DESIGN & PLACEMAKING VISION FOR ASHFORD
Ashford is a diverse, vibrant and dynamic town with major investment and development potential. Our long-term vision is focussed on regenerating the heart of the town, driven by high-quality and placemaking.
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Ashford is a diverse, vibrant and dynamic town with major investment and development potential. Our long-term vision is focussed on regenerating the heart of the town, driven by high-quality and placemaking.
Since 2010, our Town Centre Development Framework and supporting Town Centre Area Action Plan have helped create inspiring workplaces, a thriving professional community and excellent transport networks across the Borough. The design of new buildings and places combines the best of town and country in a unique and distinctive manner. Ashford’s renaissance has interpreted, learnt and adapted from this ancient market town’s rich history, character and identity. The result is a strong, distinctive and contemporary townscape with a clear sense of place.
We’re fully alive to the continuing importance of good placemaking and design in helping our Borough to flourish. In particular, we recognise how the challenges of climate change also provide unique opportunities to innovate, and revolutionise how we think about, design and build our streets, spaces and places.
Acknowledging the social, environmental and economic values that great design can bring, the Council aims to raise expectations for design quality among all players. A primary commitment to enhancing our public and civic spaces has made our town a great place to spend time in, with a vast range of diverse, multicultural activities and events throughout the year, and, and easy to walk and cycle around.
Significant investment in urban design resources within the Strategic Sites teams has helped put placemaking skills at the heart of Council decision-making. We set up a new Placemaking Team in 2020 to help deliver our design agenda in the town and the surrounding villages. We’ve also drawn up our Design Charter, which sends a powerful message to investors that we’re determined to drive our local economy forward by treating a truly superb place in which to invest.
We fully recognise the importance of a clear, well-managed and inclusive design process in delivering strategic and major projects successfully and on time. We’re also committed to using the pre-application design process to help create consensus around the best design and layout solutions. Ashford has an outstanding record of facilitating proactive, early-stage design workshops on large-scale sites, bringing together developers, investors, local communities and other key stakeholders. On many key sites, we focus on ensuring strong master-planning backed up by robust policy and guidance and, in some cases, design coding.
We follow a design team-led approach to projects, providing robust and clear pre-application advice and engagement at meetings, design workshops, community exhibitions and members’ briefing sessions. Our focus is on negotiating distinctive, contemporary, high-quality designs for buildings, streets and spaces across the borough, inspired by an authentic understanding of Ashford’s rich, varied and unique character. Working proactively with the public and private sectors, and a wide range of other key partners and organisations has been fundamental to making Ashford the successful place it is today.
Other pre-application design initiatives the Council has implemented include: