New design codes will support healthier practices
Last week the Quality of Life Foundation in partnership with Tibbalds, the Town and Country Planning Association, TRUUD and Henley Business School published new Design Codes for Health and Wellbeing. The TRUUD real estate lead, Professor Kathy Pain at the University of Reading Henley Business School is a practitioner-academic Corporate Member of the United Kingdom Royal Town Planning Institute and the University of Reading Chair of Real Estate Development. Here Kathy explains why this publication is an important resource for planners and real estate professionals.
Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government National Model Design Code advice (12 June 2023) and the provisions of the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act (2023), sought to ensure that design characteristics such as context, movement, nature, built form, identity, public space, use, homes and buildings, resources and timespan, receive due attention in planning system decisions.
Through my work with TRUUD, I was an invited member of the government’s Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) working group led by Michael Chang, to promote healthy and safe communities in a companion guide to the National Design Code on how local authorities can embed health and wellbeing in the design coding process.
I was subsequently delighted to work in partnership with the Quality of Life Foundation, Tibbalds and the Town and Country Planning Association, to advance publication of the guidance in Design Codes for Health and Wellbeing. Based on evidence from my research and role in the TRUUD project, I paid close attention during the drafting process to making sure it could speak to practitioners both in the planning and real estate spheres.
The TRUUD evidence reveals that the real estate investment industry wants to act on healthier cities. However, a shared public health, planning and real estate understanding of what constitutes healthy development, is the missing link to achieve effective community health and wellbeing outcomes. The new design code guidance will help both public and private sector decision-makers to develop a shared vision of what healthy development looks like on the ground and make the vision a reality.
Design codes can embed community health priorities in practice through collegiate decision-making and help to combat health inequalities in places where infrastructure obsolescence, economic, social and health disparities, are most concentrated. Readers can access specific case studies that deal with movement; context and identity; nature; the built form, public space; use; homes and buildings and lifespan and resources with a detailed action checklist for reference.
I’m delighted that the guidance has been welcomed by the Local Government Association and the Association of Directors of Public Health.
The next step for my research in TRUUD is the development of advice notes on what’s new about the report and how I would like to see design codes used in decision-making. Leveraging the know-how of health, planning and real estate experts can make infrastructure capital investment a powerful force for social value creation and healthy placemaking.
