Urban Foresight was awarded two contracts to apply smart principles to Thamesmead, London’s New Town. Thamesmead 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.

The contracts were 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. Peabody’s ambitions for the project placed an emphasis on maximising the benefits that could be realised by local residents and businesses. It also placed an emphasis on providing practical guidance and funding to ensure that projects could be implemented and sustained.

The first of Urban Foresight’s contracts was 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. This required working across Peabody’s directorates to develop a toolkit that 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 was 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. This covered a range of interventions such as smart homes, smart high streets, community services and engagement. The concept plan also sets out a vision, measures of success, a range of potential interventions, initial costs and a funding plan.

Photo by Brandon Wong