Liveability: Creating beautiful neighbourhoods where people want to live
Location Efficiency + Good Design = Liveability
The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment’s Location Efficiency Calculator demonstrates how different neighbourhood characteristics come together to produce more, or less sustainable places. Our Building Typology Explorer shows how higher residential densities can be accommodated on a proposed site without the need for tower blocks. The combination of these two principles; location efficiency and good neighbourhood design, can produce much more attractive, sustainable, and desirable places to live within the Greater London area.
But what do these numbers mean in real life? To answer this question we created a series of London-based case studies to help explain in plain language what these numbers really mean. These case studies help to interpret the statistics from the Location Efficiency Calculator, and also provide examples of the quality of life impacts of different building typologies, as explored in the Building Typology Explorer.
The five case studies are from Notting Hill, Gants Hill, Turnpike Lane, Shoreditch and Walthamstow Central. These were chosen because they represent typical or extreme examples of different location efficiency factors assessed by the database, for example, Notting Hill is a place with very high quality urban design supporting sustainable transport but with high car use and a high income profile of its residents. Shoreditch, on the other hand, displayed good urban form, good mix of income levels which produced a highly sustainable and low carbon profile.
For each neighbourhood we included a selection of neighbourhood efficiency statistics, as well as photos, narratives, and discussion of how they interact to influence the character of each place. The case studies will help to simply describe the meaning of location efficiency, to visualise what high and low density means, what the impact of different transport and street network accessibilities are, and how different demographic and housing mixtures contribute to the sustainability of a neighbourhood.
We encourage you to study these case studies, then visit each neighbourhood with an eye to what makes them efficient or not. Afterwards, find the exact location efficiency statistics for your neighbourhood using the location efficiency calculator, then find new development proposals in your neighbourhood with the Tall Buildings Map. You can then experiment with the impact of different building types for these sites using the Building Typology Explorer.
How does your neighbourhood compare to these case studies? What factors are similar or different, and what effect does that have on the need to drive? What other factors contribute to the sustainability and liveability of your neighbourhood?
Explore the case studies to help you find out:
Hackney / Shoreditch
Haringey / Turnpike Lane
Kensington & Chelsea / Notting Hill
Redbridge / Gants Hill
Waltham Forest / Walthamstow Central
Download a pdf of all case studies material [2 Mb]
