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The Bentilee Estate on the outskirts of Stoke-on-Trent is an interesting example of the application of a community ideal. Bentilee is a council estate of some 5 000 properties which was developed in the garden city style in the 1950s. Over the years the estate has acquired a poor reputation and has struggled to achieve a community identity because of its scale and isolated location. In 1996 the opportunity arose to improve the estate through the government's Single Regeneration Budget. The concept behind the scheme was the transformation of the estate into a series of villages and the programme was called the Villages Initiative.
URBED recently carried out a study to explore the transformation of the estate into a series of eight village centres. By studying the history of the area and building upon local nodes such as shopping parades, pubs and schools, a series of village centres were identified. These were reinforced by creating community halls, and introducing new housing development to create a sense of enclosure and increased density. It had originally been suggested that the key to creating village identities was the selective demolition of properties to create open space between each village. However the study concluded that this would not work and was in any case based on a model of a village community which was not appropriate for the area.
Rather than a rural village a concept was developed based on the villages which exist in urban areas. These are defined by their centre rather than their edge and tend to merge into the surrounding urban areas. The idea in Bentilee was therefore to create a series of village centres and to allow the population to gravitate towards whichever village centre they preferred.
In Bentilee these ideas were subject to extensive consultation with local people. It was clear
from this that not everyone viewed the idea of a village community as a positive thing. Indeed young people saw it as somewhere where people stuck their noses into your business and stifled individuality. However the word village still held a strong appeal, particularly to the older members of the community, and the proposals received widespread support.
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