Smart City Strategy and Toolkit for London’s New Town

The contracts have been awarded by the Peabody Group, which provides homes and services to more than 111,000 residents across London and is the major landowner in Thamesmead.

Thamesmead town was formed in the 1960s by the Greater London Council and today is at the start of a 30-year regeneration programme that could deliver up to 20,000 new homes and 9,000 new jobs. In spring 2016, Peabody announced its proposals for a £1bn regeneration programme for South Thamesmead over the next ten years. This, together with two Housing Zones which are being led by the London Borough of Bexley and Royal Borough Greenwich and delivered by Peabody with funding, has pushed Thamesmead into the top 50 regeneration projects in the UK.

The first of Urban Foresight’s contracts is to create a Smart Toolkit that will provide a set of practical guidelines for how to apply Smart City principles across Peabody’s current pipeline of projects.

“We want to develop a clear and simple toolkit for project leads to help make projects smart from the start” said Urban Foresight’s David Beeton. “We also expect that the toolkit could be used to undertake a health check across the Thamesmead regeneration programme and to identify where Peabody can embed, test or pilot a smarter approach.”

The second contract will be to create a concept plan for a Smarter District in Thamesmead, that would act as a “living lab” or demonstrator to test and pilot a series of interventions.

“The concept plan will cover a range of interventions such as smart homes, smart high streets, community services  and engagement” explained Dr. Beeton. “It will also set out a vision, measures of success, a range of potential interventions, initial costs and a funding plan.”

Both projects kicked off today, with the final deliverables to be completed by early 2018.

Image credits: Kleon3 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons/ Jon Bennett [CC BY 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons