New towns are back – but this time they must be more walkable

The UK’s next generation of new towns form a central part of the government’s growth strategy, while also promising to address the housing shortage.

Unlike the low-rise, car-dependent towns built after the second world war, these proposed towns are intended to be denser, more walkable and built around public transport and active lifestyles.

But the UK does not build dense housing particularly well, and various economic, political and cultural forces are pushing new developments in the other direction.

The government argues that higher density development can help support inclusive economic growth while lowering carbon emissions and reducing dependence on private cars. Its new towns programme and its seven proposed locations reflect this shift in thinking.

Developments such as Leeds South Bank, Manchester Victoria North and London Thamesmead are intended to support dense urban living in locations with strong transport links and job opportunities.

Wholly new settlements, such as Tempsford in the much-vaunted Oxford to Cambridge growth corridor, will have an ill defined aim of “ambitious density” and are expected to have a higher density development model than the last generation of new towns.

What density looks like

In reality, a higher density model doesn’t necessarily mean tall shiny towers. Cities like Barcelona, Paris and Stockholm, to take just three European examples, often consist of six-storey apartment blocks arranged around grid patterns of walkable streets and public squares – yet they are significantly denser than equivalent British cities.

Being “ambitous” about density, as the government intends, will require a decisive shift away from the two-storey housing estates that were developed around UK towns and cities in recent decades. Instead, there will be a move towards mid-rise neighbourhoods with housing between four and eight storeys and located close to walkable mixed use high streets.

Yet Britain’s housing system is not set up to deliver these kinds of neighbourhoods – or towns. Most housing in the UK is still built at low densities, and there appears to be little appetite within the powerful and highly profitable volume housebuilding industry to adapt their established business models.

Denser schemes can be more complex and expensive. Building safety regulations, alongside rising land and material costs, means high-density development is less financially attractive than suburban housing. Cultural preferences also matter. Research repeatedly shows that people in the UK prefer houses over flats, while proposals for denser development often encounter strong local opposition.

These attitudes are not universal, however. In much of Europe, there is strong support for compact living across income groups, particularly where supported by decent local amenities and accessible green space. Even in the UK, the prevalence of three to five storey tenements and apartments in Scottish cities demonstrates that higher densities are both acceptable and often desirable places to live.

However, the horror of the Grenfell Tower fire – and the subsequent revelation that thousands of people were living in buildings with the same unsafe cladding – have only deepened existing anxieties about higher-density urban living.

More recently, planning concepts associated with density, such as the “15-minute city” or low traffic neighbourhoods, have become politically polarising. Some have even characterised such ideas as a government conspiracy to control how people live and move around cities.

Dense neighbourhoods that work well – whether in Europe or parts of the UK – typically depend on high quality urban, landscape and architectural design, a mix of tenures, land uses and amenities, and good public transport. While these are precisely the ingredients identified in the UK’s new towns policy, they are also the components of placemaking that local authorities struggle to deliver and the housebuilding industry actively resists.

If planning deregulation leads to higher density neighbourhoods being built hastily and without sufficient thought, we could quickly ended up with overcrowded places that lack shops and services and are poorly served by public transport. This outcome would only serve to strengthen local opposition to new development.

The success of the UK’s next generation of new towns will therefore depend not just on the raw number of homes built, but also on whether they can create denser places that people genuinely want to live in.

James White receives funding from the Economic and Social Research Council.

Hannah Hickman receives funding from the Economic Social Research Council, National Infrastructure Planning Association