Fred London’s book Healthy Placemaking (RIBA Publishing, 2020) features his six principles for healthier placemaking, ways to create better health outcomes for city dwellers through good urban planning and design. While many of our community at Village In The City are not urban developers, it is still worth taking a look at these principles and how they support the creation, development and sustaining of micro-local communities – in other words, why our ‘thing’ is a good 
‘thing’. The principles are:
- Urban planning
- Walkable communities
- Neighbourhood building blocks
- Movement networks
- Environmental integration
- Community empowerment
The first three relate to scales of planning, in reducing size. Walkable communities is very much on the agenda today, and we’ve covered the 15-minute city movement in an earlier piece. What Fred London does is to emphasise the level below this – the neighbourhood – as the key building block. Community on this scale can reduce social isolation, nurture community and offer maximum scope for the creation of therapeutic, human-scale environments. He notes that to encourage people to congregate, places need to feel safe, served by easily accessible social facilities and free from the impacts of traffic fumes and noise
The second three elements are about movement networks, again at different levels. The importance of community empowerment – the way in which citizens can influence how spaces and transport connections are used and integrated – is emphasised. Initiatives like Incredible Edible, starting in Todmorden, West Yorkshire and spreading around the UK, show how much energy and progress can be created by engaging citizens (not paying them or giving them grants).
This blog provides a good and easy overview to these six principles by Fred London himself – well worth a quick read.
(Hat tip to our good friend Adrian Hodgson for sharing the blog with me)
