Following our conference on Healthy Urban Development, we are delighted to host this blog from Homes England outlining the updated Building for a Healthy Life (BHL) toolkit that has been published to help ensure new developments support people’s health.
About the Building for a Healthy Life toolkit
At Homes England we understand that what we build is just as important as how much we build. Delivering homes sustainably extends beyond just buildings. To be truly sustainable, we need to deliver places that enable people to live healthy and active lifestyles, support biodiversity, and embed resilience. This can only be done through good design, and for this Homes England use the Building for a Healthy Life (BHL) toolkit.
BHL is co-created with industry professionals, other Government departments, and leading experts from across the design sector. It is highly practical and has been written to be approachable and instructive. We require all our sites to make use of BHL and alignment with its principles forms part of our Strategic Plan. In short, Government holds us accountable for our design quality as demonstrated through BHL.
The role of landscape in good design
In recent years, updates have emphasised the role of landscape in supporting other aims for our sites. A hallmark of good design is when a range of problems can be solved through simple, integrated solutions and time and again we find that when we get the landscape right, other benefits follow.
For example, the simple addition of trees to our streets makes these spaces better able to support biodiversity, provides much-needed microclimate management, helps to retain water close to where it falls, encourages people to walk and cycle, and drastically improves the look and feel of a place. One intervention, multiple benefits. The latest version of BHL turns up the dial on this philosophy by reinforcing landscape considerations across various scales of design.
When thinking strategically, landscape links knit habitat together beyond the site boundary, so considering these often presents opportunities to do the same for human movement, especially for active travel. Within the site, connected landscape creates spaces that can also be used to capture and manage water, which people and wildlife both enjoy. We have already discussed street trees, but at an even finer scale, a planted boundary treatment softens the edges of a street or space, creates privacy for residents, and provides options within the plot for managing things like bins and cycle storage.
Integrating landscape strategy at all scales
The real magic happens when your landscape strategy is fully integrated at all scales. Let’s work through an example. Imagine your vision for a place is that people are able to walk and cycle for local trips should they want to. Starting at the front door, a secure cycle store is integrated into the front garden of the home, screened by attractive landscaping. Next, a tree-lined street with appropriate cycle provision connects to one of many dedicated cycle routes. These use landscape connections away from traffic to link across the site, allowing people to access local shops and services with minimal on-road cycling.
The landscape connections are direct, and have the added benefit of being attractive due to water and biodiversity. The journey culminates at a local centre, with shops and services arranged around a public square where people can meet, socialise, and where events can be hosted. The trees and water features within this square make it a great place to be, but they also help to maintain those links into the streets and other spaces beyond.
Designing in landscape from the outset
For this to work in practice, landscape must be designed in from the outset but also managed appropriately. A changing climate requires species to be carefully selected otherwise the landscape will simply not survive. The prevailing image for many people of this summer’s droughts is swathes of brown, dusty grass and dried up ponds. We can and must do better.
Another issue that we see time and again across new sites is dead or dying trees. In some instances, we have lost 90% of new tree planting due to a combination of poor species selection, inadequate root protection, soil compaction, underwatering, and damage from construction traffic. BHL expands design considerations to include stewardship and on-going care for things like landscape to help avoid these issues in the future.
When done properly, landscape and the resultant benefits can take a good project and make it great. Our experience is that it is the best investment you can make to create places that people love.
Banner image: Pydar Street by PRP
