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Coming soon: the Cambridge to Oxford Connection competition

Designers, planners, architects and others are to be invited to enter a new competition designed to seek ideas for creating high quality urban places across the Cambridge-Milton Keynes-Oxford arc. The free to enter contest, which is due to be launched at the end of June, is being initiated by the National Infrastructure Commission.

In the autumn of 2016, the NIC published a report on the Cambridge-Oxford development corridor, finding huge growth potential stymied by a lack of strategic planning and investment for housing, jobs and transport.

According to the NIC, government asked it to come up with recommendations for making the most of the potential of an arc of development that also includes Northampton and Milton Keynes, "as a single, knowledge intensive cluster that competes on the global stage, whilst protecting the area’s high quality environment and securing the homes and jobs the area needs".

Proposed transport developments already supported by the NIC and by government in principle, include a new Oxford-Cambridge Expressway and a significant new-build extension of the East-West rail upgrade project. The Cambridge to Oxford Connection Ideas Competition is being promoted as an opportunity for broad multi-disciplinary teams of urban designers and other specialists to create 'conceptual proposals that creatively link new infrastructure with sustainable placemaking'.

The contest, organised by Malcolm Reading Consultants, will launch at the end of June and conclude in the autumn. Competition director, Malcolm Reading, said: “This part of England is on the cusp of change. New infrastructure is coming, but now this needs to be integrated with imaginative and integrated placemaking that encourages a good social balance and easy access to natural landscapes and green spaces.”

More details, including automatic notification of the launch date, are available on the competition website.