This Manifesto Calls for a Sustainable Urban Future

With today's rapid rate of urbanisation, cities across the world are facing increasing pressure to expand their built environment. Housing demand is rising, land is scarce, and the construction methods that delivered homes in previous decades are struggling to meet either the scale or the sustainability expectations of today. If the looming threats of the climate crisis are to be addressed seriously, urban planners and housebuilders need to rethink not just what they build, but how they build it and where they put it.

House by Urban Splash is one of the UK companies attempting to answer that challenge directly. Established in 2019 as part of the Urban Splash family of property companies, it builds architect-designed, factory-created modular homes using low carbon and sustainable materials. To set out its intentions publicly and hold itself to account against them, the company published a manifesto called Live Well by Design. That document, and the thinking behind it, is the subject of this article.

Live Well by Design sets out ten core tenets of urban design that House by Urban Splash considers essential for creating sustainable communities and future neighbourhoods. The document is built around four central commitments: design, wellbeing, choice and sustainability. These are not aspirational statements appended to a marketing brochure. They are the principles the company uses when bidding for new sites, briefing architects and evaluating whether completed developments have delivered on their promises.

Orla McGrath, the brand's marketing director, described the manifesto as a public commitment to everything the company believes in as a values-led organisation. The intent, she explained, is for homes to be the happiest places in the world, which requires thinking beyond four walls to the wider neighbourhood, and to the idea of community and belonging. That framing sets Live Well by Design apart from most housing company communications, which typically focus on specification and price rather than the quality of life a development enables.

Urban Splash began developing modular homes in 2012, working with Liverpool-based architects ShedKM to create its first prototype. The two-storey, factory-created homes were installed at the company's New Islington neighbourhood in Manchester, and the product was launched to the market in 2016. Buyers were offered a completely customisable home installed by the canal within minutes of Manchester city centre, a proposition that addressed both the sustainability and the flexibility gaps in the mainstream housing market simultaneously.

Since then, the company has grown significantly. Backed by Homes England, the government's housing accelerator, and Sekisui House, the world's largest homebuilder, House by Urban Splash has ambitions to become one of the UK's top ten housebuilders within the next decade. Achieving that goal requires changing how homes and communities are conceived, created and delivered at scale, and the modular approach is central to that plan. Factory manufacture reduces material waste, improves build quality consistency, shortens programme times and enables the kind of customisation that site-built construction struggles to offer economically.

One of the problems Live Well by Design was written to address is the lack of meaningful choice in the UK's new housing market. In most new developments, buyers select from a limited set of fixed house types with predetermined layouts. Room sizes, configurations and orientations are decided by the developer, and personalisation is limited to surface finishes and fixtures. For buyers whose lives do not conform to the standard family template, the options are either to compromise or to look elsewhere.

House by Urban Splash takes a different position. Buyers specify how they want their home laid out: how much space they need, how many rooms, how large they should be and which way round. The team then builds to that specification. McGrath described the capability as the ability to deliver homes for all different types of lifestyles, a commitment made possible by the modular system which allows configuration changes to be made at the factory stage rather than requiring costly site modifications. The result is a development of individually tailored homes that share a neighbourhood identity without imposing a uniform domestic experience on every resident.

A recurring theme in Live Well by Design is that the quality of a home cannot be separated from the quality of the neighbourhood around it. The manifesto identifies a lack of emphasis on neighbourhood design and community within UK housing developments as one of the sector's most significant failures. New homes are frequently delivered without the amenities that make daily life functional and pleasant. Parks, schools, health centres, independent shops and cafes are often absent from early phases and sometimes never materialise at all, leaving residents in areas that have housing but not the infrastructure of a community.

House by Urban Splash builds these elements into the neighbourhood plan from the outset rather than treating them as additions to be considered later. Through the company's charitable trust, community projects and local enterprise are supported so that the things that make a difference in neighbourhood life are delivered by local people for local people. The commercial logic behind this is straightforward: neighbourhoods where residents want to live and stay hold their value better and generate the kind of reputation that attracts future buyers without requiring expensive marketing.

House by Urban Splash is currently building homes at Port Loop in Birmingham, New Islington in Manchester and Northstowe in Cambridgeshire, with future neighbourhoods planned for the Wirral, Milton Keynes and Cambridge. Port Loop is a 43-acre waterside neighbourhood in Birmingham with over 1,000 homes. New Islington is a modern village in Manchester city centre. Both developments embody the Live Well by Design principles: ample open green space, connections to water, infrastructure for walking and cycling, and small local businesses integrated into the neighbourhood plan.

Affordability is also addressed directly. At New Islington, 31 percent of homes are affordable. At Inholm, the House by Urban Splash neighbourhood within the new town of Northstowe in Cambridgeshire, 60 percent of homes across the entire neighbourhood are affordable. These figures reflect a deliberate commitment to making the Live Well by Design model accessible across income levels rather than positioning it as a premium product for buyers who can absorb a sustainability premium.

The ambition behind Live Well by Design is significant, but delivering it consistently across multiple sites requires operational discipline that matches the quality of the design intent. Modular construction at scale involves complex supply chains, tight factory-to-site sequencing, coordinated subcontractor programmes and detailed cost tracking across jobs that span different phases and geographies. The gap between a well-designed manifesto and a well-delivered neighbourhood is bridged by the quality of the project management systems supporting the build process.

This is where purpose-built construction management software becomes relevant. Platforms like Quantim are designed specifically for project-based businesses that need to track time, costs and progress across multiple active jobs simultaneously. Quantim's timesheet and job costing features give project teams live visibility of labour costs against budget at the activity level, making it possible to identify cost drift early rather than discovering it at month end. For housebuilders managing multiple sites with different phase timelines and affordable housing obligations, that kind of real-time financial control is the operational foundation that makes delivery at scale viable.

Managing holiday requests, subcontractor expenses and resource allocation across a programme of this scale also requires systems that connect those functions to project outcomes rather than treating them as separate administrative tasks. Quantim's integrated approach to project operations ensures that leave, expenses and resource availability all feed into the same live picture of delivery capability, reducing the manual reconciliation that typically consumes project management time on complex programmes.

Live Well by Design is a serious attempt to articulate what responsible housebuilding looks like in practice. Its ten tenets cover the physical quality of homes, the sustainability of materials and methods, the design of neighbourhoods, the provision of community infrastructure and the importance of genuine buyer choice. That the company behind it has moved from a single prototype in Manchester in 2012 to active developments across three cities, with backing from both the UK government and the world's largest homebuilder, suggests the approach is gaining commercial as well as critical credibility.

The broader lesson for the construction sector is that quality of outcome and operational efficiency are not in tension. Modular manufacture reduces waste and programme time while enabling greater customisation. Neighbourhood-first planning produces developments that retain value and attract buyers on reputation. And the project management discipline required to deliver complex multi-site programmes consistently is itself a design challenge, one that benefits from the same commitment to structured systems and real-time visibility that Live Well by Design brings to neighbourhood planning.

For construction and project-based businesses looking to improve the operational discipline behind their delivery, book a free Quantim demonstration to see how live time tracking, job costing and resource management support consistent project delivery across multiple sites and programmes.