SOUTH DOWNS LOCAL PLAN

ADOPTED 2 JULY 2019 (2014–33)

The Phoenix site forms part of the North Street Quarter strategic site allocated for development within the South Downs Local Plan (adopted in July 2019). Policy SD57 allocates the brownfield site for sustainable mixed-use development creating a new neighbourhood for Lewes. The Local Plan notes that this is the only opportunity for strategic level growth and redevelopment within the town.

Planning permission was granted in 2016 for the redevelopment of the site to provide mixeduse development including 416 residential units and has established the principle of the redevelopment of the site. However, that scheme was not been built-out and is widely considered to be commercially unviable.

Human Nature takes the view that compact, fine-grained, mixed-use development with a strong and clear hierarchy of streets and public spaces and rigorous engineering and landscaping, all supporting good density (akin here to the lower end of national averages for historic town infill development densities), makes for a more socially, environmentally and indeed economically sustainable neighbourhood. Moreover, given the complexities of the redeveloping the site, the cost of flood prevention measures and other infrastructure requirements, a denser scheme and a higher number of residential units has to be worked up in order to ensure that the development is commercially viable and deliverable.

Policy SD3 confirms that major development will normally be refused in the National Park, unless in exceptional circumstances and where it is in the public interest. Factors to consider include:

The need for the development, including in terms of any national considerations, and the impact of permitting it, or refusing it, upon the local economy;

The cost of, and scope for, developing elsewhere outside the designated area, or meeting the need for it in some other way; and

Any detrimental effect on the environment, the landscape and recreational opportunities, and the extent to which that could be moderated

Major planning applications should be sustainable, as measured against the following factors:

Zero Carbon

• Zero Waste

Sustainable Transport

• Sustainable Materials

Sustainable Water

• Land Use and Wildlife

Culture and Community

Health and Wellbeing

2.1.5 South Downs National Park

The South Downs National Park Authority (SDNPA) has responsibility for determining planning applications within its boundaries, as the Local Planning Authority. It has additional ‘purposes’ legally enshrined in the National Parks and Access to Countryside Act 1949, as amended by the Environment Act, to conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the area, and promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of the National Park by the public. It also has a legal ‘duty’ to foster the social and economic wellbeing of the local communities within the National Park.

The SDNPA has adopted a Climate Change Strategy and Action Plan which confirms the Authority’s commitment to address the climate and nature emergency by working with stakeholders (particularly communities and landowners) to deliver actions that respond effectively to the climate and nature emergency, and becoming ‘Net-Zero with Nature’ by 2040.

Flowing from the purposes of the National Park, the SDNPA Local Plan (2019) has a ‘landscape-led’ spatial strategy seeking to ensure that towns and villages remain vibrant centres, while conserving and enhancing the special qualities. It also requires development proposals to adopt a landscape-led design approach to enhance local character and distinctiveness of the area as a place where people want to live and work now and in the future. The Local Plan defines “landscape” as encompassing all types and forms, including historic landscape character and also townscape; townscape refers to areas of buildings and related infrastructure, and the relationships between buildings and different types of urban greenspace.

Purpose 1

To conserve and enhance the natural beauty, wildlife and cultural heritage of the area

Purpose 2

To promote opportunities for the understanding and enjoyment of the special qualities of the National Park by the public

2.2 NEW IMPERATIVES: REGENERATING CLIMATE, NATURE, COMMUNITY AND ECONOMY

What if the actions

Off Climate

Climate and nature emergencies

(as if words matter)

Climate scientists counselled in the aftermath of COP27 that on current policies the world is set for more than 2.5oc of heating. They add that the prospects of staying within 1.5oc – the clear objective of its predecessor, Glasgow’s COP26 in 2021- have already diminished to the point of implausibility.

Representations at Glasgow made it clear that global carbon emissions needed to halve by 2030 when, in fact, in 2022 they increased to be the highest annual total ever recorded. It would seem, as more than one commentator has observed, there is, ‘no credible pathway’ to this internationally agreed goal. We are on what Antonio Gutteres, Secretary General of the United Nations, calls, “A highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”.

It is now typically found in research that the large majority of people, even in the United States, no longer need convincing that the climate emergency is real but rather that anything will or even can be done about it. It is not just that too little action is being taken even hope itself is being eroded.

It is unclear whether this is also true of the emergency in nature – the ongoing loss of habitat and biodiversity upon which ultimately all life depends. But statured scientists such as Lord Robert May, agree that it is at least the equal of climate change. So pervasive is man’s impact said Pulitzer prize-winning writer, Elizabeth Kolbert, that we, “live in a new epoch – the Anthropocene.”

Human Nature believes that nature recovery and arresting the catastrophic impacts of climate change go hand in hand: regenerating nature via actions such as planting new forests and farming for healthier soils as will be enabled by Human Nature’s plans for building in timber and support for regenerative farming - can absorb huge volumes of carbon. But of course human habitats – essentially urban environments – also need to be transformed. These environments are where most of us live, their creation alone generates huge environmental impacts, and it is here where the decisions are made that will determine the future trajectory for life on earth.

