Nightmare on Superdense Street?

Did you sleep well last night? If so, spare a thought for the characters in animator Bruno Bozzetto's darkly comic short animation 'Neuro', which beautifully illustrates the worst case scenario for people living on top of each other without adequate space and noise buffers. Over the course of an evening, four neighbours return home to their apartment block and wind each other up so much through noise that lives are put on the line.

But lots of people in a tight space need not mean inevitable strife. If you think of a typical edge of town housing estate in the UK, then you are looking at developments of around 20 to 35 dwellings per hectare (dph). But consider a Victorian or Edwardian terraced neighbourhood, which used one of our most enduring, adaptable, successful and desirable housing types. Typically they were 40-80 dph, with mansion block elements reaching as high as 130dph.

In the heart of biggest cities density has often been more intense, but not that much more. From the 1940s Westminster Council operated a density cap of 150 dph on new developments. If any schemes were submitted over this limit, plans had to go before the Housing Minister and expert review committees to ensure that measures had been taken to counterbalance the intensity of so many people living on top of each other. Higher internal space standards, increased shared play and amenity space and robust management structures were all used to tackle this.

Since the call to intensify existing city centre sites in the supplementary guidance to Planning Policy Guidance 3, there has been a surge of applications for very dense development. UDP limits long fought for by London boroughs were waived and developments in excess of 500 dph are no longer uncommon. That is a giant step up in a short space of time. Crucially, schemes have passed through planning without the "safety audit" of expert review and guidance, as was the case just a few years ago.

The alarm bells have been ringing within four London based residential architects - HTA, Levitt Bernstein, Pollard Thomas Edwards and PRP. Representing some of the most active on the capital's residential sites, they had witnessed the trend through ambitious client briefs. The density would be okay, they argued, as long as everyone accepted key aspects of design and management had to be treated properly. So with Design for Homes, they produced guidance 'Recommendations for Living at Superdensity', to inform the Mayor's Housing Strategy. The guidance is aimed at designers, planners and developers, and defines any developments over 150 dph as 'Superdensity'. It highlights 10 areas needing special attention, including neighbourhood context, making flats work for families, privacy, management and the role of local authorities in procurement. The report has also been turned into a short film which illustrates the main recommendations with a selection of Building for Life silver and gold winning schemes.

So to avoid not just the undesirable homes but the violent tensions Bozzetto's animation burlesques, we need to stop building blocks of mixed tenure apartments, allowing them to be picked up by buy to let investors wholesale, and start thinking about how to manage so many tightly packed apartments.

Richard Mullane is Director at Design for Homes