London - Strategic Design

Planned Urban Expansion and New Settlements

The aim of this option is to create planned new developments that have a high degree of self sufficiency and self containment of employment and services to reduce the need for residents to leave the settlement. This may reduce travel distances and encourage cycling and walking and the use of public transport. The development will have minimum density of 40 dwellings per hectare to conserve land and ensure that public transport services are viable. Density may vary with some higher density development around public transport interchanges and local centres, but densities would generally be lower than the Compact City with the emphasis on providing residents with the housing, green spaces and facilities for a good quality of life.

Land use: Planned new settlements to create self-contained ‘cellular’ developments around central local retail and social facilities in areas of economic growth to achieve a good balance between households and local jobs. Some of these settlements to accommodate growth in the East and South East Regions would be new eco-towns of sufficient size and distance from London to have a high degree of self sufficiency of local jobs, schools, and town centre services. This may require some relaxation of green belt policies in areas where there is employment growth and potentially good accessibility, particularly by public transport. There may also be some urban expansion around the edge of the London and a thickening of development on public transport corridors to help meet the housing demand of London.

Transport: As with the other options, this will have the same total transport capital investment from 2016 to 2031 as the ‘trend.’ It will probably be a similar balance between highway and public transport to the Trend, but this has still to be decided based on preliminary testing. The same road user charges would be used as for the ‘Trend+RUC’ and other options.