YORK people are being offered the chance to help redesign the masterplan for York Central - using an online ‘world building’-style toolkit.

The method, developed by think tank Demos and hosted by York campaign group YoCo (York Central Co-Owned), will employ techniques of crowd-funding and world-building to enable local people to suggest changes to the designs for the huge site.

They will be able to download the masterplan, then redesign it online - adding new paths or public parks, sketching suggested designs for homes and buildings, and rearranging the way shops and offices are laid out.

Town planning for the Minecraft generation 

The new ‘community plan’ tool will go live on the YoCo website on October 1. All the redesigned plans, as well as the original masterplan, will be listed on the site, and ranked in order of popularity as people comment on and like or dislike them. After two months, the most popular ‘community plan’ will then be presented to the York Central Partnership, which is managing development of the site on behalf of Homes England, Network Rail, the city council and the NRM, for consideration.

It is the first time the technique will have been used for a development on this scale anywhere in the UK, said Demos’ Jon Nash. “We will be starting with the masterplan, then inviting the people of York to come up with something better,” he said.

The hope is that the scheme will increase ‘community engagement’, lead to some new ideas - and get younger people involved. “It is the younger generation that will live with York Central,” Jon pointed out.

The outline masterplan for the huge, 110-acre site behind York railway station was approved by city planners in March 2019. It envisages up to 2,500 new homes, 110,000 square metres of commercial and office space, and new streets, shops and public areas.

Often described as the ‘largest brownfield site in York’, the development has the potential to generate jobs, create new homes and workplaces, and change the face of York for generations to come.

The masterplan was developed following a pioneering ‘My York Central’ consultation in 2018 which involved weeks of site walks, workshops, discussions and debates.

But it remains just an outline, with all the detail yet to be filled in.

YoCo member Phil Bixby, the York architect who helped lead the My York Central consultation, added that the masterplan did not take on board all the ideas that came out of the earlier consultation. One of the big ideas was that we needed to get away from the idea of ‘zoning’, he said - where a development is organised into separate zones for housing, business and retail.

Mixed use neighbourhoods work much better, Phil said. There’s less need for transport, for a start. “People can walk to the shops or the café.” And such neighbourhoods tend to be active at all times of the day, he added.

So YoCo teamed up with Demos to launch the new online consultation. “We’re looking to see what appetite there is to take back the masterplan and do more innovative stuff,” he said.

York Central project director Ian Gray welcomed the YoCo approach.

“Creating communities that are great places to live and work is at the heart of Homes England’s work, and we welcome the engaged approach of YoCo and Demos,” he said.