By Ruth Peacock
A report on the place of faith groups in planning and designing new towns and housing developments, recommends that a new organisation is set up to ensure planners understand the needs of faith groups and create social cohesion through good design.
Housing with Values: Faith and belief perspectives on the place of faith groups in planning and designing new towns and housing developments recommends creation of the New Town Faith Taskforce to ensure planners understand the value and contribution of faith groups to society, and the way they can build strong communities.
The report is by the new organisation, the Faith and Belief Policy Collective, which chose housing as its first investigation after the government declared housing a priority and the New Towns Taskforce recommended that 12 new towns should be built in England within the next five years.
It is based on the belief that “housing is about more than bricks and mortar. It is about the kind of society we want to build”.
Phil Champain, a co-founder of the Faith and Belief Policy Collective, told a Religion Media Centre briefing that although the New Towns Taskforce said faith-based spaces could enrich communities and provide opportunities for personal development, more work was needed on how faith groups could partner with developers and planners.
He said a frequent barrier was lack of resources, and reliance on volunteers, so that engagement and willingness often did not turn into results.
The envisaged New Towns Faith Taskforce could work alongside planners, councils and government agencies, to bring faith voices into discussions about how new towns can be designed, and then sustain the conversation.
Professor Chris Baker, another co-founder of the collective, worked on this report around 25 years after writing a thesis on the creation of 32 garden towns after the war — including Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth.
Development of those towns had significant input from Christian groups and the architects and builders understood that they were creating social infrastructure to go alongside physical infrastructure.
A key concept was creating spaces for people to “serve their neighbour” and to ensure that new towns had opportunities for people to practise their belief, values and worldviews.
He told the briefing that research into garden cities had found that residents suffered “new town blues”, which he himself experienced while living in Milton Keynes: “a strong sense of dislocation, finding it hard to make connections” in a public space that was very sterile.
What was missing was a connection to something beyond yourself, a community, which established societies developed over time.
Another author, Dr Iona Hine, said people who had been interviewed for the report explained the importance of feeling trust and connection with neighbours, and this was often cultivated by people of faith.
The briefing then heard from two councillors in Kent, who are dealing with planning applications for new housing in the medieval town of Faversham, potentially increasing its population by 50 per cent over the next 10 years, from 9,000 to 14,000 homes. Among the developments is the Duchy of Cornwall’s plan to build 2,500 homes on the outskirts.
The developments are of such a size that they pose challenges to keeping the new and old communities together.
The Mayor of Faversham, Josh Rowlands, said the town council tried to keep the community in the town centre, with amenities such as pubs there and not in the outskirts. He acknowledged a strain on infrastructure such as doctors and dentist surgeries, and said the council was improving transport links to increase options.
He also explained the pressure on finding space for community use, with the town council struggling to keep their social housing targets and then resisting developers who wanted to build houses over community spaces.
Charles Gibson, who chairs Swale Borough Council’s planning and transportation policy working group, highlighted challenges in how developers create diverse commmunities. Some estates were populated by local people in a ten mile radius, because that’s where the developer advertised. These allowed cultural and family networks to continue, creating positive communities.
But other estates built by national housebuilders and advertised nationally, attracted people from a wider geographical area. Local councils have no power over this, and he said the diversity of who ends up living in a place is something deveelopers can and should be held accountable for, and think about. He said it would be entirely possible to to advertise in a county focusssed way.
On the presence of faith commmunities, Cr Gibson said the Faversham Churches Together group was regularly consulted in shaping what community spaces could look like in the new developments.
He said churches were looking for a space they could use for worship, but also community activities on other days of the week. This had the advantage of not giving church members another big building to be responsible for. The town centre has many churches, many ancient which require upkeep.
A similar pattern has been shown in Northstowe, a new town north of Cambridge, where 10,000 houses are planned. Here a faith strategy group has been set up to discuss the allocation of community spaces and to share assessment of needs. The model here is also providing a building for worship, with community uses on other days. Dr Hine reported that one concern was to avoid favouritism, by allowing different faiths access to one shared community building.
Faversham is changing and the mayor spoke of the impact of recent political changes on the conversation around planning and the place of religion in the life of the town. Faversham is an island of Liberal Democrat support in Kent, surrounded by Reform county councillors. The town centre has recently seen flags raised in the nationwide nationalist campaign.
Councillor Rowlands told the briefing that since Reform had taken control of Kent County Council the conversation had shifted to “we want to take care of our own”, whereas Faversham wanted to be open to newcomers.
He said the challenge was how to persuade people that change could be good. “Faversham changes people,” he said. “You can’t be here for more than a year without getting involved in some volunteering.”
The housing report told the story of secularisation in public policy, and a weak religious literacy, with Professor Baker saying that in certain sectors there is “a kind of residual enlightenment view of religion that it should be seen and not heard”, and that religious identity and views do not have the same validity as the knowledge and experience of experts.
There were examples of developers stuck in a mindset that created “ghettoised” spaces, without understanding that faith groups had much to offer in building connectivity within a new development. The real question was how to build bridges between communities, the old and new, or people of different faith traditions.
Dr Jennifer Eggert, who contributed to the report, said addressing the secular bias remained a key issue and it was important to be aware of how race, gender, class, disability and religion can intersect in how people experience new housing. She also said it was important when engaging with faith communities, that conversations were not restricted to male elders, but included women and children, and were held at a granular level.
Another contributor to the Collective’s work, Mohammed Ali Amla, said British Muslim communities often felt they were not welcome in new towns or certain places. When his parents and grandparents’ generations moved to the UK, they faced racism and far-right hostility, which led to geographical segregation.
Muslim communities have since filtered out from these centralised places into wider society, but some still did not feel safe in certain cities or rural parts of the country.
In conclusion, Mr Champain said they were regularly in touch with the government and the door was open with the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. What was needed was a process to take these ideas forward.
