East Manchester, 1900 hectares of land situated immediately adjacent to Manchester’s thriving City Centre, is disadvantaged socially, economically, physically and environmentally. Urban Strategies was initially retained by English Partnerships in 2000 to jointly lead a team with GVA Grimley that also included environmental, transportation, education and skills-training expertise, to create a comprehensive Strategic Regeneration Framework for the area. The goal of the framework is to build on outstanding resources, such as the Ancoats historic area and associated canal sustem, and the Medlock River valley, to create a community where people choose to live and work. The framework identifies viable economic enterprises that can improve job prosepects for the existing community and proposes a mix of new housing types intended to broaden the area’s social diversity. Guided by the initial framework, precinct planning work is now underway and New East Manchester has made considerable progress in new housing construction, the generation of employment and improvement to educational attainment.
Urban Strategies is currently leading a refreshed version of the Strategic Regeneration Framework for New East Manchester Corporation. The refreshed strategy revisits the goals and objectives set in the original 2000 report and establishes a series of targeted interventions that respond to a new funding and policy context. A key new theme of the refreshed strategy involves the rethinking of existing development patterns around eight newly planned LRT Stations across the area. Supported by a number of measures including the designation of strategic areas of intensification, and moves to improve connectivity, the strategy seeks to leverage the potential for each station to promote transit use, and to support neighbourhood growth, and both economic and community development objectives, through the creation of a series of accessible, pedestrian-friendly, mixed-use destinations.
