Altered Estates: how to reconcile competing interests in estate regeneration

What – Altered Estates: how to reconcile competing interests in estate regenerationWhen – Thursday 9 June Where – New London Architecture, The Building Centre, 26 Store Street WC1E 7BTWho – Julia Moulder, Executive Director of Development, Catalyst Housing (Chair)Kaye Stout, Partner, Pollard Thomas EdwardsBenjamin Derbyshire, Managing Partner, HTAAndy von Bradsky, PRP Consultant and Chairman, The Housing ForumWhy – In response to the renewed political focus on estate regeneration, the practices (HTA, Levitt Bernstein, Pollard Thomas Edwards and PRP) have joined forces to distil their combined experience into a series of recommendations on how best to meet the challenges of today. You can download the report by visiting the website www.alteredestates.co.uk    Here’s what Benjamin Derbyshire, Managing Partner of HTA had to say “Thirty years ago our four practices were working as community advocates in the spirit of what was then known as ‘community architecture’. We experimented widely with techniques of community engagement and concensus building around options for neighbourhood change. And over the intervening years we learnt from our mistakes and came to understand the factors for success. One of the great virtues of our collaborations on issues such as this is that it affords us the opportunity to set out for the benefit of others what we believe to be keys to success based on this experience. Whereas we have the benefit of learning from many past and current projects, others undertake the challenge only rarely. Sometimes this results in a reluctance to commit to the necessary investment in planned time and resources, the confidence to trust in the good sense of local communities and an inability to be sufficiently bold. So I hope our collaboration on Altered Estates will help clients and communities, government and policy makers in the planning and delivery of such complex neighbourhood regeneration projects as we describe in our joint report. In particular, we have learned that transparency and openness in structured consultation, the willingness to expose a wide range of options to thorough scrutiny, and the early statement of projected outcomes that matter most to local people are vital pre-requisites for success.”