Teoría y práctica del diseño urbano para la reflexión de la ciudad contemporánea

234 Teoría y Práctica del Diseño Urbano 3.6 New urban housing design in the UK Michael Short y Graham Squires Introduction The last 15 years has seen significant changes in the location, type, delivery and design of urbanhousing in the UnitedKing- dom. There has been a move away from seeing design ‘purely as part of the development process and as a technical aspect of building construction, and a move towards viewing better de- sign as a central policy objective’ (Gallent and Tewdwr-Jones, 2007: 111). This period has also seen the market provide a huge number of high density apartments in central brown field lo- cations in our main cities, fuelled by policy initiatives linked to Labour’s urban renaissance agenda. The result has been the construction of investor-led dwellings of variable quality with limited local facilities leading to half-empty large ur- ban blocks with a stunted relationship with the surrounding townscape. The current recession provides us with an oppor- tunity to revisit the appropriateness – in design terms - of this housing boom and allows us to examine the factors that led to this type of housing growth, not least because this is the very housing sector that has suffered so much in recent years. In addition we will examine why the housing product has been so variable in design quality terms given that there has been an explosion in policy and other regulatory instruments across the country from a wide variety of planning agencies. As a form of development, high density apartments are a very different product from the traditional output of British house builders – tried and tested standard house types at low to me- dium densities, single-tenure and in suburban locations ac- cessed by the car (Carmona et al ., 2003). The tightening of the planning policy agenda in the UK in the late 1990s and early 2000s saw an engagement with the concept of brownfield land in existing urban areas, providing a new challenge to house builders who had been used to providing a ‘one size fits all’ product to the market since the 1950s. There is evidence that developers responded quickly to the changing policy context by adapting the housing product to new housing types in dif-