The question posed by New London Architecture was an international ideas competition on New Ideas for Housing to help solve the London housing shortage. We were invited to submit an idea that would help to improve the speed, scale and quality of housing supply. We believe as designers/planners, we spend a lot of time working with, and mediating between councils and clients. We felt we could bring something different to this discussion and tackle design and coordination issues rather than policy. If we want to speed up housing we would need to speed up the planning process.

To speed up the process and thus increase housing provisions each year, we explored how digitisation and the use of more accessible online information can facilitate a more interactive exchange between planners, architects and their clients. We have found it is this coordination issue with the council that seems to stretch for long periods of time, to the extent that the planning process can easily match the build time. A quicker planning process would give all involved parties more clarity to move forward on financial and schedule strategies, and ultimately enable them to delivery new projects quicker while increasing the quality of both design and the final product.