In more detail
Community planning is planning carried out with the active participation of groups of people with shared interests in a service or a place. It might involve local spatial planning (to do with the use of the space we share). It can also involve how places are served and how the communities which share a place work together (and with the agencies which serve them) to make it better to live and work in.
Scope
Community planning and design could apply to anything which needs planning and design: a project or a service; a site or an organisation. This toolkit is about community planning of neighbourhoods. That is, working out how to improve the places we live and work with the active participation of the people with the biggest stake in them. Neighbourhood planning is part of that (bear in mind that formal neighbourhood planning only covers spatial issues – this toolkit is concerned with community planning applied to all sorts of neighbourhood issues). In community planning for a neighbourhood, your focus is the place and its people, not a process or set of outputs to do with the local planning framework.
Where you do it – it’s nearly always best to be ‘on site’, that is in the neighbourhood itself. Partly, being there makes it accessible for the people you want to take part. Partly, being there means people can make easier reference to things that are important and more easily show each other what they mean. Sometimes there is a case for getting away from the neighbourhood, however. You might find things like prioritisation, dealing with conflict and other tasks for which you need objectivity can be done well away from the neighbourhood.
How you do it – a lot of community planning works through dialogue: that is conversation, not consultation. You generally sit in a circle rather than have everyone facing a ‘top table’. You make sure you use words most people understand and avoid jargon and abbreviations wherever possible. You create lots of ways for people to take part – we don’t all work the same; some methods work well for some and not at all for others. You use lots of visual methods – pictures, graphs and maps (but the maps don’t always have to be to scale or to show every feature) – because these make sense for a lot of people. You live with difference – not everyone has to agree all the time. Your objective throughout is to enable variety – of voices and views; of methods; of channels of communication; and of conclusions. Unlike in industrial processes where quality is based on conformity, the quality of community planning depends a lot on enabling and drawing value from diversity.
Who does it – the most important participants are the resident experts – the people who live or run businesses in the place and who have the local knowledge on which the plan depends. You will need external experts: and, respectfully, keep them ‘on tap, not on top’. You will need to listen to people from the area who aren’t normally heard including: young people; newcomer communities; disabled people; minorities; people from the less well-off parts of the place. Their voices matter because they see your place from a different angle and may know different things about it. And although you want as many people involved as possible, remember: there’s no point waiting for people to step forward: you – and other individuals - will have to take a lead from time to time; and community planning isn’t a numbers game. You want quality, not quantity of responses.
When you do it –you will probably want to get on with community planning; but you probably also know that – as with most projects – time spent preparing beforehand is rarely time wasted? The thing to bear in mind is that planning is a process and preparation is an essential part of it. So, don’t regard preparatory work – like talking to lots of other people and local agencies about what you want to do; or setting up a local website to publicise it and get people talking – as time wasted. If you are doing those things, you’ve actually made a start on community planning.
Why you do it – community planning is action-planning. The product at the end of it is an action plan which should have actions people and organisations – including developers - can take to make the neighbourhood a better place to live and do business. This sounds obvious, but remember that some of the people you will be working with are a lot more used to ‘inaction’ plans – that is the sort of plan that takes so long to produce and is all about the problems of doing anything that producing it becomes an alternative to taking action. But community planning isn’t all about the end-product, it is about the process you follow too. The process of coming together to take part in planning adds value. It should be: a learning experience for the people involved; enjoyable and rewarding; and it should leave more capacity (skills and connections) behind in the community to carry on planning in future.
| Key Facts:
Community Planning means the communities with an interest in a place being involved in, and leading, planning and making it better. Neighbourhood planning is a specific example of community planning which deals with spatial planning issues. The idea behind this toolkit is that communities in urban neighbourhoods in particular are likely to benefit from looking at how to use other tools - including wider community planning - alongside neighbourhood planning. |
Page Links from here
The Community Planning website by Nick Wates has lotsof information on tools and techniques
Community Planning Toolkit by Community Places in Northern Ireland
Community Planning in Scotland
ACRE guidance of Community Planning in rural areas
And on this site, see
Neighbourhood Statements and Policies
OR you can use the navigation menu above right to look at other parts of the toolkit.
BIRMINGHAM COMMUNITY PLANNING TOOLKIT DEFINITION SHEET This sheet may be reproduced in paper or electromic or any other form but please mention it was made by Chamberlain Forum Limited for Birmingham City Council supported by Department for Communities and Local Government.
| created: 2016-07-22 10:17:25 | by: admin | status: f published |