Great places have a compelling blend of community, nature, and beauty. Cambridge is destroying all of
these, and rapidly creating naff spaces.
The Great Places paper refers to Heritage Assets, but completely fails to recognise that the city of Cambridge is a city heritage asset of worldwide significance which meets UNESCO’s Outstanding Universal Value criteria for World Heritage status.
This significance derives from the combination of its built and natural heritage. The draft Plan fails to recognise the vital role which this special character plays in making Cambridge a great place to live in, work, study, and visit.
The draft Plan’s approach involves a false separation between Landscape and Townscape (Objective 6)
and Historic Environment (Objective 7), which for Cambridge has resulted in inadequate consideration
and valuation of the historic city in its historic landscape setting, with historic landscape and open spaces
considered as green infrastructure but not as historic environment.
Cambridge’s special character has been, and continues to be, under severe threats from the quantum of already approved growth (built developments and pressures on both streets and green spaces). There are severe environmental capacity issues in trying to accommodate the demands of a 21st century city within what remains the built fabric and spaces of a medieval market town.
These fundamental conflicts between growth on the one hand and environmental capacity and special character on the other should have been recognised as a key challenge for the draft Local Plan.
But the draft Plan documents include no assessment of current pressures, let alone the impacts of the draft First Proposals.
Instead, para 3.2.4 of the Strategic Heritage Impact Assessment: baseline makes a totally unjustified statement that:
“3.2.4 Future growth in Cambridge has the potential to strengthen and reinforce these characteristics,
enabling the City to meet contemporary environmental, economic and social drivers without undermining
its economic identity”.
Overall, the Evidence base for Great Places is inadequate, and the proposals are premature pending a
thorough review of the success or failure of existing policies.
Community requires a degree of stable population, and works better when people are investing in a place they want to stay in. However, people often come to Cambridge for 5 years in a tech job or a research post and move on again. This benefits the diversity of our city but means that civic engagement is patchy and social networks are largely based on livelihood or interests, rather than place. New neighbourhoods need additional community spaces to encourage cohesion and local friendships.
Independent shops are a good place for community to build, we must do away with the assumption that new developments will orbit around a supermarket.
Nature is being annihilated globally, it is not a problem specific to Cambridge. It is necessary to have some spaces where humans can enjoy interacting with nature, and some spaces where nature can enjoy NOT interacting with humans. For a city, Cambridge is quite wealthy in green spaces, but lockdown and shortage of community facilities have given many green spaces the air of a festival in daytime and a fix room at nighttime. New developments must do better than a tree in a square metre of soil, or a rooftop garden, people need space to walk in nature, to watch it, to rest in it.
Beauty is part of our heritage in Cambridge, not only through the natural world but an incredible architectural inheritance. The narrative on many central streets is one of design and construction skills being lost - vulgar unworthy buildings which spoil the setting of the wonderful ones. Soulless concrete and glass, towers of it, and chain brands that welcome you to Clone Town, Anywhere. And public art that aspires to be vapid enough to fit right in.
We want to see this three-fold destruction paused, until the planning system is fit to support appropriate means to heal the damage.