Crawley New Town came about through careful planning. Its development was driven by a high-level master plan that specified the neighbourhoods, housing locations, employment areas and much else. Thanks to this good and thorough groundwork, we have a thriving community within a relatively compact space inWest Sussex.
The skills that help us plan our future are vital to Crawley Council and to any other local authority. They are about applying a high level of concentration, analysis and precision work to assess what development might meetCrawley’s future needs. This kind of master planning has its important place today in defining what we seek to achieve in delivering a comprehensive vision forCrawley.
Ideally developments for a scheme such as Town Centre North or Manor Royal Business District should deliver comprehensivity. Their component parts are designed to complement each other in delivering an overall vision and in not detracting from what is already there.
While this approach is as important today as it ever was, economic circumstances require that we apply some complementary and pragmatic trains of thought. Investment capital remains quite scarce especially if we are dealing with just one developer or development partner. This fact can heighten financial viability challenges facing major regeneration schemes and oblige us to think of different approaches.
Comprehensivity for major developments can be achieved through careful phasing where each tranche of construction contributes to the whole. Each completed phase assists the viability of the next. Bringing on additional development partners provides further help with the financial challenges.
In these circumstances, we need to be flexible enough to consider ideas that go beyond the single-minded pursuit of perfection. A master plan where every single development slots into its allocated area of land at exactly the right time with exactly the right usage is probably perfect but is it deliverable? If we have a plan that will not materialise, then it has no more social and economic meaning than a Powerpoint slide.
We need flexibility to deal with the obvious dilemmas that rigid master planning can present us with. That means taking risks to make progress. If we have development proposals that can contribute to our wider town centre regeneration objectives, these ideas should be given an airing. We should efficiently determine if new proposals contribute to our wider vision without going right back to square one to make that decision. Otherwise opportunities pass us by.
Similarly when we have a period of high unemployment and we are approached with development proposals that create jobs but deviate from a master plan, we must be balanced in our decision-making. Is the long-term plan still attainable and if it is, how seriously does one proposal affect it? We can turn away opportunities and use eloquent reasoning in the process. If this is done too many times, we should not expect to be understood. That would be asking too much.
Councillor Bob Lanzer, Leader of Crawley Borough Council
29th November 2010