The value of housing design and layout

commissioned by the Popular Housing Forum in 1998 indicated that, for owners of
new-build housing, ‘issues of site layout were considered more important than the
appearance of an individual property, especially the area in which a house was built.
The appearance of the neighbourhood was seen as more important than the
appearance of the individual house’.
Carmona argued, in 1999, that the issue of the dominance of roads in the
determination of housing layouts is arguably the most difficult component of the
residential landscape to integrate successfully. Not surprisingly, then, the current
period of residential design guidance was ushered in with the publication by the
DETR in 1998 of the report Places, streets & movement, a companion guide to
Design Bulletin 32 — Residential roads and footpaths. In the same year, the
publication of Planning and development briefs: a guide to better practice endorsed
the need to consider design issues at the earliest stage of the planning and
development process (a point which was made strongly in the 1998
POS/HBF/DETR report).
The publication by the DETR of Planning Policy Guidance Note 3: Housing in 2000
consolidated the transformation in national planning policy guidance relating to
design which Carmona dates from the original guidance issued in 1992. The
publication of By design — urban design in the planning system: towards better
practice by DETR/CABE in 2000 began the process of providing national guidance
relating to urban design objectives and aspects of development form. English
Partnerships and The Housing Corporation published the Urban design
compendium by Llewelyn-Davies in 2000 as a complement to By design to
contribute to the improvement of the quality of housing-led regeneration projects
and the promotion of sustainable new development. A companion guide to PPG3,
By design: better places to live, published by DTLR/CABE in 2001 sought to apply
the principles of good quality urban design (set out in Places, streets and movement
and By design) to the residential environment. None of these official publications
considers in detail the issue of costs and added value from improved design quality
in residential environments.
2.5 Summary
ADDRESSING THE GAPS
The most striking finding in a review of the literature relating to the quality of
residential design is the almost complete absence of any empirical attempts to
measure the implications of high quality on costs, prices or values.
Few commentators have gone beyond making a distinction between the direct
benefits for built environment stakeholders and those indirect benefits that accrue in
the form of ‘public goods’ or externality effects. Initial attempts to formulate models
of the residential development process which emphasise the institutional and
negotiating context in which residential design solutions are formulated have tended
to be based in a greenfield development context, with few applications in brownfield
contexts. To the extent that brownfield developments involve complex pricing effects
deriving from public goods and externality effects deriving, in part at least, from the
T H E V A L U E O F H O U S I N G D E S I G N A N D L A Y O U T
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