Case Study- Haringey live project

The London Borough of Haringey has a series of assets, a diverse population, some fine heritage buildings and large areas of green space, which make up more than 25% of its total area. The borough also faces a range of challenges in common with other London Boroughs. These include issues of social sustainability such as addressing a long-term shortfall in housing provision. The council is also seeking to address environmental sustainability by, for example, increasing levels of recycling and addressing a legacy of car dominated design that discourages walking and cycling.

Build Up recently contributed to Haringey Borough Council’s progression of a series of six sub-projects collectively designed to help shape the future of the area. Sub-projects ranged from immediate office re-modelling to strategic cross-borough policy revision. The six sub-projects were:

1) Planning and regeneration centre for Haringey – aiming to review and suggest improvements to earlier Haringey Council plans for a Planning and Regeneration centre (drop-in and education resource).

2) Assessing the Tottenham Hotspur planning application – aiming to produce a response analysis to Tottenham Football Club’s major planning application for a new stadium, including overall level of public support plus addressing of specific infrastructure/technical issues related to the application

3) Developing an urban design and development framework for Tottenham Green – aiming to build on existing council improvements to an area dominated by a busy one-way traffic system, and to suggest new ways of threading together the public assets (buildings and open spaces) in the area.

4) Progressing the Alexandra Palace project initiation document – aiming to assist in the early stages of a new attempt to remodel the future of Alexandra Palace. To use heritage regeneration specialism to review the current position and propose alternative scenarios.

5) Scoping study for Haringey’s sustainable design and construction guidance – aiming to critically review current good practice in sustainable design and construction   from a range of local authorities, and to draw on this in developing guidance for Haringey Council.

6) Scoping study of spatial planning policies across the north London sub region – aiming to work with other parts of Haringey Council to conduct detailed comparative analysis of the present planning policies in neighbouring boroughs, to identify common policy and form bases for future work in the area.

Achievements and Outcomes
This was a different model for Build Up as the participants were located within the local authority and were sub-divided into pairs to work on a range of different projects.

The aim was that each mini-team should offer new cross-disciplinary thinking and external perspectives to local authority-led regeneration and planning. In effect, they brought a non-planning and a non-local authority perspective to the problems they were addressing. The addition of these mini-teams to the council’s staff also gave new opportunities for junior managers in the borough to experience working with and supervising new staff, and of helping to manage a time limited mini-project.

This raised numerous learning opportunities for both participants and staff. For participants who were all new to local authority work, the challenge was to grasp quickly the demands of working in a large, highly structured organisation. The demands of democratic accountability meant that projects often had to go through several lines of accountability.

For the council’s staff, the challenge was to clarify briefs and roles. Both groups had to work out the best way of picking up live projects, advancing them, and then handing them back to the organisation to continue after the participants had left.

The Build Up project mini teams provided support to the council’s clarification of strategic projects (eg Planning and Regeneration Centre) as well as progression of existing live applications (eg Tottenham Football Club stadium). The Tottenham Green Urban Design project is set to be part of a future bid for European INTERREG funding.

Participants were able to bring Developments made on each of the six sub-projects were combined into a series of outputs for the project as a whole, including:

• Identification of potential for further development of sub-regional planning policies
• A review of good practice in neighbouring authorities to be used as a strong reference point for the council in its development of new sustainable development policy
• Identification of need for officer time within individual authorities to be better allocated to allow more focus on delivery

The final presentations of all six sub-projects are available below as an attachment. 

This was a complex project which gave Build Up participants the opportunity to work with a range of local authority and regional bodies, engage in detail with the strategic planning process and develop skills in clarifying project-related issues whilst delivering a client brief.

Several issues and concepts were addressed over the course of the project:

• Consideration of public need- how better to include people in local authority work through providing a welcoming environment
• Process of major planning applications- how these are handled and how competing interests are weighed up
• Urban design work- how the public realm could be adapted to provide a more pedestrian-friendly and welcoming environment
• Complexity of partnerships- level of management required for successful outcomes, and the long timescale involved in project management
• Green construction issues

Participant Perspectives
Haringey council offered desk space to project participants who acted as external consultants on time-specific sub-projects. Build Up members were managed by junior managers from a number of council teams and exposed to the demands of local authority work- in particular requirements of the local democratic process such as the relationship between officers and elected members. None of the Build Up team had experience of working with local authorities.

Due to the nature of the Haringey project, I discovered what it’s like to work as a consultant with a given brief and managing own resources, as opposed to working as just a team member. It’s given me the routine and confidence to work as a consultant - how to define a brief and produce the agreed products within set time limit.
Urban designer and researcher

It was a great way to become familiar with the UK planning system and associated vocabularies which are so useful when networking with other professionals.
Architectural assistant

I found the Haringey project to be a great form of informal CPD, which then leads onto obtaining formal CPDs and feeding into some of the projects I am setting up independently by collaborating with various organisations.
Architectural Design Consultant

 

 

 

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