As you arrive back to your desks after the Sustainable Communities Summit, you will no doubt be struggling to absorb the content of numerous workshops on the likes of creating partnerships, renewing housing markets and, of course, building sustainably. Mark Smulian considers the purpose of the summit, and where the government’s ambitious plans are headed <p></p><p>Anything that can get deputy prime minister John Prescott, chancellor Gordon Brown, and home secretary Charles Clarke to make the trek to Manchester must be a subject the government takes seriously. And they have all been at the three-day Delivering Sustainable Communities Summit, from which you are likely just returning as this issue hits your desks. </p><p>Sustainable communities were written off by some as an eccentric preoccupation of Prescott’s when he first enthused about them in 1997. But the policy took definite shape when he published the Sustainable Communities Plan in 2003 as a blueprint for where housebuilding and associated development should take place. </p><p>The plan is nothing if not ambitious, and it offers plenty of opportunities for housebuilders so long as they fit in with its strictures on density, design, use of brownfield land, and development of communities. It addresses the regeneration of stricken …