Community-led planning
The future of planning / Part 6
If, ultimately, planning is the mechanism through which communities give their consent for development, then at its centre sits an inescapable problem. What if communities don’t want to give their consent for development?
This problem has become one of the most intractable battles in UK politics. In 2021 it even decided the result of a by-election in Chesham and Amersham in Oxfordshire. It has been amplified into a toxic, polarising debate on social media, framed as a conflict between two tribes: NIMBYs (not-in-my-backyard) who are accused of blocking development, and YIMBYs (yes-in-my-backyard) who support new development, because they want more homes built. It’s a vicious, tribal feud — one that transcends the traditional political left / right divide, and it has become one of the defining political issues at a national level. Local councillors are unwilling to impose development upon their electorate, so there’s pressure on the national government to overrule them by forcing-through development. For national governments it’s a lose-lose political choice.
Except, the whole thing is based on a simplistic myth. It is a war being fought across false battle lines and a false choice.
And it is, in large part, a product of the way our planning system is designed.
The reality is that most of the people being accused of NIMBY-ism are not objecting to all development — they are objecting to bad development.
Of course, there will always be a minority of people who will always object to any development or change, no matter how good it is, and no matter how much it will benefit the local economy and local people. But they are a much smaller minority than you might think.
Hook Norton is a village in Oxfordshire (with a very nice brewery) — not in the Chesham and Amersham constituency, but a similarly attractive part of the country. Having already completed various local community initiatives, Hook Norton Community Land Trust ran a survey, asking the community what they wanted next. Astoundingly, of those who responded (around 21% of the community), 74% said they wanted more housing. And in fact, of the other 26% the large majority actually agreed that more genuinely affordable housing and a mix of housing types are needed, but they were concerned about the burden that additional housing would put on existing infrastructure.
Listen to organisations like Create Streets, WeCanMake in Bristol or any number of community organisations across the country and they will tell you similar stories. Far from being a nation divided, at the scale of neighbourhoods there is a surprising amount of consensus about what we want. We want beautiful, sustainable, well-built homes, in walkable, leafy, mixed-use, gentle-density neighbourhoods, with affordable tenures for a mix of ages and backgrounds, and space for local businesses and community organisations. Younger people want homes they can buy. Older people want to downsize, but stay in their communities. They want to live near their grandchildren, and they want their children to be able to own a home. We want keyworkers to be able live nearby. Above all, we want better public transport, schools and GPs. In short, we want development that improves our lives and leaves places better, not worse.
But in many cases, that’s not what’s on offer. Instead, too much of the development being proposed is ugly, characterless, unsustainable, unaffordable to most local people, and comes with little or no community infrastructure. Developers argue that it would be ‘unviable’ to build better, whilst simultaneously returning large profits to external investors.
So it’s not hugely surprising that most people are against it. They are being asked to bear all the costs of new development, but seeing none of the benefits.
Applying a veneer of ‘consultation’ to this (however well-intentioned) feels tokenistic and insulting. People instinctively know that whatever they say, it’s not going to change the basic economics of what gets built. It’s like being asked which flavour of gruel you’d prefer.
This is why the binary social media narrative around planning — and the idea that the only solution is to override democracy and force-through planning consents — is such an unhelpful oversimplification. In reality, it’s very likely that many of the ‘NIMBYs’ and ‘YIMBYs’ are actually the same people.
So if we really want to unlock more development, the solution is not less, but more democracy. We need to flip the question from ‘are you for or against development?’ to a more constructive one: ‘what would development have to look like for you to support it?’.
As I’ve already suggested, the first move is to shift to a rules-based approach to planning. That would immediately give communities meaningful power to shape development. That in itself will do a lot to restore trust.
The next move is to then engage local communities even more in the plan-making process. Inviting them not just to comment, but to suggest ideas, discuss priorities, share hopes and fears, and to say what they would and wouldn’t support.
To be clear, this does not mean taking power away from local planning authorities, or blocking strategic national infrastructure. A well-designed planning system is one in which decision making is federated, so decisions are made at the right scale from the national to the local, to the neighbourhood to the individual property. So communities would still have to work within national and local policy parameters. But those parameters would be made clear at the outset, and within those parameters, the goal should be to leave as much freedom as possible.
