How can we best stimulate the housing sector and use the planning system to negotiate the biggest challenges in our dense, built environment? How can we realise the benefits of household energy efficiency for living standards, jobs and the climate? How can we transform our energy markets to put people at the centre of energy policy? How can we better recognise the importance of place in tackling environmental issues?

This is the second of three contributor pamphlets under our Green Roots programme, sets out to answer a number of these crucial questions. Bringing together contributions from social democratic thinkers and independent experts, it looks at how to deliver sustainable communities, reconciling the importance of social and environmental capital with the need to create many hundreds of thousands of new homes.

We would like to thank the Ashden Trust, the European Climate Foundation and the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust for supporting the Green Roots programme.