Sustainability is essential to future growth

Regardless of whether the proposed City Plan is accepted or not, it is inevitable that to gain the 24,000 new houses we need over the next 15 years, our city will have to start creeping out to our green edges - and perhaps into our blue edge as well.

As an architect, I would be disturbed if the built fringes were developed as mediocre housing estates. This is an exciting opportunity to do something better. After all, with the Brighton and Lewes Downs having just been awarded UNESCO biosphere status, we need any potential greenfield development to embrace the latest sustainable technologies.

All of the talk in Brighton and Hove so far has been of increasing the amount of available homes to the city. But these sites need to be do more than that: they need to be exemplars of sustainable living.

Other cities have successfully increased their size within a sustainable way and there is a particularly good example with Freiburg in Germany. Freiburg has about 220,000 inhabitants, high levels of public transport use, parking space 'restrictions', promotion of cycling, and a Green leadership. Sound familiar?

Freiburg also has long-term strategies that encompass sustainable living much like Brighton's One Planet City status.

Since the 1970s, Freiburg has been increasing in size and has determined that Vauban, one of the new districts, will have a particular emphasis on sustainability.

I first came across this area when researching Passivhauses (or Passive House) for one of my firm's projects, as the district has quite a number of them - including a Passivhaus tower block.

Most interestingly, Vauban has developed energy-plus houses - houses with energy-generating features that create a surplus beyond what the house requires. Consequently, the residents of the energy-plus houses in Vauban earn an income of €6,000 a year by exporting the energy back to the grid.

For Brighton to offer the best urban fringe, any new developments must achieve the following:

Little reliance on outside energy

Ideally, it would be like many schemes in the United States that are totally off-grid, or ones that create more energy than they consume, such as the energy-plus schemes.

Focus on cycling and walking

Through design and planning, it should be possible to keep everything a community would need close and connected. Car-use could be discouraged by removing parking from the streets and only allocating a small number of paid-for spaces in a remote car park.

Excellent public transport

I do hope our city will go for it and get a tram system implemented, because I worry that we will get to a point where we have an excess amount of buses required in the city.

Self-build opportunities

I would like to see small plots sold off for self-builders and niche developers. In Vauban, less than 30% of the houses were developed by large-scale developers. This approach is also very successful at encouraging diverse streetscapes, as has been demonstrated in the newer areas of Amsterdam.

Food-growing

Brighton and Hove's planning policy already requires new developments to encourage food-growing, but again this could be fully integrated into the design to be an exemplar scheme.

A close community

This is another integral part of the success of Freiberg, where schools, workplaces, and shops are kept close together. Freiburg even restricted shopping centres from being out of town - a very different scenario to most towns.

Density

This is always the hardest aspect to balance correctly. It is essential that these urban fringes are developed within a framework that offers all of the positives, but also maximises the density. A sea of land-hungry bungalows would be a real tragedy.

Quality

All elements of the developments need to be excellent and you can only achieve that with the right brief, the right financial investment, and the right project team on board.

Finally, maybe we should also look beyond our urban fringes and explore developing the blue edge of our city?

An approach could be to use Arcology, which is Architecture and Ecology combined. The results are very dense cities that have everything integrated and is often proposed in a distinctive built form. It all sounds a bit like an architecture student's project, but there are schemes being built based on this theory such as Masdar City in Abu Dhabi.

I often walk to the office along the seafront and admire the elegance of the pier being at rest within the seafront vista. Perhaps we have room for a few more structures in our seascape to generate housing opportunities, rather than just restricting our view towards the green landscape surrounding the city.

Andy Parsons is managing director and founder at Yelo Architects. For more information, visit: www.yeloarchitects.com