Garden cities are not the answer to the country’s housing shortage and existing cities should be developed more densely, the think-tank The Future Spaces Foundation has suggested as it estimates that an additional 67 garden cities would need to be built in London and the Southeast alone over the next 25 years to address current housing shortage, while developing brown field sites could meet demands for at least the next eight years.
Future Spaces Foundation writes:
Plans to build 250,000 homes in Garden Cities would deliver just a third of unmet demand for housing over the next five years, leaving a shortfall of around 500,000 homes between now and 2020, according to a new report from the Future Spaces Foundation (FSF).
In its second report, Vital Cities not Garden Cities: the answer to the nation’s housing shortage?, the FSF critically examines the Government’s policy of building new Garden Cities in response to the current housing crisis, suggesting instead that the focus should be on densifying existing settlements.
The report found that if all the new homes that are required were to be built in Garden Cities, 67 of these type of settlements, each with a population of 30,000, would be required in order to meet the projected shortage of one million homes in London and the Home Counties over the next 25 years. Moreover, if used as the sole solution to the current housing shortage, Garden Cities would require 675km² of land (an area bigger than urban Manchester), the equivalent of 6.8% of the unprotected and unbuilt land within a 50 mile radius of London. As an indicator of how inefficient this low-density model is, in contrast, if these one million homes were built at the relatively average gross density of a typical major town in the region such as Brighton & Hove (3,320 homes per km²) just 301 km² of unprotected and unbuilt land would be required.
