Estate-led regeneration: Camden’s collaborative approach to creating sustainable, liveable and inclusive communities

Abstract

Camden Council is at the forefront of local authorities seeking to build new high-quality social rent homes to tackle social inequality and create mixed communities. Local authorities have an important role to play in addressing an increasingly unaffordable housing market; their role as housebuilders is often most prominent during times when national housing crises have been most acute. Alongside being a reliable deliverer and enabler of new homes, local authorities sit at the junction of national and local priorities and can, as such, seek to ensure that any new housebuilding is reflective of what communities need locally. This paper sets out some of the history of local authority housebuilding to outline an argument that there has never been a time during which local government has had the funding and mandate to build, alongside the desire to build and develop in conjunction with communities. Within a wider national discussion occurring about how to balance a need for more housing alongside recognising the value of community networks and community self-determination to successful places, this paper seeks to outline Camden’s experience in delivering new social housing within existing estates.