North West Cambridge: a model for affordable urban housing?

Cambridge University has completed the first stage of its ambitious ?1bn development of homes, shops and schools on the city's outlying farmlandAt the centre of debates about green belts is the question of trust. In theory it should be possible to build on a very small proportion of the nation's green belts in such a way that affordable housing and sustainable communities are created, and more people have more and better access to nature than before. In practice few people trust that this will happen, as the available evidence is that we will get instead a smearing of developers' standard products across the countryside, for sale at inflated prices.The promise of what's called the North West Cambridge Development is that it will indeed achieve these good things. Here the University of Cambridge is turning 150 hectares of what was flat, inaccessible and somewhat featureless farmland, located between the city and the M11, into a billion-pound urban district the area of which is not much smaller than the historic centre of Cambridge itself. Three thousand homes are planned, half of them affordable, plus 2,000 postgraduate student bed spaces, 100,000 sq m of research facilities, and the schools, shops, surgeries and the like needed to sustain them. Two new public parks are being created, one between the new development and the old city, the other a series of lakes and mounds that buffer the sights and sounds of the motorway. Continue reading...