The future of strategic brownfield regeneration in England – between urban intensification and green infrastructure provision

The reuse of brownfield land is an important objective of planning and regeneration policies. In England this has been a key component of the urban renaissance agenda since the late 1990s. The national target for England to provide by 2008 a minimum of 60% of new housing on previously developed land (PDL) has been well exceeded with an estimated 90% of dwellings (including conversions) built on PDL in 2009. At the same time the density of new dwellings has increased from 25 dwellings per hectare in 2001 up to 43 dwellings per hectare in 2009 (Land Use Change Statistics July 2010, CLG). While on the one hand this can be seen as a success of a target-driven regional and national planning policy and a restriction of greenfield development, one can also argue that this urban intensification policy came at the cost of a lack of green infrastructure development within urban areas, an approach advocated by many landscape planners as part of the provision of social infrastructure. This was to some extent acknowledged by official policy documents. For example the National Brownfield Strategy, published in 2008, proposes a more differentiated strategy, considering different forms of new uses for brownfield land, including so-called soft end-uses in the form of open space and parks. More recently the new UK coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats revised some of the previous planning policies, such as the qualification of back gardens as previously developed land and the minimum density requirements within planning policy statement 3.The first part of this paper analyses the last decade of strategic brownfield land redevelopment across England using data from the Land Use Change Statistics and the National Land Use Database for Previously Developed Land. Following on from this quantitative analysis, the following part of the paper discusses future policy options and related strategies of local authorities in the light of both national targets for housing provision on PDL and local environmental green-space considerations. The de-facto abolition of regional planning and housing targets by the new coalition and the publication of the draft localism bill in December 2010 indicate a much more localised future approach towards planning and brownfield regeneration. The paper discusses to which extent this new policy setting increases the role of brownfield regeneration as provider of green infrastructure.Although the themes discussed in this paper focus on England they are relevant for planning and regeneration in other countries as well. In Germany for example targets for the reduction of housing on greenfield land and the regeneration of brownfield sites have become important policy themes over recent years.