The regeneration programme that London Borough of Croydon is embarking on promises nothing less than a completely new town centre. In just five years, more than 160 construction projects of all kinds, from office buildings to retail schemes and schools, will transform Croydon as a place to live, learn, work and visit.
More than 20 major schemes and numerous smaller projects will deliver around 3000 new homes, up to 2.8 million sqft of new office space, 2 million sqft of new retail and leisure facilities, 28 new public spaces and places, seven new hotels, four new schools and new further and higher education.
It’s an Olympic-scale programme of development, with one major difference: it’s not on a blank canvas of land. And Croydon can’t close while it’s all going on. Critical to its delivery is that investors, developers and other shareholders retain complete confidence in London Borough of Croydon (LBC) to coordinate and facilitate the programme, share risk and bring about the necessary improvements in local infrastructure.
LBC set Arup the challenge of planning how to deliver the programme while keeping Croydon moving. Instead of a report or timeline, Arup gave Croydon a tool: a tailor-made, web-based dashboard that defines the programme, allows the cumulative effects of projects to be easily understood and balanced, and their progressive delivery to be tracked and managed, all in real time. The dashboard provides an intelligent ‘single point of truth’ by capturing all 169 regeneration projects in an interactive map, allowing users to navigate central Croydon and add a range of background layers, such as masterplan areas or political boundaries.
It has already proved itself as a highly innovative programme management tool and strategic roadmap. Specifically, it meets LBC’s objectives by:
- Defining the entire Croydon regeneration programme, providing a single map-based source of reliable, continuously-updated information, accessible to all, on all 169 individual projects
- Balancing the programme, providing an interactive, visually intuitive way to analyse and understand the cumulative impacts of projects and construction traffic, essential to planning and keeping Croydon moving
- Delivering the programme, by providing the central, on-going planning and programme management tool for the Central Croydon Area-Based team.
This easy, intuitive window on the future, developed by Arup and accessible to all, is helping to secure Croydon’s transformation. The Programme Delivery Dashboard has given LBC a vital management tool. But it has done much more than that. It has engaged and reassured stakeholders, allowed them to bring forward projects and grasp new opportunities, identified areas of infrastructure requiring investment, helped secure funding commitments, and promises to radically transform how regeneration schemes are planned and delivered in the future.
In summary, Arup’s Programme Delivery Dashboard has added a vital and timely momentum to the regeneration programme that has helped to secure Croydon’s transformation, and offers a prototype with which other major urban regeneration schemes can win support and funding.