Last Thursday, Glyn, Marta R, Ruth and I attended the annual London Stansted Cambridge Consortium conference where we led a workshop exploring what ‘smart growth’ means in the context of this nationally significant growth corridor.

Over the last three years, we have been working closely with the London School of Economics on research related to the London-Cambridge corridor which runs through metropolitan green belt. Our workshop was well attended by professionals from a range of industries and backgrounds and provided a great opportunity for us to discuss and test our thinking on the subject. It covered a range of themes including:

• How best to create happy, healthy and sustainable communities
• The need for a landscape-led approach to growth that considers access, amenity, flood risk and ecology, among various other issues
• Opportunities to take a regional approach to housing types and tenures that considers the various yet interconnected places along the corridor
• The need to reconsider attitudes toward density to create more sustainable places where people can live, work and play.

Going forward we will be looking to collaborate with other practices to join up thinking on placemaking, transport infrastructure and the future of the corridor and metropolitan green belt.