Conquering Modern Design, Planning, and Urban Challenges with Esther Kurland part 1
Inside Property DevelopmentShow Notes
For this episode, Paul is joined by veteran planner Esther Kurland, the director of UDL, who has extensive experience, including roles at London Transport, the GLA, and several other local authorities. Esther provides an in-depth look at the challenges property developers currently face, how we got here and, importantly, how these issues can be overcome.
Including, multi-time cities, planning for objectives rather than by numbers and communal spaces e.g. Play areas being shared by small groups of neighbours, which could change the density matrix.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Esther's personal experience of living in a poorly designed housing estate sparked her interest in urban planning.
Planning policy is still too complex.
Developers must now achieve multiple objectives including growth, public good, and financial viability.
Some planners think they exist to facilitate growth, others think they exist to facilitate community good and each type of planner tends to only focus on that one thing.
You need a certain density of people to get neighbourhood facilities to work.
If you only build suburbs, you end up needing expensive transport infrastructure.
If you plan for quality, you automatically produce a development that is the correct density for the site. Esther explains how that happens.
Planning policies that say what they are trying to achieve e.g. Good ventilation encourages designers to innovate.
Local authorities are critically under-resourced so developers must be prepared to engage more collaboratively.
BEST MOMENTS
“We literally took the policies out of those 20 different documents and put them in one little concertina booklet that you could put in a pocket.”
"We seem to have been going through planning reform forever. It will settle down now, but we're still not there."
“The planning system has become more and more housing target driven.”
"I think we're building a lot of slums, basically in some of the schemes we see in the highest densities."
EPISODE RESOURCES
https://www.urbandesignlearning.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/esther-kurland-33017115
ABOUT THE HOST
Paul Higgs is a Chartered Planning and Development Surveyor with 40+ years' experience in land, planning and development and a 100% success track record in winning planning consents.
Paul undertook his first refurb project when he was just 17 and then worked his way up from labouring on building sites to becoming Head of Land for renowned plc housebuilder, Barratt Developments. He managed to escape the corporate world in 2002 to set up what is now a multimillion-pound award-winning property development company, Millbank Group.
In 2013 Paul founded the Millbank Land Academy, the UK’s first training company dedicated to property development; to teach established and aspiring developers the insider secrets the big housebuilders don’t want you to know!
Paul is also a founding investor and former board director of the industry-leading PropTech Co, LandTech, and has lectured on Advanced Development Valuations on the MSc Property Development at London South Bank University.
CONTACT METHOD
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-higgs
Millbank Land Academy: https://www.millbanklandacademy.co.uk
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/paulhiggsofficial
YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@InsidePropertyDevelopment
This Podcast has been brought to you by Disruptive Media. https://disruptivemedia.co.uk/
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