The added bonus of inviting communities to proactively propose how they would like their place to improve is that you get ideas or outcomes that you couldn’t otherwise get. No one knows or loves a place better than the people who live there — they have skin in the game, and they’re going to stick around. So they might propose, for example, shared community spaces or spaces for new ventures like a local shop or café. These are things that a lone developer could never propose. They may suggest car-parking strategies that a developer would see as too risky. Volunteers might undertake to establish a community land trust that will act as the long-term steward of a place after it is built, instead of that having to be taken-on by councils or private management companies.
This is already beginning to happen today. Planners and communities can already create neighbourhood plans (known as ‘place plans’ in Wales and ‘Locality Plans’ in Scotland) and design codes. Organisations like Create Streets and Urbed (now sadly wound-up) have worked with a number of communities and planning authorities around the country to develop design codes, and they tend to enjoy consistently high levels of community support.
But once again, the limit is time and resources.
Allowing planners to spend more time planning is already a big ask. Asking them to work even more closely with communities, even at the scale of individual neighbourhoods is a really big ask.
In part, this is again about funding.
But it is also about the way that plans are made. Today it is an almost unbelievably slow and laborious process. Endless document drafts, drawings, commissioning evidence, emails with consultees (organisations like the planning advisory service or bodies with responsibility for things like wildlife or health), public consultations. All to end up with documents that have pretty similar goals, pretty similar images and often pretty similar messages. MHCLG estimates that preparing a neighbourhood plan typically costs between £20,000 and £86,000. The cost of developing a local plan can be anything between £500,000 and £1m. They take years to produce, and are then almost immediately out of date. In fact, many local councils in England do not currently have a local plan in place at all.
This is another area where digital tools have a potentially transformative role to play — by improving the way government works. Imagine if planners and communities could draw from common, shared libraries of shared development ‘patterns’ that have already been consulted on — like shared building blocks — and test-out alternative versions.
What if the basic sketch shape of a neighbourhood proposal could be made in minutes, not months, by focusing on the basic elements: how many homes and buildings, what uses, what types (or ‘patterns’), what mix of tenures, what infrastructure, and what conditions might apply.
Tools that can successfully apply these kinds of approaches to planning might feel years away, but the first glimpses of that future are already here.
There are also already some really good examples of web tools designed to support better, wider and more inclusive public consultation in plan-making. Meanwhile, neighbourhood design tools like BlockType allow rapid site feasibility models to be made. Singapore was the first city to develop a public-owned 3D digital city twin, in order to coordinate development. A team at Melbourne Design School led by Dan Hill have taken this idea of the digital city twin and begun to prototype planning tools that allow the user to rapidly test different development patterns.
This is what people expect the future of planning to look like. They expect tools that allow planners to ask ‘what if?’, and to weigh-up the different trade offs. They expect planning to be not a batch process (where a local plan is a document that takes 10 years to make) but a continuous process. They expect local plans to be living codes that— like software — can be versioned and tweaked when needed (even in days, if necessary, to respond to civil emergencies).
But the opportunity is not just to improve how plans are made and published by planners (although that is a huge opportunity).
By making it easier to make outline planning proposals, we can also open-up that process to allow anyone (individuals or groups, expert or non-expert) not just to give feedback, but also to positively make counter-proposals. This means we can harness the power of collective intelligence and informed public deliberation. Instead of just being for or against a single proposal, we can more easily test-out alternative proposals.
A good illustration of what might be possible is vTaiwan, an open source, neutral platform for deliberation between experts and the public. What makes it interesting is that it doesn’t just invite below-the-line comments (which, as we all know, usually descend into a polarised shouting-match) but uses upvoting and iteration to encourage participants to suggest new ideas and compromises and to find common ground. This doesn’t replace in-person engagement, it actually augments it. At various points along the way, participants can be invited to get together and discuss emerging proposals.
Imagine if anyone could make an alternative planning proposal for a neighbourhood and, if it’s popular (and complies with national and local policies), support could gather around it. To be clear, this would not replace expert planners and elected representatives, nor would it necessarily remove officials’ power to ultimately decide which proposals eventually get adopted into the plan, but it would make it easier for them to continuously listen to communities, to iteratively find the proposals that are most popular. It’s just a more constructive way for planners to work with the communities they serve.
Instead of a reactive planning system, where as communities we only mobilise to fight against the development that we don’t want, we can begin to create a proactive public discourse where we debate the development that we do want.
This is Part 6 of a series. The first part is here.
