishing with the power of the New Towns development model offers real hope of transforming how we deliver a new generation of high quality and healthy places.
‘Health, hope and prosperity‘ sets out the high-level preconditions necessary to create a healthy new town and reflects on some of the key lessons that need to inform future thinking. This brief note outlines the kind of vision for healthy places that will be vital to securing high quality outcomes in new towns. It then touches on some of the key lessons from the past New Towns programme and some headline preconditions for future success. The golden thread of this work is to explore the relationship between Garden City vision and the post-war New Towns delivery model to demonstrate how visionary outcomes can be made practically deliverable.
Our vision is for a new community where everyone can thrive – economically, socially and environmentally, where all basic needs to secure physical, mental and social wellbeing are met, where people have real agency over their lives and where the other diverse artistic, cultural and spiritual needs of human beings, the things that which make life worth living, are enabled.
Health, hope and prosperity: a vision for healthy new towns
