ABSTRACT
Homes occupy more land than anything else in built-up areas, and are a massively important part of our lives and environments. Ensuring that they are well designed will help to provide the homes needed, bring communities and neighbours together, support health and wellbeing, and reduce levels of crime and antisocial behaviour. A public street between the fronts of homes can be the focus for comings and goings. Careful housing design will ensure that internal privacy and active overlooking from the home are both secured, for example by placing living room rather than bedroom windows facing streets at ground-floor level. Allocating a specific parking space to each home only increases the number of spaces required: once the layout designer has met the local authority policy for parking, they will have to add up to 20% for visitor parking, probably on the street.
