Five designs for a new garden city in the UK have been shortlisted for a major prize at a time when the country could see up to three new towns built.

The government has pledged to reform the planning system so that new garden cities can be built and one site at Ebbsfleet in Kent has already been identified.

The 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize, the second most lucrative economics awards after the Nobel Prize, asked entrants to design a visionary and economic garden city and received almost 300 entries from all over the world.

Now it has announced the shortlist of five finalists and revealed that a new poll shows that 74% of people believe garden cities are a good way to meet Britain’s need for more housing.

The five shortlisted designs, which were judged anonymously, are made up of entries from planning consultants Barton Willmore, housing development expert Chris Blundell, urban design specialists URBED, housing charity Shelter and planning company Wei Yang & Partners.

Miles Gibson, director of the Wolfson Economics Prize, said that if all five of the proposed garden cities were built, they would provide homes for 400,000 people and construction jobs for 400,000 workers.

‘There are opportunities to improve the quality of people’s lives by building garden cities, rather than tacking 50 odd houses here and 100 houses there on to the end of an existing settlement,’ he said.
‘We can’t continue shutting people up in what are the smallest homes in Europe at just 76 square metres. People are entitled to aspire to better quality housing for themselves and that does include a reasonable amount of outdoor space,’ he added.

Gibson explained that a garden city must be green and have plenty of open space. ‘It has to be a mixed use place with jobs and offices and retail facilities to create a community. It needs to be well connected to the existing transport network but not necessarily so well connected that it becomes a commuter town. It’s got to have a life and an identity and a community of its own,’ he pointed out.

‘We haven’t done garden cities in the UK for 100 years and we haven’t done new towns in the UK for 40 years, so there’s no doubt there’s a skill and collective memory issue that would have to be addressed if any of these were actually to be built,’ added Gibson.

‘Nobody is expecting anything overnight and this takes careful planning. We hope that what the prize has done is make people feel it is possible. Our entrants all argue that this can be done and what it needs is a national political consensus that it should be done and then it will happen,’ he said.

Campbell Robb, chief executive of Shelter, whose shortlisted design proposes a development at Stoke Harbour that could eventually accommodate 150,000 people, said that creating new garden cities is an essential step towards building the homes we need.

‘From families struggling to keep up with their…