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Setting a vision for how councils could have a more community centred approach to regeneration and town planning.
In this talk for New Local's Innovation Exchange series, Paul explores how councils can take a more community-centred approach to town planning and regeneration - by starting with why.
Why do people live in their communities? Why do people stay, or leave? These simple but powerful questions are frequently lost in the technical jargon, lengthy documents and bureaucratic processes of local planning.
The solution? Shift focus toward a compelling vision for the future: one that excites people, empowers communities and taps into creative storytelling. Imagine local plans that inspire, told not through endless documents but through films, cartoons, and innovative narratives that reflect the hopes and needs of the people they serve.
From radically transparent procurement to empowering Community Land Trusts, Paul challenges traditional town planning methods and offers fresh ideas for building places that resonate with local communities in only 8 minutes.
In Paul's words (for those with less than 8 minutes)
If I can start with planning
We have a local planning system, it's actually very flexible (unpredictable!), plan-led but discretionary. We vote in, as local representatives, the people that will sit on the planning committee. We consult on our plans – extensively. We even have neighbourhood planning. And then you get to comment and make representations when applications do come in. And if there was ever a democratic deficit, the government scrapped regional planning and, now housing targets. What more can anyone want? How much more community centred could it be? And to what end?
And yet there is a creeping sense of injustice on the ground that no-one listens, or really cares. That most people don’t have time to be getting involved with local design codes or the like. And developers get to hide behind the fabled ‘viability tests’. What we are talking about is addressing a sense that people on the ground are unempowered. That we all in our personal lives have little meaningful power when it comes to informing change in our build environment.
But leading and managing change in the built environment has to be one of the most exciting things we do as humans!
Town planning should be buzzing and exciting. It should be energising. How have we made it so boring?
Even my local neighbourhood planning group bores me. And I have two planning degrees and I collect books on the history of town planning. This group spent more than two years arguing about the boundary for the neighbourhood plan. Where is the excitement?
The shortest local plan I can find is NW Leicestershire – 160 pages, before appendixes and supporting studies of course. Some of them are 500 or more. Who has time for that!? I read a few in preparation for this call and I couldn’t believe how many of them started with what? What is this plan? What is a local plan? What is planning?
No-one starts with Why? We’re big fans of Simon Sinek and his book Start with Why, it informs a lot about what we do. Why are we planning? How will this plan improve your life? What can this plan do to secure benefits from development?
And then you’re presented with a vision, of sorts. Visions that contain words like vibrant, equitable, opportunity. These are not visions.
I have come to the conclusion that a community centred planning process probably needs to ditch the development management stuff and focus on the vision for the places the plan will serve. And do so by starting with why.
Why do you live here? Why don’t you move? Why do you think you would ever have to? No one in my local authority has ever asked me that.
Obviously some people don’t have these choices, but knowing that would be instructive. And I think if you can get things right for people who can vote with their feet then everyone stands to benefit.
And what I would then do, is take everyone’s input and give it to a marketing company with a great copyrighter. We did some work recently for Nottingham City Council. They had brought together an advisory board of a wide range of expertise, some local, some national. And it was chaired by a film maker. I don’t think we have ever produced better work than the work he edited and cajouled out of us.
My provocation is that we should bring different skills into the vision making process and then basically give it to a film maker. Give it to a cartoonist. A comedian. Creative people who can tell stories.
Instead of click here to fish out the vision from this 500 page document, why not click here for a film about the change our communities want to see locally. We need to try new ways of cutting through and we might just get there.
So, to address regeneration specifically
Regeneration projects are development projects, usually delivered in a partnership, where the local authority and by extension the community are in the driving seat. Without wanting to get too technical here, for me this won and lost in procurement.
If we want a more community centred approach to regeneration we need to make sure we are procuring partners and not solutions.
Resist the temptation to fix a land price, and leave healthy programmes for consultation.
Lets procure with fixed returns and score developers on their approach – then you can have radical transparency. Just tell the market, you get 20% profit on cost – all else is open book. Now, how are you going to make this brilliant? In this way we can create better conditions for sitting down and listening to local people. Nothing will be commercially sensitive, the community will have full visibility of everything.
And then linked to this, demand your partners are on-shore or if they have a water tight reason for having to be off-shore, demand full transparency. Where is the profit going? Offshore does not have to mean secret. Lets give scores for reinvesting profits locally, or for B-corps or for not for profits.
Then I think you could also go a step further and get a Community Land Trust to be the long term owner of the development. Make the community the client. Explain that they will have a long term interest and there will be income available. You’ll soon get their attention.
To conclude
My vision for how councils could have a more community centred approach to regeneration and town planning is to:
Start with why
Focus on the vision
Bring in storytellers
Full transparency
Make the community the client
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