Making space for growth

There is only so much land available in successful cities. Increasingly, the answer to delivering more homes, workplaces and investment appears to be making much more of it.

That is particularly visible in London. The newly-approved Vauxhall Square scheme brings together conventional housing, Build to Rent, co-living and student accommodation across seven buildings, with its tallest tower reaching 69 storeys. Nearby, the next chapter of Battersea Power Station proposes another 3.2 million sq ft of development across the final 16 acres of the site.

Scape’s plans in Southwark tell a similar story on a smaller footprint. More than 800 student bedrooms are proposed in a 45-storey building, while existing locally listed buildings would be retained and brought back into use.

We can see this same story take shape in the north.  In Manchester, Renaker has cleared another hurdle for four towers providing 1,746 homes at Great Jackson Street. In York, meanwhile, detailed approval for the first phase of York Central will unlock more than 1,000 homes alongside commercial space, a hotel, innovation hub and new station entrance.

The architecture and scale may differ, but the principle is remarkably consistent. Development is being concentrated in places where existing infrastructure, transport connections and established economic activity can support substantially more people and uses.

That matters because the economics of development have changed. Higher construction and financing costs have made viability harder, while pressure to provide affordable housing, infrastructure and wider public benefits has not disappeared. One response is to extract more value from well-connected urban land.

The result is not necessarily taller buildings everywhere. York Central demonstrates a different version of the same idea: previously inaccessible railway land has been unlocked through more than £135m of publicly funded infrastructure, allowing private development to follow.

Battersea offers another variation. Rather than simply completing a masterplan conceived more than 15 years ago, its remaining phases have been redesigned around smaller building clusters, new routes and a broader mixture of uses. Making land work harder does not have to mean filling every available square metre with buildings.

There is also a familiar lesson about regeneration running through these projects. Successful large-scale development increasingly depends on combining uses rather than relying on a single market.

Homes sit alongside hotels, offices, shops, leisure, student accommodation, cultural venues and public spaces. Different uses create different sources of value and demand, while potentially making large and complicated sites easier to deliver over time.

After several difficult years for development, the significance may be less about the sheer scale of this week's projects than the fact that so many large urban schemes are moving forward at once.

The challenge for developers is increasingly clear: where land is scarce and construction expensive, every part of a site has to work harder.

One to Watch: Mixed-tenure living

Vauxhall Square is an unusually clear example of how the boundaries between residential sectors are changing. Market sale, Build to Rent, affordable housing, co-living and PBSA are all proposed within one development.

That may become increasingly common on major urban sites. Different forms of housing can address different markets while giving developers more options to manage viability and phase construction. The question is whether mixed-tenure development becomes a standard tool for unlocking the next generation of large regeneration schemes.

Risk Radar: How dense is too dense?

The drive to make urban land work harder inevitably creates tension. Taller buildings and greater density can improve viability and put more homes close to existing transport and infrastructure, but they also increase pressure on local services, public space and the planning system.

Vauxhall's 69-storey tower, Manchester's expanding skyscraper cluster and another 45-storey PBSA proposal in Southwark show the direction in which parts of the market are travelling.

Density can help solve the development equation. The harder task will be ensuring that the places created around it still work.