Creating Connected Thriving Places in Bristol
ZOE METCALFE, Client Director, Buildings and Places, Local and Central Government UK
As a winning team of UN-Habitat’s Climate Smart Cities Challenge, Thriving Places, powered by AtkinsRealis and Edaroth are working on a ‘Thrivability Toolkit’ to create Thriving Places for people and nature in Bristol.
There are unloved spaces peppered across our nation’s towns and cities, and in Bristol there are over one hundred such sites: micro and small sites, degraded and neglected garage sites, underutilised car parks and marooned islands.
Viewed individually, these sites are unviable for transformation, but by viewing them as a cluster, they have the potential to generate value, counter social disintegration and enhance the resilience of the city. The Thriving Places team are working on both a system demonstrator and a replicable system blueprint to show how this can be done.
Right now, we are facing a humanitarian crisis caused by the structural deficit in quality, truly affordable housing. The facts are stark. There is a clear supply issue: local authorities spent £1.6 billion on Temporary Accommodation between April 2021 and March 2022, which was an increase of 4% on the previous year and 61% on five years ago.
Bristol, for example, has a housing waiting list of 19,000 households, and around 1100 families in Temporary Accommodation. Many of these are poor quality: BRE reports that poor housing costs the NHS £1.4 billion a year. 11% of England’s housing stock (2.6 million homes) are ‘poor quality’ and hazardous to occupants. Heating our buildings accounts for 23% of the UK’s greenhouse gases and decarbonising heat will be crucial to achieving net zero by 2050. Yet 88% of homes remain heated by natural gas.
People need decent homes that support health and wellbeing. However, we’re in a state of emergency where Temporary Accommodation, sick homes, fuel poverty and the refugee crisis undermine our ability to deliver positive quality of life outcomes. Alarming trends include a growing demand for adult and child social care, and a rise in long-term health conditions. 185.6 million working days were lost to sickness/injury in 2022, 47.4 million more than in 2019, a record high that exacerbates labour/skills shortages. Absences due to respiratory conditions have more than doubled since the pandemic, with poor housing a contributory factor. Mould and dust-based respiratory irritants prevail in damper, poorly constructed homes, disproportionately affecting adults and children in the lowest income households.
Local authorities want holistic solutions that help them adapt at pace, enabling delivery of truly affordable social housing and retrofit of existing communities. However, we need to collectively overcome policy, planning and viability evaluation systems and dismantle structures that act as barriers, both real and imagined, if we are to succeed.
This is our goal, to unlock supply by unlocking land through small, complex sites. We’re asking some big questions: What role can digital and technology play in enabling the transition at scale? How can we generate digital ecosystems that improve decision making? Where will credible and sustainable investment come from? How do we re-naturalise our places for better quality of life? How do we create new ways of measuring value?
There are no simple answers, and yet together we must continue exploring the questions to increase the supply of affordable, climate smart homes and place communities at the heart of decision making and solution seeking.
For more information visit our project page.
