Overview
The Strategic Growth Study for Milton Keynes and its environs focused on bringing together a broad evidence base to articulate futures thinking and produce a spatial vision with placemaking objectives to help shape long term growth and investment plans for the local authorities in the area.
Project Highlights
Clients
MK City Council
Date
2017-2019
Scale
Sub regional
Bold and innovative, this study aims to guide the next three decades of Milton Keynes’s strategic spatial growth, examining how the scale of growth to 2050 might be achieved sustainably and inclusively while also benefiting the existing population. Achieving this meant looking beyond planning policy to agree growth objectives with housing, education, health, and environmental groups, business communities and the voluntary sector.
Judges' Comments, Planning Awards 2020
The Project
We were commissioned to produce a Strategic Growth Study to inform the Council’s preparation of the Milton Keynes Strategy for 2050, and to revive bold ambitions for the future of the city. The study takes forward the growth aspirations outlined in previous ‘Futures’ work and the 2016-22 Council Plan, the latter anticipating the continued growth of Milton Keynes to a population of 500,000 people by 2050, to analyse how this level and type of growth might manifest itself spatially and over time. The Growth Study recommendations form part of the Council's 'Strategy for 2050', adopted as corporate policy in 2021 and is a key piece of evidence informing the next Local Plan review.
The Process
Our work drew together the existing evidence base and examined the possible and desirable scale and pace of population and economic growth within the wider Milton Keynes area for the next 30+ years. Working spatially and with cross-sector stakeholders, we focused on how to plan for and deliver ‘good growth’ in the local context which reflected wider Council objectives.
We explored scenarios around capacities and opportunities within the existing city to accommodate additional growth, and recommended ways in which future growth beyond the Designated Area of the New Town, including cross boundary growth and infrastructure, might achieve a step change in sustainable patterns of mobility and development to deliver real and sustained benefits back to the existing population of Milton Keynes. The Growth Study recommendations form part of the Council's 'Strategy for 2050,' now adopted as corporate policy and a key piece of evidence informing the forthcoming Local Plan review.