A New Town for the Highlands/ Moray Estates
The population of the Moray Firth area is projected to increase by 30,000 over the next ten years. Moray Estates are proposing to build a new town near Inverness to help meet the demand for new housing. The initial reaction to the idea was relatively hostile.
Moray Estates had decided to appoint a world leader in traditional town planning – Andres Duany founder of US firm DPZ. The company are renowned for their unique form of public consultation – a series of public design workshops known as a charrette.
The Brief
We were asked to achieve a number of objectives:
- Improve perception and generate support for the new town
- Announce the appointment of Andres Duany
- Publicise the project’s innovative consultation process
What We Did
- Building a new town in this location was always going to be controversial and one of the main stumbling blocks was that some people refused to accept the need for growth.
- Our approach was to stimulate public debate about the need to deal with a growth in population which was inevitable. In particular we had to address local prejudices created by decades of poorly planned growth in the city, which was beginning to suffer from suburban sprawl of the worst kind.
- We positioned Andres Duany as a world leader in traditional town planning through a series of lectures and interviews. We promoted the Charrette and attracted national TV, radio and newspaper coverage during the consultation process.
What We Achieved
The new town has been formally incorporated into the council’s A96 Corridor Masterplan. The project has attracted 84 media items, reaching an audience of more than 22 million. More than 600 people attended the public design workshops and over 200 attended Duany’s Inverness Lecture – a record number for UHI Millennium Institute’s public lecture series.
