Demos Project : Future Planners

Future Planners: Propositions for the next age of planning

peter.bradwell@demos.co.uk ( Pete Bradwell ) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 16:32:01 -0100

Future Planners: Propositions for the Next Age of Planning

Including a talk by Kate Barker, economist and author of two influential planning reviews

RICS, 12 Great George Street, Parliament Square
London SW1P 3AD

8:00am-9:30am

Join us the launch of the report Future Planners: Propositions for the next age of planning. (You can download an executive summary diagram of the report here.)

The event marks the culmination of a collaborative project by Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS), English Partnerships and the Royal Town Planning Institute, which was led by Demos, Campaign to Protect Rural England and zero zero.

The future of our places has become increasingly central across the private, public and community sectors alike. Future Planners argues that, in dealing with changes to the built and natural environment, the planning professional can play a vital role in enabling democratically legitimate, sustainable development.

To make that happen, we should look carefully at the changes happening beyond planning – democratic, environmental and economic. As a response to these changes, the report offers propositions and positive ideas to support the emerging roles that planners are taking on.

The event starts at 8:00am on 6^th February at the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. Following a talk by Kate Barker, there will be a panel discussion chaired by Max Crofts, with the launch concluding by 9:30am.

If you would like to attend RSVP by emailing futureplanners@demos.co.uk, or calling Peter Bradwell on 0207 3676 331. Please RSVP by Tuesday 30th January.

DCLG / Gosplan Comparison Shock

peter.bradwell@demos.co.uk ( Pete Bradwell ) — Mon, 31 Jul 2006 18:40:53 -0100

The apparent re-emergence of Russian centralised planning caught my attention over the weekend. It doesn't, according to Deputy PM Vladimir Yakovlev, amount to a return to amusingly scientific output specifications for nails and screwdrivers, but rather a means to integrate cross-regional planning needs. Or, as Alexander Khloponin, Govenor of the Krasnoyarsk Territory, suggested - 'We must adjust aims and tasks, and not supplies of nails and products'.

So: less hardware determinism and more centrally integrated planning across Russia's many regions.

One of the criticisms of our planning system from the free market pocket of the planning debate - for example, from the Policy Exchange - is that the system has become 'Soviet' like in its regulatory centrality.

Whatever the merits of those arguments, it seems a more interesting area is the search for what organising principle is driving our current system - a planning system which sees large infrastrutural projects seen as necessary and casts those local voices opposed to them as unhelpful 'NIMBYs'.

The real Soviet system was criticised on one level for claiming to have captured the public good and for trying to centrally control the delivery of that good. We tend to think of liberal free market economies as having crushed that centralism.

But it would seem that there is still a national 'public good' perceived by government which we all (have to) buy in to. It seems relatively uncontroversial to say that the government sees that as growth.

We might have forgone determining how many Philips screwdrivers are available in Corby. But it just seems somewhat amusing that the agenda of growth impacts most publicly and controversially on planning.

The differences and similarities between the Gosplan and the DCLG are much more interesting than a naive free-market critique concerned with over-regulation.

Efforts to reimagine how people legitimise the planning system might have to focus on how we produce locally-specific but nationally consistent 'social contracts' (perhaps a clumsy term). But they might also need to deal with how connected people feel to major infrastructure projects legitimised by the language of growth. And further, perhaps, to the unease the government must feel around 'interfering' in that agenda.

It's complex stuff, and one feels that the tension between national and local - and what both terms mean - is absolutely central to most planning debates.

Challenge Yvette

peter.bradwell@demos.co.uk ( Pete Bradwell ) — Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:02:19 -0100

Rather predictably, one of the key tensions to emerge from our discussions with planning departments relates to the governments rather Janus-faced approach to planning.

On the one hand, there are incentives for local authorities to speedily process applications within eight weeks and, now, to deliver housing targets. On the other is the demand that authorities put more effort into community engagement - a clumsy way of saying that people's vision for their area should be central to the plan-making process.

The logic is that if planners 'front load' consultation, these aren't necessarily mutually exclusive aims - but it seems they can feel so to resource-strapped authorities who see cash incentives for one and rather more rhetorical encouragement for the other.

I wonder if the logical conclusion to the speedy planning agenda isn't a grand, modified version of Challenge Anneka. After all, she never missed a deadline. And there was never a NIMBY in sight. People could harmonise and compromise for the BBC, but for some reason find it a lot harder for the DCLG and vast housing targets. Why the buy-in gap?!

