Keep up to date with all the latest news and views from UDS
Keep up to date with all the latest news and views from UDS
Just when you thought that the government hated planning, up jumps housing and local government minister Grant Shapps to call for the building of garden cities.
Furore in the planning profession about the Lib Dem communities minister Andrew Stunell’s declaration that ‘planning isn’t brain surgery’. How dare he?
Remember eco-towns? With due fanfare Gordon Brown announced a programme of building them in 2007 in the early days of his premiership as a Big Idea, and forgot it, probably, two minutes after he had left the press conference.
Exciting times: the planning system may be in for a few years of utter confusion before sanity prevails.
The government's announcement of a new programme of enterprise zones reminds me of Matthew Carmona's comments (in his 2009 article 'The Isle of Dogs: four development waves, five planning models, twelve plans, thirty-five years, and a renaissance... of sorts', Progress in Planning 71, Elsevier, London) on the Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone, home to Canary Wharf.
Urban Design Skills has had a great response from local authorities interested in using Qualityreviewer. One question that has arisen is from a few planners have said that they use Building for Life in assessing design quality, and wonder why Qualityreviewer might help them.
A new word to me: homophily, defined as the tendency for social connections to be more common between similar people than dissimilar people. It is good to discover that there is a branch of urban sociology that keeps itself occupied studying this extraordinarily unsurprising circumstance.
Is there any positive aspect of planning or urban design that Patrick Geddes had not mastered by 1915? Possibly, but I have not come across it yet. The thought is prompted by some good news from Scotland. I will come to that in a moment.
In a speech in March, prime minister David Cameron identified, among other 'enemies of enterprise', 'the town hall officials who take forever with those planning decisions that can be make or break for a business – and the investment and jobs that go with it'.