The urban linchpin

Trevor Beattie, Chief Executive of the South Downs National Park Executive wrote in November 2022 that National Parks are “the linchpin of the UK’s ambitious nature recovery and climate change targets. We need the resources to match our ambitions for nature recovery, access for all and the national response to climate change.”

The Phoenix is the largest new development in any UK National Park and will become the standard bearer for the urban component of this vision. This is both in regard to operational and whole life carbon and the ways in which urban places and the communities that inhabit then can become far better companions to and stewards of nature in their host bioregions.

The experience of a better, sustainable future for all made real

Few would argue that addressing climate and nature crises is anything less than urgent. But as writer, Rebecca Solnit, reminds us, “these dispersed, incremental, atmospheric, invisible, global problems with many causes and manifestations”, have solutions that are also, “dispersed and manifold”. Moreover, these solutions are perceived as unaffordable or toodifficult and too easily put off to another distant day when, because of the acceleration of climate change and the series of tipping points crossed they become far more expensive and far more difficult.

We’re too often powerless in our imaginations. Most of us know that the way we live our lives is environmentally untenable. We also know that we live in an unjust or at best unfair, society and that our economy works to a jaded, unproductive and wasteful model. We just cannot readily see the better, sustainable future. Worse we cannot picture ourselves in that imagined future, still less the policies, collective action, designs and decisions that point the way towards it.

Where we live and how we live

Human Nature believes that by working with people and communities at the neighbourhood-scale and changing places, buildings, infrastructures and land-uses we can inspire and enable change. This change is not just in where we live, but in how we live. In this way doubts and inhibitions held by people in communities can be turned into public understanding and agency in an engaging, relatable and fulfilling programme of action at all scales.

Better lives in beautiful places

What if the actions needed to stave off climate and ecological catastrophe could also be seen to lead directly to better, healthier, more stimulating lives, lived in beautiful, enduring places? We believe that at the neighbourhood scale they can perhaps those same actions could enable an upsurge in creative, and rewarding work, generating new jobs in a highly productive, no-waste, circular economy. Done well, with the catalyst of places planned and designed with multiple appealing shared spaces and resources, they might also serve to reduce the isolation and loneliness experienced by many people and help heal social and cultural divisions, fostering new ways for all to be included in society and the economy.

Building a new world

As climate journalist Mary Heglar writes, we are not short on innovation. “We’ve got loads of ideas for solar panels and microgrids. While we have all of these pieces, we don’t have a picture of how they come together to build a new world”. The act and process of regenerating and making a place – as here at the Phoenix – can and must help paint that picture. Sustainability should and can be about how much we all stand to gain rather than what we might have to give up or lose; at the Phoenix it is seen, as Obama’s science adviser John Holdren once observed, “as a series of great opportunities disguised as insoluble problems”.

Lived experience not rhetoric

But too much of what is offered to society is rhetorical rather than applied and practical. It leads to “the inability to imagine a world different than the one we currently inhabit”. It is always, therefore, someone else’s job. It’s time to change this. Inspiring on-the-ground action is needed, action that leads to relatable, joyous, lived-experience by people in whom we can see ourselves.

To counter the prevailing gloom, the upsides of a sustainable life in sustainable places with a sustainable economy need to be evidenced with compelling human stories. This is a driving motivation and organising principle for the Phoenix, suffused through its plan, use-mix, homes, design, energy grid, mobility services, construction materials and wider procurement, training and economic strategy and more.

The Phoenix will show by doing, that sustainable ways of living are far easier, far more relatable and far more appealing than is widely seen. It will achieve this in a neighbourhood that in its fabric and infrastructures is itself intrinsically sustainable as well as accessible, inclusive and beautiful.

Climate as a driver of masterplanning and infrastructures

“We have crossed climate tipping points. We are out of time. Don’t kid yourself otherwise. Start looking at your community. The future, where we have one…is in building resilient, regenerative communities.”

Pooran Desai , Founder, OnePlanet.com

Climate can no longer be a marginal issue in the built environment. It must be and is here a fundamental driver of masterplanning, design, construction and future stewardship. Far better infrastructures for renewable energy are needed, and since transport produces 24% of the UK’s total emissions (of which more than 60% arises from cars and taxis) different kinds of street networks and mobility services are required to drastically reduce the vast carbon emissions and other pollutants from vehicles.

According to Paul Hawken’s Drawdown project (billed as, ‘The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming’), 27 of the top 80 solutions to global warming are to be found in urban form, the construction of homes and other buildings, in building materials, small scale, distributed energy and local transportation. Most of the other solutions are concerned with food and waste and large-scale energy generation that supports life at home and in business. Refrigeration (increasing alarmingly due to the need to cool poorly insulated buildings in ever-hotter conditions) is at the top of this chastening list.

