Thanks to everyone who joined our fringe event at UKR**F in Leeds. A brilliant turnout and a genuinely insightful hack. Great to catch up with familiar faces and meet plenty of new ones too.
Some sharp, honest and creative thinking around what it really takes to deliver Good Growth in practice. Lots of energy, lots of challenge and plenty to take forward.
As Jon Humphreys said 'Order out of chaos and lots of fun along the way'
See session findings below.
Leaders should have real community experience working at neighbourhood level before shaping national policy.
→ Better decisions come from lived local understanding.
Developers should retain long-term responsibility for places they help create.
→ Stewardship builds accountability, trust and better long-term outcomes.
Teach young people how places are shaped, funded and governed.
→ Built environment literacy should be part of everyday education, not a specialist subject discovered later in life.
Communities engage better when they understand planning, procurement and decision-making processes.
→ Civic knowledge creates confidence, trust and stronger participation.
Procurement should support long-term collaboration, not fragmented commissions.
→ Build teams around engagement, delivery, stewardship and social value from the start.
Meaningful engagement must happen before decisions are fixed.
→ Communities should help shape projects, not simply react to finished proposals.
Environmental and social outcomes are linked.
→ Affordable, healthy and resilient places should deliver both climate justice and better everyday lives.
Narratives about lower bills, healthier homes and cheaper journeys.
→ Affordability is often the strongest public case for sustainable development.
People need the language, tools and confidence to shape their communities.
→ Participation improves when engagement feels accessible and meaningful.
Challenge slow, expensive and outdated processes.
→ Small practical interventions can sometimes unlock progress faster than layers of bureaucracy.
The challenge now is turning that momentum into delivery. Let's make the 10 fixes a reality.
In the meantime, feel free to share, challenge, and build on the outputs - and if there’s a project or place where you’d like to apply this thinking, let’s set up a conversation.
Thanks again for bringing the energy and insight.
This is a collaborative workshop between Layer.studio x Studio Hoodless and will involve some of the UK’s most innovative and forward thinking change makers including; designers, developers, policy makers and community shapers.
The outcome will be a collaborative, experimental learning experience that will test, design, refine and publish a viable place-shaping methodology that can be applied across the UK’s urban centres.
The process will reveal those elusive moves that will deliver your regeneration project, captured and shared online to inform and support your plan making.
