New Suburbia

"PPG3 has had a huge impact on how we look at a piece of land," says Tony Stevens, managing director of Redrow in Lancashire, which is developing the 2000-unit Buckshaw village near Chorley in Lancashire with Barratt Homes. "Housing estates will take on a different form and there will be a wide range of house types, designs and ideas." Stevens accepts there is a need for change "People no longer want to drive through a development and not know where they are because everything looks identical." The water features, squares, football pitches, commercial units, hotel and bowling green planned for Buckshaw bear testament to the role Section 106 agreements are having in forcing homebuilders to provide mixed-use villages. "It's not like the urban vision you have in a city where amenities and buildings already exist," says Stevens. "Buckshaw is on the edge of Chorley and needs to be designed as a new community".

Westoe Colliery in South Shields is another brownfield scheme too far from the town centre to prosper without amenities. "Designs for villages have to be informed by the community's needs not just the housing, such as where people will shop and spend leisure time. It's not just physical it's economic," says Jason Syers, development and regeneration manager at the Prince's Foundation which advised Wimpey Homes on the 600-dwelling project.

The masterplan for Westoe Colliery by architect Building Design Partnership is mixed-use, and includes buildings based on the local vernacular, which Syers says hasn't been built in the area for 60 years. The design team is also keen for the landscaping to fit in with the surroundings. "Rather than creating a park or village green we have taken stock of what's around here and created pocket parks instead," says Syers. "The sea front provides us with a natural amenity and we are ensuring that there are plenty of vantage points." According to Syers, Westoe and Buckshaw are examples of sustainable urban extensions, which are built on the edge of towns or cities on brown or greenfield land. A couple of years ago this land would have been covered with housing estates. Inner urban regeneration, on the other hand, is villages built in cities where buildings and communities already exist.

Ancoats in Manchester is typical of an inner city urban regeneration project. Masterplanned by Chapman Robinson and EDAW, Ancoats has 14 listed buildings, a fixed street pattern and its own community. English Partnerships' director of planning and technical services, Jane Hamilton, says this type of site calls for a particular approach. "In regenerating an existing area it's important to involve the community. This may mean giving people the opportunity to live and work in the same locality. It's about building on what's there.".

Ancoats Urban Village Company development director Lyn Fenton says that inner city constraints need to be turned into assets. "At Ancoats you can't wipe the slate clean. We have to promote the conversion of existing buildings and encourage sympathetic new building," she says.

One way of creating an identity for the area is to have contemporary street furniture, says Fenton. "We wanted the street furniture to harmonise with Ancoats but still be modern." Security is also important in an inner city scheme. "The emphasis is on people being able to walk around safely," says Hamilton who says that permeability, street front access, overlooked parking and good surveillance will encourage people to move around Ancoats.

Derek Latham of Latham Architects says that the site he masterplanned in Ely doesn't fit into any current definitions of an urban village. "We feel we are creating a model for market town urban development," says Latham. "A lot of the current urban housing solutions are London based and designed to work with Victorian and Edwardian streets." Latham took the rest of Ely's medieval street plan as the basis of the masterplan. The roads are narrow - as little as 3.2 m wide in places - giving the scheme a feeling of density and character. The narrow streets also mean that cars can't park on the street. Between the homes Latham was careful to make sure the spaces joined up, which meant creating alleyways and ensuring permeability across the site.

The first to build on the site is Hopkins Homes. Latham is impressed by its approach. "It didn't try to squeeze in any standard housetypes and the resulting irregular housing seems more friendly as a result," he says.

There is one type of village that doesn't appear in Government design guides anymore - the original insular village. Mawsley in Northamptonshire was given planning permission six years ago. According to Martin Wilkinson, senior partner at Mason Richards Partnership the lead architect for Alfred McAlpine, it would not get planning permission today because it is unrelated to existing settlements, too far from a main road and on a stand-alone site.

The influence of recent sustainable thinking can be seen in the first few homes to be built on the site, though. The development layout is permeable and informal, cars have been designed off the street to maintain the streetscene, and traffic calming measures are horizontal not vertical.

Alfred McAlpine was keen to recreate a genuine Northampton village. A design team explored nearby villages to establish the essential ingredients. As a result the homes echo their rural surroundings and feature steep-pitched roofs, local slates, Corby stone, and simple elevations and fenestration. Block paving, railing and landscaping by JP fencing, T&W Civil Engineering and Alpine Landscapes respectively have also been sourced to blend with the Northamptonshire vernacular.

Section 106 agreements also aim to make the village sustainable. Alfred McAlpine is obliged to provide a subsidised bus service, school, pub, community building, workshops and a shop for the 750 dwellings.

Wilkinson is impressed with the diversity of build so far and that a volume builder such as Alfred McAlpine can build 26 different housetypes in the first 48 homes. "A year ago I wouldn't have thought housebuilders could have built something like this, but I've been proved wrong," he says.