Studio Egret West reached the last four of twenty in a competition to structure Harlow’s growth. We intended to follow an evolutionary approach at Harlow. To begin by giving Harlow’s future communities a new paradigm for growth and new, sustainable designs for living will follow.
Defining a framework not a Master Plan. Defining the limits of growth and the interfaces with the existing settlements Harlow itself and the villages to the north not the exact form of the future settlement. Defining the long-term ambitions of the place in terms of size and the potential number of homes and jobs rather than a restrictive density diagram applied across the site. Defining the principles of a 500 home community that can be refined as time goes by rather than a prescriptive design code for 10,000 homes.
What is cutting-edge environmental design and technology today is likely to change. The same is true of the way people live. A good framework should allow adaptation through time. Allowing each and every community to come forward as and when required, signing up to a constitution that supports growth, tightly collecting and aggregating each one to slowly create a compact, greater whole. The design of each community adapts as they accumulate to respond to the particular needs of the time and the ambitions of those next pioneers joining the North Harlow partnership. Here the sense of ownership is not one of personal accumulation but of being part of something bigger, like the heart is part of the body.
In essence our approach to North Harlow can be seen as a Natural Evolution.
