The project aim is to regenerate the 57-acre Heath Business and Technical Park into a beacon project - zero-carbon mixed-use community - ensuring that through good design we promote health and happiness, mitigate climate change and help to eradicate loneliness and poverty.
In response to the brief, the vision for Heath Park illustrates an ambitious yet practicable future: a place that helps its users cultivate prosperous and sustainable futures of health and wellbeing.
Proposed aerial view illustrating how the landscape and built form layers cumulatively create the settings for everyday life
To achieve this at Heath Park we build on its thriving research economy and existing assets using a complex systems approach - to re-invent Heath Park as a desired place to live, work and play for the 21st century and beyond.
To enable walkable neighbourhoods, we collocate and maximise the diversity of activities. For liveliness and safety, frequent entrances maximise ‘eyes on the street’.
Typical block, illustrating a mix of activities to localise life, work and play
Responding to the climate crisis and to changing energy trends, our multiscale strategy for regenerative utilities infrastructure maximises the potential for resource-sharing and energy efficiency. This is achieved by creating dataconnected circular networks of energy, water and waste; enabling the operation of a cooperative economy and raising awareness about how we can live, work and play our way towards a carbon neutral future.
Interconnected loops of energy, waste, water, and data
Aligned with the financial criteria of ethical investors, the proposals put forward a carbon-positive and climate-responsible masterplan that supports ecological diversity and promotes the health, wellbeing and social capital of their users. It underpins a circular economy; organised to reduce, reuse and recycle resources, and embraces a holistic approach to contextual design and place identity. Natural Capital Accounting shows that the proposals achieves environmental net gain in at both a site scale and wider regional scale.
The Heath Park masterplan
Location
Runcorn, UK
Year
2020 - 2021
Client
SOG Ltd.
Project value
400 million
Project services
2020 - Winners, RIBA ‘Vision of the Future’ competition
2021 - Masterplan feasibility study
The project is recognised, at Government level, as one of 35 ‘Green Innovation’ schemes selected for the UK’s Global Investment Atlas and showcased through the ‘Global Investment Summit’ in London in October 2021.
From adapting existing building stock for new uses that conserve embodied carbon to designing for affordable utility bills; the proposals envision everyone living and working at Heath Park to be an integrated part of a carbon-conscious community that empowers sustainable lifestyle choices as the easiest and cheapest option. This evokes actions, emotions and levels of understanding that in turn impact positively on people’s physical and mental health and wellbeing; lighting a beacon of new expectations, and inspiring a shift to a ‘new place-making normal’.
Heath Park
