This is a website for people who have heard about ‘neighbourhood planning’. The aims are:
- to help you to find out about neighbourhood planning and some alternatives
- to help you see how you could use these tools, including neighbourhood planning, to make your neighbourhood a better place.
On this website, when we talk about ‘neighbourhood planning’, we mean a particular process which lets people come together to say how we want where we live to develop. The right to do neighbourhood planning was made by the Localism Act in 2011. Even before this law, people had other ways of coming together to make neighbourhoods better. These ways included:
- tools people can come together to use for themselves as a community. On this website we call these things ‘community planning’
- things your local council is responsible for and the community can work with your council to use. On this website, we call these things ‘working with the council’.
This website is a toolkit for integrating (bringing together) neighbourhood planning with community planning and working with your council to make better places to live.
In this toolkit, you will see some interviews with people who have been using neighbourhood planning and other tools in Birmingham, in England. Birmingham is where this toolkit has been made. We have made it for people, particularly in cities and particularly in England, but hope that you find it useful, wherever you live.
In Birmingham, we have some neighbourhood communities, some community groups and some council officers and local councillors who believe in working together to make neighbourhoods better. They have been working together in many places in our city, including in:
- Balsall Heath – an inner city neighbourhood with a mixed community and a proud history of community-led regeneration in the Hall Green district of Birmingham
- Moseley – a suburb known for its pubs, independent shops and vibrant community life also in the Hall Green district of the city
- Jewellery Quarter – an historic area bordering the city centre which is home to thriving industry, shops and a rapidly increasing population of residents
In these three places, people have taken a lead in planning. In each, they have found that they needed to integrate neighbourhood planning with community planning and working with the council to make a success of it. That is why our toolkit is based on the idea you might want to look at other tools, as well as neighbourhood planning, and work out how to fit them together best for your place.
To start exploring the toolkit, find out about:
Tools and Techniques
This toolkit is mainly written by Paul Slatter of Chamberlain Forum – an independent and non-profit organisation based in Birmingham which helps communities and the people who serve them work together to make better places to live. Paul was helped in particular by Tony Thapar, John Dring and Fiona Adams of Moseley Community Development Trust; Abdullah Rehman and Dr Dick Atkinson of Balsall Heath Forum and Joe Holyoak who worked with them; Matthew Bott and Nicola Fleet-Milne of the Jewellery Quarter Neighbourhood Planning Forum; Neil Vyse and Karen Cheney of Birmingham City Council; Councillors Tony Kennedy and Claire Spencer of Birmingham City Council; and Meena Bharadwa of Locality. Translations were done by Illustration were done by
All of the people who helped to put together this toolkit would be pleased if you got in touch to share your experience or ask questions. The contact information for their organisations is shown below. If you do not read English and would like to find out more about neighbourhood planning and the alternatives, please contact your local council or talk to a local neighbourhood forum or residents’ group in your area and get them to help you to get more information.