Exponential sustainability: breakthrough models needed

For these reasons large-scale development must double-down on what sustainability guru John Elkington calls ‘exponential sustainability’. This needs what he calls ‘breakthrough business models’ and designs for systemic local and wider change with the agility and boldness to move, as he suggests, 10 times faster, go 10 times further, and with 10 times more impact than mainstream models of change.

This is some agenda and place matters hugely to it. What we build, how we build, the density we build at, the energy infrastructure put in place, the mobility services needed to replace dependence on the private car, and the way collective, self-sustaining, behavioural change can be enabled, are all critical components of any serious programme to address climate catastrophe and we seek to address these issues directly and comprehensively at the Phoenix.

The Sharing Society: Inspiring and enabling good choices

“It’s time to move on to a more mature advocacy focused on developing a vastly deeper response to the predicament we face beyond recycling and shopping for “green” cars and carbon offsets. Why not instead learn how to live in alignment with the biosphere, both as individuals and as a collective. This practice demands that we change our everyday lives, how we think about ourselves and our place on this planet”

Peter Kalmus, NASA scientist

Place can also inspire but more importantly enable positive lifestyle changes that move the dial on our carbon footprints. The design of a walkable neighbourhood is key. If people can walk or cycle to meet their daily needs, if streets are safe, journeys short and the experience of travel is pleasant not torrid, carbon emissions race down. If people have easy and affordable access to food from regenerative farms (in the Downs, say), reduce waste, generate energy from residual waste and compost the rest to improve soil conditioning in neighbourhood community gardens, carbon emissions decline further.

If also, people were to share party walls, laundry rooms, co-working spaces and generate a more self-contained local circular economy, emissions reduce yet more. Please see ‘Life at the Phoenix’ in Section 12.

Cumulatively, these and other actions – as designed into these proposals for the Phoenix – make a compound difference. In fact, they can set us on the trajectory towards global fair shares carbon of 2.3 tons per person (Oxfam’s stated imperative and Human Nature’s corporate target for place-projects). Human Nature’s own Circle of Impact framework describes the 12 levers of change that can be deployed in neighbourhoodscale developments to achieve Elkington’s exponential sustainability.

Combinations of actions lead to cumulative positive impacts

Via the creation of, inter alia, and in combination: new homes, mass timber engineering for buildings and the use of other biomaterials, renewable energy infrastructures, co-mobility services, efficient and human-scale apartment blocks with shared facilities, superb streets and public spaces, abundant greenery, and new creative and circular economy enterprises, the Phoenix will be an exemplar of the actions needed to create a safe and in very many ways far better world. Many of these same actions will serve simultaneously to grow stronger neighbourly connections, community spirit and intentionality while regenerating nature on and off site. The potential for a virtuous circle of reinforcing actions is palpable.

Community matters: Social bridges and bonds, civility and addressing deprivation

“A viable neighbourhood is a community, and a viable community is made up of neighbours who cherish and protect what they have in common”

Wendell Berry

Government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance upon reading the so-called ‘Code Red’ IPCC report on climate change, published in the run up to COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, wrote that, ‘only transforming society will avert catastrophe’.

It is notable that Vallance referred to society not, primarily, to physical fabric and infrastructure. He did so because unless ultimately people behave differently – unless we repeatedly make what might be called better choices - and unless new norms of behaviour become embedded, even cultural, critically important carbon targets will remain well beyond reach. Individuals can’t and/or don’t make significant changes of these kinds readily of their own accord in great numbers; communities acting together just might.

Neighbourhoods as communities

Suzanne Simard, the esteemed forest ecologist, has as her central thesis that an “intact forest is a community” not as Darwin would have it, “a grouping of competitive species”. Trees prosper via the action of other kindred trees and these myriad and extraordinary mutual collaborations result in a successful forest. A forest is a dynamic, complex system that continuously learns and adapts at every level from microbe to trunk, floor to canopy, leaf to timber. For humans to flourish in this most daunting of centuries we must now see neighbourhoods in the same way. This means providing the places, shared spaces, infrastructures and services that ease the shift to the exponentially sustainable better future. Is this landscapeled design at its most profound?

We also see that neighbourhood making and remaking has to regenerate – to transform – society. We have to work hardest with excluded, more disadvantaged communities and households. New opportunities have to be created, social bridges and bonds built, poverty alleviated and shared experiences and ultimately, shared values, forged.

Accordingly, the Phoenix will provide special opportunities for education, training and work in creative and circular enterprises. It provides space for work – a rich mix of spaces of different kinds to stimulate tomorrow’s economy. This will be a mixed income place, offering a wide range of choices in housing type, tenure, price, configuration and even design. It provides multiple community facilities – shared spaces such as streets, squares, courtyard gardens, roofs and parks at different scales. Localised health care, active play and sports, healthy cafes and retail are also tuned to the regenerative mission.

Public health & wellbeing

Energy & infrastructure

Behaviour & Culture

Bioregion & ecosystems