Lessons from the Olympics: creating lasting value at pace. Helen Streeton writes for EG
With the Paralympics now finished, attention turns to what the future holds for Paris’s Olympic Village and its legacy for Parisians.
The newly developed Olympic Village is to be transformed into a combination of homes, leisure, commercial, community and education facilities. The homes will be a mix of social and open-market homes, with the design of the apartment buildings highlighting how good affordable housing can be.
Similar to the plans for Paris, the London 2012 Olympics kick-started a huge regeneration project in east London, transforming Stratford and Hackney Wick through £400m of investment into the area. This delivered economic growth which exceeded pre-Games projections three-fold, with almost 40% growth in local employment and thousands of homes (East Village, the former Athletes’ Village, has more than 3,284 homes and an estimated 6,500 people live there). Legacy was at the forefront of the vision for the London Olympics – a goal it has seemingly successfully achieved.
The French government also has ambitious plans to create four new Metro lines for greater Paris through the Grand Paris Express project, which will focus on connecting disadvantaged areas and streamlining commutes for thousands of people. Not only does this new infrastructure reduce travel times, but ultimately provides access to employment opportunities and amenities that are currently out of reach for many in Paris. It is said there will be 11 times more job offers to people within a 45-mile radius of the new hub than now, showing the true value added through improvement to infrastructure and travel.
Need for speed
The connectivity to Stratford was key to unlocking the East Village. Stratford International opened in 2009, connecting the area to King’s Cross in seven minutes, followed by the Elizabeth Line in 2022. Sustainable travel connections need to underpin any major regeneration, alongside employment opportunities and affordable housing.
Hosting the Olympics is a remarkable opportunity and can create meaningful value for the surrounding community and wider country, but it cannot continue to be the case that we need to be on the world stage to release necessary funding and deliver projects successfully and at speed.
Government funding was a key element of ensuring the London Games were delivered by the Olympic Delivery Authority and demonstrates that it is possible to deliver government-funded housing at speed when there is a need. With the Athletes’ Village then sold on to the private sector, this shows how effective public-private partnerships can be.
In many ways, the transformational ideas of the Paris and London games align with the Labour government’s focus on “new towns”. A few weeks ago the government announced its New Towns Taskforce, a key role of which will be to advise ministers on appropriate locations for significant housing growth. A final shortlist will be coming down the track within 12 months.
We can expect a mix of new standalone communities built on “greenfield” and a number of “urban extensions”, presumably to optimise transport links and other important infrastructure. The unifying principle is that they will contain at least 10,000 homes. That is a large metropolis, which will throw up additional demand for public services – schools, medical facilities, green spaces and so on. It isn’t clear where this land will come from – exercise of CPO powers is slow and public-private partnerships may be a part of the answer for land assembly.
Lessons from the past
As a new programme of garden cities and new towns looks increasingly likely, it is surely the case that there is much to be learn from the post-war new towns programme – the most ambitious large-scale project of its type in the UK. Between 1946 and 1970, 32new towns were delivered across the UK. Brought forward by development corporations, which had a wide range of borrowing, planning and strategic powers, the towns provided homes and jobs, while aiming to create socially balanced communities. Key to the successful delivery of these new towns was the powers the development corporations possessed, similar to those that the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation has for the delivery of Ebbsfleet Garden City.
The New Towns Taskforce is in good hands with Sir Michael Lyons, who chaired the 2014 Lyons Housing Review, at the helm. It will be interesting to see how the plans develop – what use can be made of the existing legislation and what lessons can be drawn from the building of the previous new towns – to deliver much-needed housing. Much like the Olympic villages of London and Paris, the earliest new towns were delivered quickly – Stevenage in 1946 and Harlow by 1947. Let’s hope we can take some lessons from the Olympics.
Published in EG on 10 September 2024, you can also access the article here.