Sustainable Futures in the Built Environment to 2050

4From the ‘Sustainable Community’ to Prosperous People and Places: Inclusive Change in the Built Environment

Saffron Woodcraft and Constance Smith

4.1 Introduction: The ‘sustainable community’ in crisis

Creating sustainable communities has been at the forefront of planning policy since the New Labour era. In this chapter, we argue that the ‘sustainable community’ is no longer a meaningful or productive planning goal. We draw on new qualitative data from two research projects in East London: one exploring what the idea of a sustainable and prosperous community means to people living and working in three neighbourhoods in and around the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park¹ and a second with a team of architects, planners, house builders and regeneration practitioners engaged in planning and designing a new urban neighbourhood (Woodcraft, 2016). We argue that the term ‘sustainable community’ has become so elastic and ambiguous it is now frequently used to describe development models that are unsustainable in local terms. We examine how people living through change and regeneration in three East London neighbourhoods experience conflicts between planning policy that promises sustainability and day‐to‐day realities of unaffordable housing, insecure employment and anxieties about displacement. Our research shows these conflicts often centre on questions of value: What value does change in the built environment generate? Who benefits and how? How can the ‘social value’ of a strong and inclusive ...