Blogs

Just over a year ago Integreat Plus was established as a social enterprise company. We transitioned out of Yorkshire Forward with the express aim of sustaining the legacy and underlying principles of Integreat Yorkshire - the Regional Development Agency’s Centre for Regeneration, Renaissance and Place Making Skills, and Yorkshire Forward’s well respected Renaissance programme. 

How do you create a place which has meaning for a wide diversity of cultures, ages, and personalities?  Are gathering, socialising spaces more important now because we live even more isolated lives?  As house sizes diminish in width, height and breath does this mean we yearn for space and light?  Where space has become branded, gated, controlled and borrowed, - then where is our space rather than second hand space?   Our space in our city?  Something that is unique and special and belongs to us?

This week the Integreat Plus Yorkshire Design Review Panel,  mass  architecture, Friends of York Walls and City of York Council met to review plans to improve the access and usability of York’s famous walls.

Somehow we have to make our High Streets more enjoyable places to shop than online or going to a mall.  This is a difficult task but not impossible! 

This week Sheffield was pleased to welcome yet another innovative building into the Cultural Industries Quarter of the City.  Project Orange’s 192 Shoreham Street joins the likes of Fielden Clegg Bradley’s Persistence works and Nigel Coates’ Hubs.  It demonstrates exactly what can be achieved in a conservation area, setting the standard that should be expected from any future new developments in the Quarter.

This week has seen much furore about the way that skyscrapers affect the heritage of places, and with the row that has erupted over the Liverpool waters scheme we asked our Head of Architecture & Urbanism, Elizabeth Motley for her thoughts on the matter.

Rural areas present a mixed picture, some places are thriving, some fairing better in the current economic climate than in the aftermath of the 2001 Foot and Mouth epidemic and some are struggling. There are the seemingly perennial challenges of affordable rural housing, public transport and accessible local services, amongst others.  These were not ‘solved’ in the good times, so how can these are addressed in a time of dwindling public finances?

On the 26th January Integreat Plus and Design Council CABE met with members of the Dewsbury Town Team to work together on proposals for the future development of the northern quarter area of Dewsbury.