Hackney’s Green Infrastructure Strategy gets the thumbs up

If anything, we’d push for even more ambition…

We have responded to Hackney’s Green Infrastructure Strategy consultation, supporting the strong links it proposes with sustainable and active travel strategies – creating green routes which encourage people to use parks and links between them to walk and cycle; as well as the links it proposes to tackling green space deficiency (too little green space per head) by creating pocket parks on streets.

There is a huge amount in the strategy which we support, including green routes, de-paving and much more – and only had a few suggestions for where we felt the strategy could be even more ambitious:

• We emphasised the need to link this to Parking Policy, in particular we advocate that the two need to be linked by a target to replace 10% of parking with green and sustainable travel infrastructure.
• We agreed that ‘opportunities for the creation of new local or district parks should always be sought’ but disagreed that ‘such opportunities are very limited due to the existing density of development’. On the contrary, we have just seen Camden Council transform Alfred Place into a park and feel there’s a huge opportunity in Hackney and all of Inner London to tackle green space deficiency by creating ‘StreetParks’. We are calling for each London borough to create 30 StreetParks by 2026. In Hackney, for example, we are working with local campaigners to advocate that Downham Road is turned into a StreetPark to serve the densely populated De Beauvoir Estate which has very limited green space. 
• We also felt the GI strategy could be linked to street design standards which would limit the width of roads to 5.5m while introducing standards for greening, replacing parking with GI infrastructure.