Urban design for town centres aims to create a thriving heart to the community a centre serves. However, urban design teams can struggle to define exactly what this ‘thriving heart’ looks like. There is an assumption that the current consultation process and design approach will lead to a town centre that satisfies. Very often though, it disappoints the public it is meant to delight.

We believe the issue is in the consultation phase. Currently there are few, if any, tools for helping us identify, define and then describe exactly what qualities a town centre needs in order to satisfy its users. The Q and A approach doesn’t delve into the very personal feelings that individuals have about a town centre that are formed from their personal experiences, current circumstances and aspirations for the future. Consequently, the exact qualities that would make a ‘thriving’ town centre urban design have to be predicted by the design team. There is often a disconnect between this prediction and user expectation. This is what leads to disappointment. 

Some examples of these frustrations are bulk and massing in relation to conservation of valuable historic buildings and places, traffic engineering and the pedestrian environment (its vitality, safety and air quality), the visual environment (impact of scale and massing), housing needs for key workers, employment opportunities, the diversity of retail on the high street and a general landscape with insufficient urban trees and parks.

Town Centres are by definition the centre of the wider populated areas they serve. The two interact and neither can be considered in isolation. Density versus the wider distribution of local public services - local food shopping, healthcare and education services, public versus private transport, market versus social housing - are typical areas where friction occurs. 

So, there is nothing straightforward about town centre planning and it needs many professional services to work together to develop and deliver proposals. However, the volumes of paperwork generated is generally inaccessible for normal people getting on with their busy lives. This is often interpreted as apathy, lack of interest or the public simply not knowing what they want until they are shown it. There is a need for a process that cuts through this complexity and begins by setting out to discover what will build delight in a town centre and then capturing this in a brief all can understand and agree. 

The Aura Planning process begins by finding the aura people are looking for in the town centre. We talk, one to one, with a representative cross section of the people involved. This is not consultation with groups or surveys in Q and A formats. It is a very personal but non-intrusive investigation that collects immediate perceptions about the town centre’s atmosphere. We then compare these to identify common threads about each phase of contact with the centre: the entering, the being in the town centre and the light, sound and air qualities desired at different moments and during different activities. 

The outcome is an Aura Plan - a brief for the built environment that will be the permanent backdrop, nurturing the atmospheres the town centre needs to generate.  This serves to focus the different professionals creating the new town centre urban plan by giving them a clear purpose. It does not disrupt or delay the technical processes that must be allowed to run its course. What it does do is make clear to all what outcome the users of the town centre want.