Our story

 

Create Streets exists to help solve the housing crisis and to help neighbourhood, communities, landowners, councils and developers create and manage beautiful, sustainable places of gentle density that will be popular, are likely to be correlated with good wellbeing and public health outcomes and which are likely to prove good long term investments based on the historical data of value appreciation and maintenance costs.

Our goal is to make it easier to co-create beautiful, sustainable, prosperous, economically and socially successful places with strong local support and which residents will love for generations. We also take an active part in the debate about the planning and design in the UK and beyond to help landowners, communities and governments support the creation of sufficient homes and places in which people can flourish.

Nicholas Boys Smith set up Create Streets in 2012 out of frustration with the low quality of too much recent development and of irrational decision-making. We research links between urban form and wellbeing, health, sustainability, prosperity, value and popularity. We advise communities, landowners, councils and developers. We lobby for necessary policy change. And we help communities and long-term investors develop exemplar schemes and better manage the streets and public spaces they already have.

Thanks to support from neighbourhood community groups up and down the country, Create Streets has managed to have a major impact on English planning policy and the wider debate as well as helping many communities and councils make the case for and start to achieve better and more popular development. We are now working with a rapidly growing number of neighbourhoods, councils and landowners. Do please get in touch!