Housing Design Quality: Through Policy, Guidance and Review

by Matthew Carmona

This book directly addresses the major planning debate of our time - the delivery and quality of new housing development. As pressure for new housing development in England increases, a widespread desire to improve the design of the resulting residential environments becomes evermore apparent with increasing condemnation of the standard products of the volume housebuilders.
In recent years central government has come to accept the need to deliver higher quality living environments, and the important role of the planning system in helping to raise design standards. Housing Design Quality focuses on this role and in particular on how the various policy instruments available to public authorities can be used in a positive manner to deliver higher quality residential developments.

360 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Matthew Carmona is an architect, planner and researcher based in the United Kingdom. His research focuses on the process of design governance and management of Public Space. He has taught at the University of Nottingham and The Bartlett, the latter since 1998.
Carmona serves as the chair of the Place Alliance, a collaborative alliance for place quality that he helped in founding in 2014. He regularly works as an advisor to governments in the UK as well as in other countries. He was the Specialist Advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on the Built Environment in 2015.
In 2015, Carmona received the RTPI Academic Award for Research Excellence and in 2016 (for the Place Alliance) the RTPI Sir Peter Hall Award for Wider Engagement. In 2018, Carmona received the AESOP Best Published Paper Award for his work on the governance of design. In 2021 he was awarded the Athena City Accolade and in 2022 he received the RTPI Sir Peter Hall Award for Excellence in Research and Engagement for work on the treatment of design in English planning appeals. He is the European Associate Editor for the Journal of Urban Design and since 2003 has written a quarterly column for Town and Country Planning as well as his own blog Urban Design Matters. Carmona has published thirteen books and has written numerous articles.