A prize fund of £250,000 awaits the consultancy that can create the most compelling but workable strategy for creating new garden cities in the UK.
The prestigious Wolfson Economics Prize – the richest after the Nobel – has attracted 279 entries from consultancies, mostly UK based, which will be narrowed down to a shortlist of five by June, with the winner announced in September.
The winning submission could be in time to influence potential bids for the government’s new “Locally-led Garden Cities” initiative, launched yesterday by deputy prime minster Nick Clegg.
The government says that land-owners, developers or consortia must propose to build at a scale of at least 15,000 homes, and will benefit from a £2.4bn pot made up of various existing funding streams.
Expressions of interest are invited on an ongoing basis, with the 10-page government prospectus saying there are no fixed deadlines.
Meanwhile, the five Wolfson competition finalists will be judged by a panel drawn from the construction and property industries and chaired by developer Trevor Osborne, whose company The Osborne Group specialises in rejuvenating historic properties.
The other judges are Lend Lease’s Pascal Mittermaier, director of sustainability EMEA and also project director for the Elephant & Castle Regeneration, and Tony Pidgley, chairman of The Berkeley Group.
They are joined by Professor Denise Bower, director of the Engineering Project Academy at the University of Leeds, and David Cowans, group chief executive of Places for People.
The competition aims to create new garden cities such as Letchworth, Britain’s first garden city, founded in 1903. Photo: www.letchworth.com
Trevor Osborne this week said: “Delivering a new garden city is an enormously complex task, spanning finance, legal, design, governance economic and environmental issues. We are hugely impressed by the entrants’ efforts to grapple with these issues and the competition is very hotly contested with a wide range of approaches. But in the end we will have to choose a small handful of finalists. The judges are continuing their deliberations.”
To win, entrants must explain how to deliver a new Garden City which is “visionary, economically viable, and popular”.
Among judging criteria is the stipulation that the cities must be self-financing and require no public finding, instead drawing on innovative funding and financing structures that will help to harness the future value of the city.
These could include the “selling forward” of future taxation income (business rates, council tax, and/or development levies) to fund infrastructure upfront, and the use of compulsory purchase options that could reduce the upfront costs of city expansion.
Other criteria are that entrants provide ideas for improving the quality of urban life through the architecture, civic design, public spaces, transport networks, infrastructure of a new city and quality of life.
Finally, entrants must show how local support for a new city in the area could be secured, and aim to convince the judges that the proposals set out would stand a good chance of winning a local referendum.
Simon Wolfson, founder of the prize, said: “The UK faces a genuine housing crisis. The answer must surely be to increase the supply of housing, and garden cities provide a potential answer. The challenge, and opportunity, is to build new cities that are a credit to our age – architecturally inspiring, practical, and desirable, with great infrastructure, good transport systems and beautiful public spaces.
“At a time of economic austerity, the construction of new cities would provide a desperately needed boost to growth without costing taxpayers a penny in the long term.”
