Innovative Ipswich IV

In order to continue my search for reasons to be hopeful about my hometown I have dug into the archives of the Economist for an article I remembered recently. It was about Ipswich doing something rather exciting with its new housing estates. You see Britain, like most of the world throughout the past decade, has been subject to a massive period of growth. Accordingly the green plains of the English countryside have been gobbled up by countless new estates.

Ipswich has been no exception and the population of its ‘greater metropolitan area’ has surely multiplied many times over in the last few years. What is perhaps exciting about the new homes in Ipswich is that some of them have been pioneering a new type of architecture and street planning. The Ravenswood estate is the one mentioned in the article but I know for a fact that Grange Farm has also been involved. Both estates have looked to the American ‘New Urbanist’ movement that enjoyed a limited period of success in the 1980’s for inspiration. The defining features of this movement being “traditional architecture, densely packed houses, geometric street plans and the attempt to create communities” as opposed to soulless tracts of homes. And as the Economist goes on to say, “The results are occasionally weird. In Ipswich, brick houses abut wooden-sided cottages that could have been lifted from a New England fishing village. In the next street, the dominant style is vaguely Scandinavian. That opens into a Parisian-style boulevard; turn left, and you are in a Victorian main street.”

The idea of all this is that by brining people into closer proximity with one another you help create more open and connected neighbourhoods. People can no longer hide behind hedgerows and driveways. By housing a higher ratio of people to land it also means less precious countryside gets paved over.

All this makes me quite excited and as an enthusiast of architecture in general the idea of designing more sociable spaces seems appealing. Britain’s cities are littered with the ugly, needle strewn remains of 60’s and 70’s building projects that were similarly designed to usher in a new age of social harmony and personal wealth. But I still have faith in the notion that you can effectively change behaviour through design. Perhaps David Cameron should give a few lines in his new manifesto on the importance of community design in combating anti-social behaviour. Or perhaps this would make his crusade more bizarre than it already is. Either way, I quite like the new designs and I though it warranted a new pro-Ipswich post.

Of course the true motivation lies in the fact that I have a very nasty Ipswich bashing post in the pipeline. And can anyone think of a suitably negative word beginning with ‘I’ that can go before ‘Ipswich’ as a basis for my anti-Ipswich posts?