The masterplan for Stratford City was always going to be a huge project, forming a key part of the strategic growth of London eastwards and a demonstration of best practice in urban design. The project has been made possible by massive investment in public transport railway infrastructure, built around the new Stratford International Station at the centre of the site. However, its international significance has grown exponentially since London won the bid to host the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. The project has been designed in close collaboration with Arup Urban Design and the Dutch landscape architects West 8 over more than six years and work is ongoing. The project was originally expected to take 15 - 20 years to reach its conclusion, but the timetable has now been dramatically accelerated and a critical mass of development will be delivered in a single phase. It speaks volumes for the robustness of the design that it has been able to withstand the immense scale of change. This robustness is illustrated by the way in which the project has been able to accommodate the Athletes' Village, home to 17,000 competitors and team members before reverting to more than 3,700 homes to form a new urban community after the Games. A key element of the London bid, the Village is now almost entirely located within the Stratford City site and the complexities of the functional requirements of the Games are being combined with the overriding need to create a high quality long-term urban environment. This has involved the integration of the masterplan within the wider Olympic Park development, coordinating with a wide range of stakeholders and helping steer the massively complex project from a strategic planning level through to construction and implementation. The 73 hectare site, which includes Stratford regional station, will be a new urban centre in its own right, incorporating a mixture of uses, and leaving a legacy of design decisions for generations to come in the structure of streets and open spaces. It gives opportunities to literally sculpt a new landscape using the soil from the tunnelling work. This has lifted the level of the site by an average of six metres, raising the scheme out of the flood plain and enabling roads and bridges to overcome the tracks that have encircled and isolated the site since the growth of the railways in the nineteenth century. The project aims to establish a series of urban districts, integrated into the surrounding communities and with the new parkland and river systems of the Lea Valley. It seeks to create areas with their own identity in which people choose to live and settle. Ultimately, the project is about more than just housing, or retail, or offices, or any other individual land use. It is the reason why community facilities are at the heart of the project, why public space has been integrated throughout the scheme, and why, in collaboration with many other architects and designers, Stratford City will aim to provide a range of first class amenities. Stratford City is about creating a real piece of city.