Local consultation is often dominated by a vocal minority with time and resources, and that doesn’t only affect overall decision-making about whether a development can proceed - it is also likely to skew what kinds of amenities are built into mixed-use developments.

Stack’s unique approach to understanding community preferences when it comes to the built environment can help. We use leading-edge polling and analytical techniques to give clients a truly representative understanding of what local people want, think and worry about when it comes to new development in their area.

In this post, we’re focussing on what people say would improve their local area. We asked a nationally-representative sample this open-ended question:

Take a moment to think about the area where you live. What kinds of services or community facilities would you like to see more of nearby, to improve your local area and make it a better place to live?

Respondents could type in as much as they liked, without any prompting or priming from us. We didn’t want to constrain responses by providing predetermined options.

This generated thousands of open-text responses, which we then ran through a large-language model so we could condense respondents' own words into a manageable number of categories. This approach is useful on any open-ended question, to allow for qualitative insight at robust, quantitative scale.

Here are the categorised preferences shared by respondents:

Involves suggestions for better roads, pavements, street cleaning, waste management, and general tidiness in the area.
Encompasses requests for better public transport links, bus services, train stations, and parking facilities.
Includes requests for youth clubs, educational opportunities, sports facilities, and areas for children and teenagers to play.
Involves suggestions for more community centers, youth clubs, social spaces, and places for social gatherings.
Encompasses requests for more green areas, parks, gardens, orchards, and recreational spaces for children and families.
Covers requests for more doctors, dentists, GP surgeries, pharmacies, hospitals, and health centers.
Includes desires for supermarkets, clothing shops, department stores, leisure and entertainment facilities, restaurants, cafes, and takeaways.
Includes suggestions related to the desire for more local independent shops, green grocers, bakeries, butchers, farm shops, and markets.
Encompasses desires for more police presence, security facilities, CCTV cameras, and decreased crime rates.
Includes suggestions for cinemas, theatres, libraries, bookshops, pubs, and music or art venues.
Covers requests for more banks, ATMs, post offices, and affordable housing options.
Responses that do not fit neatly into the main topics or are unclear, as well as those indicating satisfaction with the current state of the area. (We excluded these from our analysis.)

Lots of green spaces and kids play area (Female, 36, lives in a city)

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Reinstate the bus service to once every 2 hours (instead of 3) and also reinstate the Saturday service (Female, 71, lives in a Village)

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Better policing, better services for health (Male, 51, lives in a town)

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More centres with help for the disabled and elderly. (Male, 60, lives in a town)

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Parks, public gyms and play grounds (Female, 25, lives in a city)

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I think it would be nice to have a town hall where seasonal events can be held and people can come together as a community (Female, 20, lives in a town)

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Lots of green spaces and kids play area (Female, 36, lives in a city) 〰️ Reinstate the bus service to once every 2 hours (instead of 3) and also reinstate the Saturday service (Female, 71, lives in a Village) 〰️ Better policing, better services for health (Male, 51, lives in a town) 〰️ More centres with help for the disabled and elderly. (Male, 60, lives in a town) 〰️ Parks, public gyms and play grounds (Female, 25, lives in a city) 〰️ I think it would be nice to have a town hall where seasonal events can be held and people can come together as a community (Female, 20, lives in a town) 〰️

What do people want?

Better roads and transport links and cleaner streets come out top in a national-level analysis (Fig 1), but opinion is spread out across the categories.

What’s interesting immediately is to examine preferences according to the kind of area the respondent lives in (Fig 2): better transportation links are particularly desired by those living in more rural areas, while interestingly those in towns are likelier to want to see a return of the independent shop, perhaps reflecting long-term concerns about the homogenisation of the high street.

Taking the analysis a level deeper, we can see in Fig. 3 how age interacts with the type of area in which the respondent lives. Younger people in rural areas are much likelier to prioritise food and retail than older people in the same areas, who understandably overwhelmingly want better transport links. In cities, green spaces are important to middle-aged respondents with children, and the young themselves also want space to socialise.

Figure 3: The share of responses sorted into each category split by age and the kind of area respondents live in.

Clearly there is substantial variation in what people want! Stack’s approach gives you a hyper-local lens: by modelling our large-sample national surveys down to Output Area level, we can show you how representative opinion varies from one street to the next, offering insight into local preferences in the immediate vicinity of your development.

*Fig 4. Illustrative variation in opinion within 5 miles of a site in Hertfordshire*

Get in touch to find out more at info@stackdatastrategy.com

Methodological note: the importance of question wording

When thinking about survey design the exact wording of questions is vitally important! In a separate survey, we asked the public a similar open-ended question:

Take a moment to think about the area where you live. What kinds of shops, services or community facilities would you like to see more of nearby, to improve your local area and make it a better place to live? (No bolding used in question)

Sorting the responses to this question using the same categories as before yielded significantly different results. A large proportion of respondents provided answers categorised under "Food and retail options" and "Local shops and markets," with over 50% of responses falling into these topics. At first glance, this might suggest strong public support for additional shopping amenities. However, our earlier analysis indicates that this interpretation is misleading unless the idea of "shops" is explicitly planted in respondents’ minds through the question's wording.

Amenities in a mixed-use development: what do the local community really want?