Otley Vision

Otley Vision is about working towards a sustainable and appropriate future development in the market town of Otley, through raising the community’s aspirations for brownfield site, mixed use development within the Neighbourhood Development Plan (NDP). The client of the Otley Vision Live Project is the ODD Campaign, a community group promoting a more robust and intelligent future development strategy for Otley in reaction to proposals made by Leeds City Council, who plan to expand Otley into surrounding greenfield sites.We were tasked with designing alternative options for the development of brownfield sites within Otley, in order to raise aspirations for future developments, in addition to being used as a tool to encourage wider community involvement in the Otley NDP.

We developed the design brief through participative engagement with the client and wider community, each activity was recorded and contributed to the design process. As a student group, being neutral to local political agendas and commercial interest in the sites enabled us to engage the community in discussion without bias.

The employment opportunities and adaptive reuse of former industrial buildings explored within our proposals were taken with great interest by local people, in contrast to their opposition to typical developer-led regeneration.The final designs were consolidated into two options of high and low density, along with a set of design principles to form an agenda for further discussion.

The designs were presented as a series of options, resolved at a neighbourhood masterplan scale incorporating key design ideas such as appropriate densification, provision of green space, greater pedestrian connectivity and celebrating past and contemporary industry. The design principles and options analysis will also be disseminated through the ‘Otley Vision’ document, which will be used as a basis for discussion in future NDP meetings.The outputs of the Live Project will be exhibited at a forthcoming public exhibition, which is aimed at involving the wider community in the continual dialogue about Otley’s identity as a market town in the 21st Century.