By Councillor Alex Hollingsworth is Oxford City Council’s Board Member for Planning and Transport

Oxford is a wonderful city, with a beauty and a history that brings visitors here from all over the world.

We are a centre of learning and innovation on a global scale, and we have much of which we can be rightly proud. But we are also a city where inequality is stark - where decent and affordable housing is out of reach for too many of our citizens, where traffic congestion is a serious problem and where poor air quality damages the lives of many more.

We need to make sure that Oxford continues to be a successful and attractive city; a place that people enjoy living and working in, as well as visiting. Oxford’s Local Plan is a vital document that sets out the shape of our city, and how it will look and feel in years to come.

It will guide and shape new developments, so that they respect the past and present of Oxford, while improving its future by supporting our city’s people and their environment.

This new Local Plan will help shape the homes, jobs, community facilities and new transport infrastructure of the next twenty years, striking the right balance between the different pressures that Oxford and its citizens face.

Providing more homes– especially homes for social rent, community-led housing, self-build housing and other forms of affordable housing – is one of its key priorities.

We are also making it easier for employers like the NHS, the County Council and the universities to build housing for their own staff on their own land.

The need for housing in Oxford continues to be higher than the capacity for new homes inside the city, so the Local Plan commits to continuing to work with adjoining authorities to meet housing need that cannot be met within Oxford.

But we can deliver more than eight thousand additional homes within our boundaries. We’re proposing to build upwards and increase densities where appropriate.

And the Local Plan allocates 18 hectares of Green Belt land – just 0.02 per cent of its total size - for housing.

Oxford is not just its city centre; it is a network of separate communities with their own characters.

Reflecting this understanding of our city, the Local Plan focuses development in district centres like Cowley, Headington and Summertown, to make sure that facilities and services are close to home and easy to reach on foot or by bike.

The Local Plan makes clear that it is vital to reduce traffic and congestion, promote walking and cycling, and continue to improve air quality in Oxford.

We will be requiring new developments near shops and public transport routes to be car-free, and we will continue to work with the County Council to reduce traffic levels throughout the city, not just in the city centre.

Oxford has a successful economy, and the Local Plan continues to protect our key economic sites like BMW. Businesses small and large in our city need new office and workshop spaces, and we will be encouraging better use of existing sites to provide them.

A Local Plan needs to respect the city of previous generations while shaping the city of the generations to come. That is what this Local Plan aims to achieve.

We can’t treat the city like an artefact; it would be easy to wrap up the historical core in aspic and turn our home into a monument to the past.

Oxford’s not about that: We are a future-looking city, and we have to meet that challenge head-on.