THAMES GATEWAY INTENSIFICATION STUDY

LONDON, 2004

URS and Maxwan were appointed by the London Development Agency (LDA) to assess the potential for the development of up to 150,000 new homes in the London Thames Gateway.
The LDA controls a sites database, a reservoir of developable land that was expected to yield a total of 90'000 new homes. In order to address the shortage of homes, Richard Rogers proposed a study to assess the real capacity of the Gateway and asked "Can this number be doubled"? Using a Geographic Information System (GIS) based approach, five development scenarios were created and tested. For each scenario we posed the question: How many dwellings can be built at maximum feasible densities?

To many people large numbers of residential units, at high densities, still conjure up images of monotonous high-rise and large scale open space. Maxwan has developed tools that relate densities (number of dwellings per hectare) to typologies (of buildings and of public space). This enables discussions about quantities to become discussions about qualities. Preoccupations concerning densities can be overcome using this approach. It can show the rich variety of urban characters that can be 'generated' in ranges of 150 dwellings / hectare and higher. The London Thames Gateway, by the very nature of the way it is developing, will be a loosely organized mosaic of uses, characters, spaces, held together by networks of infrastructure and landscape.

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