Developing a strategy for a greener, more connected and more inclusive Cheshire West & Chester with community at its heart.
Cheshire West and Chester Council asked Create Streets to carry out a strategic review of their street design strategy and suggest how this could be improved to better meet their ambitious strategic aims to reduce inequality and improve health, wellbeing and sustainability in the borough.
This included a full review of existing council strategy, policy and design guidance and fifteen structured one-to-one interviews with key officials and planning officers to better understand the day-to-day challenges they encounter in their roles and opportunities for design guidance to improved. We also carried out forty-six virtual site visits and eighteen in-person site visits to residential developments and highway improvement schemes built over the last decade to assess their place quality and street design and how effectively national and local design guidance was being implemented ‘on the ground’ using the Child’s Eye, Adults Eye, Birds’ Eye framework);
The final report identified potential improvements to a) council policy; b) the design of new developments and streets; and c) the retrofit of existing streets to help raise the bar for the design of new and existing places and streets so that they become places to be not just roads to move through.
Client
- Cheshire West and Chester Council
Timescale
- 2023