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

241 Experiencias contemporáneas del diseño urbano New urban housing design in the UK design across levels of policy and decision-making, including the appeals process. In spite of this flurry of policy making, good practice and gov- ernment exhortation, as we have seen, poor housing design quality remains a problem. CABE audits of new housing u- sing the Building for Life standards reveal a large gap between aspiration and achievement. In 2006 only 18% of new housing across England was assessed as good or very good, and 30% is judged to be so poor that it should not have been given plan- ning permission. The majority of schemes are assessed as av- erage (CABE 2006). It is also important to acknowledge that planning regula- tion is seeking an increasingly wide-ranging and complex set of objectives, and there may be trade-offs among diffe- rent objectives. In planning for housing quantitative targets for housing delivery, targets for brown field use and ob- taining developer contributions to the capital cost of afforda- ble housing have arguably taken precedence over design qua- lity. Overall supply and affordable housing delivery are audi- tedbycentralgovernment,andachievementshavebeenrewar- dedviatheperformancemanagementregime,whichcharacte- rized local government under New Labour. According to Mu- rie and Rowlands (2008), in order tomake work the formula of increasing housing supply, maximizing the use of brownfield land and obtaining planning gain, has meant allowing deve- lopers to develop at much higher densities. A consequence of this is a surfeit of small flats, reduced space standards and lit- tle in the way of private or public open space or community facilities (CABE, 2009). The emphasis on improving residential design quality rep- resented a significant shift in the government’s stance with respect to design control in the planning process, compared with the 1980s when design control was labelled as subjec- tive and an inappropriate interference with market deci- sions. It was motivated partly by the evidence that projected household growth would require higher levels of new hous- ing development and land release. Better residential design was seen as important in ensuring public support for this (Carmona, 1999). There is, though, long-standing criticism of the quality of new speculatively built housing, and the rea- sons for this relate partly to design control and its effective-