Steven Tiesdell

Current planning policy in England enables local planning authorities to require housing developments above a certain size to include a proportion of ‘affordable’ housing. The policy has social objectives (that is, to create ‘mixed’ communities and reduce the potential for the ‘ghettoisation’ of affordable housing) and financial objectives (that is, to shift the cost of providing social housing to the private sector). Although aspects of the policy have been the subject of research the design issues have yet to be fully investigated. Viewed from a development process perspective, the key design question is how layout and design decisions are affected by the developer's perception (or market experience) that the inclusion of affordable units has a detrimental effect on the market-rate housing. To aid further research, the author develops a classification of design strategies and outcomes necessitated by the inclusion of an element of affordable housing.

The quality of contemporary residential development, and the associated design challenge for house builders, are important current policy issues in England. Until recently, better‐designed contemporary housing development was more frequently seen on smaller, more constrained urban or brownfield sites and more rarely on greenfield sites. Set against a significant shift in the prevailing planning regime during the 1990s (from greenfield development to an express policy emphasis on brownfield development), this paper attempts to explain this observation. Utilizing the concept of ‘opportunity space’, it develops a model of the role of design and the designer in the development process, which is then used to account for differences in the quality of development on greenfield and brownfield sites. It is suggested that the development of greenfield and brownfield sites displays significant contrasts and that, as a consequence, successful brownfield developers yield opportunity space in their business strategies to designers.

In the Unted Kingdom New Labour has claimed to be pursuing a ‘third way’, with policy implications intended to break away from and/or move beyond established debates and policy alternatives. In this paper we explore, identify, and discuss what New Labour's third way means with regard to neighbourhood regeneration in England. The paper has two main aims: first, to review developments in neighbourhood regeneration policy and, second, to assess New Labour's third way in respect of neighbourhood regeneration. The paper is in four main parts. The first provides a broad-brush review of the New Right approach to neighbourhood regeneration in the form of the Thatcher and Major governments. This provides the point of departure for the second part, which discusses the Blair government's neighbourhood regeneration policies in terms of policy change or continuity in four substantive areas: welfare policy, housing policy, regeneration, and the institutional context for regeneration. The third part identifies some of the key themes in New Labour's approach and the final part draws some overarching conclusions.