We need to talk about SLOAPs: Sites Leftover After Planning

Welcome to The Developer Podcast, where we talk about how to make cities worth living in, which often has to do with the spaces between the buildings as much as the buildings themselves. My name's Christine Murray, founding editor in chief of the developer and director of the Festival of Place. Our ambition is to break down silos and bring people together to unpick what makes places that thrive. Today, I'm talking about sites left over after planning or slopes. We've all seen them on housing estates in The UK. These corridors of tarmac are fenced in scraps of grass. As we focus on the retrofit and housing intensification of council estates, shouldn't we also be retrofitting the communal and public spaces? What is the collective potential of this mosaic of pieces of land for social and environmental gain? We could use them for biodiversity, for food growing, or flood resilience. That's the argument of two former winners of our awards, the pineapples. So Emdate from Eco Responsive Environments and Valerie Baron of Where Pathways Meet want to put slopes, literally, on the map. They're here to ask you to help them. So hi. So and welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do and about these sites left over after planning that you've been thinking about. First of all, thanks for doing this podcast with us. So just a bit about myself. I'm, Soham Deh, co director, founder of, a design practice called EcoResponsive Environments. We are based in South London, and, we like ourselves and value both of, one pineapple was, with you, Christine. And, and just a bit bit more on on our practice. We've been writing this book by the same name called Eco Responsive Environments, and it is, you know, to be, published in summer next year. And the book is actually about, you know, it's it's a manual for designing sort of safe and just space, for the future. So, well, in that context, we've been working, on on a public realm regeneration, in one of, social housing estates in located in Tower Hamlets. And, whilst working in that project, we realized that, there's so much of leftovers open spaces between buildings within just within tar hamlets that, are not really thought about with meaningful purpose. And also when we were engaged in into this sort of design project, the main aim was to, intensify, the site, via rooftop extension and other in full developments. But that being the main aim of such projects, the improvements to the landscape and public realm wasn't has not necessarily been in the forefront. And what we realized that, a lot of these open spaces that we, you know, then found, just walking around the council, that these open spaces are mainly primarily been designed as defensible open spaces and no other sort of, function to it. And therefore, these spaces are not really used much. Not just that, …