The Developer podcast

How do you develop a new town hall and civic hub in a community with a longstanding mistrust of its local authority? “You’ve got to listen,” says James Stockdale, Development Director at Muse. Your New Town Hall in Brixton, the project to restore the Grade II-listed Lambeth town hall was never going to be easy. According to a 2013 resident’s survey, the council was not held in high regard. The report said residents felt “policymakers have stopped listening to them, and their culture and identity is gradually being lost.” Not a great starting point for a major development project. “Regeneration is always going to be contentious. Buildings will get knocked down,” says Stockdale. “You’ve got to listen. And by doing that hopefully more people will be happier than not.”

Local authorities are moving head with net zero and climate resilience plans, installing solar panels and heat pumps. But a recent report from Key Cities, a group of 27 UK cities, concludes that "progress is being hindered by central government through a lack of powers, clarity, capacity and funding". Gina Dowding Lancaster County Counsellor and Richard Cook, Leader of Gloucester City Council, discuss the recommendations from the report, Levelling Up, Emissions Down, which captures the palpable frustration at the lack of clear direction and mandate for action on climate change.

We need to talk about SLOAPs, aka Sites Leftover After Planning. We've all seen them, corridors of tarmac or patches of grass with no purpose or social life. Could we put these fragmented spaces to better use as sites of biodiversity, food growing, play or connection? Soham De from EcoResponsive Environments and Valerie Beirne from Where Pathways Meet have been adding up the potential of this multitude of tiny sites, and want to spark an industry-wide conversation about the mapping and transformation of leftover spaces into sites of care, biodiversity and creativity.

Art in public space has long been subject to hot debate. It was back in the 1970s that James Wines referred to Modernist sculptures as "turds in the plaza" and "Plop Art". The removal of sculptures associated with slavery as part of the Black Lives Matter are proof positive that public art matters deeply to people and places. So when seeking to commission public art, is community involvement the answer to question of relevance, appropriateness and permanence? Shiro Muchiri, founder of SoShiro art gallery and Hanna Afolabi, founder of Mood and Space, have teamed up to create Art in Architecture, a consultancy that believes public art can deliver social value – if you get the community involved from the very beginning. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of commissioning art for urban public spaces.

Street art has a lot to do with play, says Dr Lee Bofkin, co-founder of Global Street Art, who points to the evolving role of streets as a backdrop for content creation and personal digital expression. Global Street Art has connected street artists with sites to paint 3,000 murals in the UK since 2012, including pieces created under the Art for Estates programme and launching the London Mural Festival. In this podcast, the co-founder of Global Street Art discusses the expansive role of public art and why we should all live in painted cities.

In this special 100th episode of The Developer Podcast, author Carolyn Steel hosts Stephen Witherford, co-founder of Witherford Watson Mann architects and Sophia Craxton, food anthropologist and manager of the community kitchen at almshouse Appleby Blue. What emerges is passionate and emotive discussion about how we design spaces for dignity, and the building as the beginning of a conversation about how we live and what we value. In a city where loneliness is one of the biggest killers, the question was how to create an architecture that promotes the good life: The answer was the use of food as an instrument for creating community. "Eating on your own and cooking for yourself can be one of the most soulless things, when you've lost people you spent time cooking and eating with," says Witherford. "We wanted to a place where people cook together and they eat together and share their experiences. Ultimately this is all about how to get residents to speak to one another."

The construction industry is struggling to attract young people with an acute shortage of skilled workers hampering innovation and quality. Architecture and engineering need more diversity. At the same time, developers are creating playgrounds and spaces for teenagers to attract families and create community. What if we could solve all these needs with a single intervention? The adventure playground is not a new concept – the first one opened in Camberwell in 1948. But their longstanding tradition of giving children the tools, skills and materials to build their own play structures under supervision of trained playworkers has fresh resonance. "These places have been doing co-design from the beginning," shares Nitasha Kapoor, anthropologist and trustee of SWAPA in Hackney. In this interview, Kapoor talks about the potential for adventure playgrounds and their skilled staff to transform places and lives with one caveat – they need our help, skills, materials and financial support.

The regeneration playbook is to takeover industrial spaces in favour of housing and mixed-use development, displacing the garages, workshops and sheds and pushing them to the margins of the city. But an increase in industrial rents and a shortage of industrial spaces has led to a radical rethink, with councils seeking industrial intensification instead, funding the creation of multi-storey light industrial spaces. In this interview, Regeneration Officer Francis Moss from London Borough of Ealing and Holly Lewis, Co-founding Director of We Made That explain the radical shift taking place and why industrial uses are essential to local economies and communities, making the case for keeping, and increasing, the sheds on our doorstep