ABSTRACT

Higher density was encouraged in London with a matrix showing locations where soaring density would be acceptable – more development profit would cross-subsidise more social housing. Royal Road is a real model for affordable urban housing at high density, with an intelligently integrated architectural and landscape approach that sits comfortably alongside its Victorian, inter-war and post-war neighbours. By 1949, the rehousing programme saw the first tower blocks, first in Harlow, and the revised New Towns Act turning farmland into a laboratory for urban innovation. Social-housing clients responded by seeking dwellings with no shared parts at all. Nowhere illustrates this absurdity better than Coin Street Community Builders’ phase 1 development on London’s South Bank from the late 1980s. Unlike many public-housing projects in New York City, Via Verde fuses a community together using the fundamental communal components of a neighbourhood, which are often kept separate and funded as such.