Workshop and Narrative

peter.bradwell@demos.co.uk ( Pete Bradwell ) — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 18:17:44 -0100

We've been developing our Future Planners story for a while now - a process that really began with the writing of the 'Production Values' chapter. And the most recent session was last week's workshop here at Demos (pictures in the Flickr feed on the right). Thanks to everyone that came and withstood the intense heat and brought real skill, experience and insight to a compelling day's work.

With that workshop and through our initial thoughts from the interviews and case-studies, we have produced a slide that maps the direction of our thinking and the emerging narrative for the project.

We decided it would be a good idea to put that draft up on the blog and invite comment and critique. You can download it here. We'll be putting up some notes shortly to accompany the graphics and flesh out the argument a little.

It could be a good way to involve more people in the process of developing our thinking and be a useful space for reflecting openly on the planning system and profession.

(And not least to begin testing the new website as a mechanism for more open research processes and better feedback loops.)

So do feel free to download, comment, critique, praise, take apart, alter and rework the arguments - either below in the comments box or via email.

And in the seventh month...

peter.bradwell@demos.co.uk ( Pete Bradwell ) — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:52:47 -0100

...there was nuclear power. Or, at least, talk about nuclear power.

The government's energy report has, to nobody's surprise, signalled that rebuilding Britain's nuclear power capacity will be necessary to keep our TVs burning and our Macbooks charged. And the Prime Minister confirmed what we all feared - that 'wishful thinking won't keep the lights on'. And there was me crossing my fingers...

But aside from the rights and wrongs (wrongs, wrongs) of investing in nuclear energy, there are the obvious challenges and problems the energy review raises for planning.

Committee-based recommendations such as these are the basis for decisions on massive infrastructural projects.

But with current prevailing models of consultation for such projects, is it any wonder that they get held up by long and complex appeal and consulatation processes? Is this the nature of the beast - or are there better ways of linking grand schemes and 'local' concerns through dialogue rather than feedback?

What relationship do people have to these comittees - just how democratically legitimate are they? Sustainability is supposed to be the raison d'etre for planning - but how much do the public feel part of that in relation to planning and infrastructure projects?

Legislating for a NIMBY backlash, through reform of the planning system to limit local efficacy in challenging these big projects, will, I'm guessing, only harden the resolve of those who have the inclination and resources to resist national planning directives.

To speed up and legitimise such infrastructure development, a lot of real work also needs to be done further upstream linking people's apirations and hopes about their own places with the broader implications of their everyday lives - before the brief for a report lands on the desks of the comittee, and certainly before pre-emptive public statements by those supposedly basing policy on the report's findings.

Where the rubber hits the grid-road

peter.bradwell@demos.co.uk ( Pete Bradwell ) — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 15:49:37 -0100

We spent Wednesday (21^st June) and Thursday (22^nd June) in Milton Keynes talking to planners and council members - the first of our case study visits. I had some initial thoughts I thought might be worth putting up.

For the debutant visitor the grid-planned streets and wide, tree-lined pedestrian walkways lend ‘MK’ an LA-tinged other-worldliness. It was planned into existence, so inevitably it's fairly unique.

Milton Keynes is indeed a special case from a planning perspective. But the challenges facing the city as it looks to deliver the growth demanded of it – as a designated ‘growth area’ - have a strong resonance for planning more widely.

Firstly, the relationship between 'centrally' designed and delivered planning imperatives – housing figures, for example – and local discretion and community involvement is an area we are keen to explore.

Secondly, in contrast to its initial ‘round’ of growth that led from near blank-canvas to major city, the next phase of housing and infrastructure development is happening amidst people’s complex associations with their established communities and the idiosyncratic features of Milton Keynes as it stands.

So the incredible pressures to expand and regenerate meet head-on not necessarily with resistance, but with people’s understandable desire for an element of control or understanding over the changes happening to their homes and neighbourhoods. Trust between people and their local authority was an interesting issue - one we're exploring here at Demos, too. Contact Simon Parker if you have thoughts on that.

We met some engaging, thoughtful people that had plenty to tell us about the problems and opportunities they were facing. We left even more convinced of the need to express the sense of purpose that planners feel in new ways, to challenge the image of the profession as dull and reactive.