Planning process restores influence to shape sustainable communities

Planning, 11 July 2008

At a recent conference, housing association delegates found darning socks a useful if surprising metaphor for their personal and professional responses to the challenges of sustainability and climate change. In the past they could extend the useful life and appearance of things by regular repair, changing them through their own action. Now corporate interests, built-in obsolescence and the pace of modern life make this almost impossible. Delegates said they feel frustrated and personally diminished.

But good tools are needed at home and work. The new spatial planning system could be a genuinely powerful workhorse for adapting to climate instability and promoting sustainable development, as PPS1 asserts. It seems that planners still do not understand just how powerful it could and should be or how different spatial planning is from its land-use predecessor.

Take the government's proposed modifications of the East of England Plan. It sets out targets and trajectories for carbon reduction, increases in renewable energy and reduced waste and water use. It expects the burden of meeting these to fall on the region's key areas of growth and change. Landowners, communities and planners must decide where and how they are best able to deliver these targets and meet the trajectories so as to make broad and site-specific land allocations accordingly.

Maybe we do not yet have the technical tools to make these choices easily. But the opportunities and challenges are there. We must recognise, however, that the tools are not just about science and technology. Many of the targets are about personal behaviour. Homes and businesses do not consume energy, people do. Without behavioural changes, any prospect of meeting the targets for zero carbon homes or whole eco-towns is an illusion.

There is no escape for local political leaders and senior public professionals, who must work with their communities to make the necessary changes. They should not be daunted because we have been here before. The work of officers on the sustainability goals for their local agenda 21 (LA21) strategy after the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992 unleashed fresh ideas and enthusiasm for a better quality of life and behavioural changes of precisely the kind that are now needed.

LA21 introduced a subject outside the experience of professionals and politicians and was often consigned to the margins. Now, community leadership must take responsibility for core strategies and masterplans in area action plans and regeneration areas that enable everyone to make better choices about how they live. Professionals, politicians and the public are all in this together.

Masterplanning is always the best time for ensuring that sustainable lifestyles are embedded in strategic location and design choices. It must cover neighbourhood layout, movement patterns, utilities, infrastructure, the use and occupancy of buildings and public space. It must create a vision grounded in strong institutions for neighbourhood governance. Masterplans need to be informed by local people, sustainability must be understood and difficult choices openly debated.

The new duties to involve stakeholders through local strategic partnerships must build on decades of good practice in neighbourhood regeneration to create engagement between the public and public services. The place-shaping guidance will put more emphasis on the local distinctiveness of particular places. Local area agreements and development frameworks must be able to bind together local aspirations and the capacity of services to deliver spatially focused outcomes.

In explaining what these administrative arrangements mean and their links with living more sustainably, we need to remember how our grandmothers repaired with skill and economy that well-loved pair of socks - knitting a whole new toe section symbolising the urban extensions and repairing worn-out heels, the urban renaissance.

- Stephen Hill is a chartered planning and development surveyor, a director of C2Ofutureplanners and a member of the RTPI planning with communities network core group. For further details of the network and how to join, please visit www.rtpi.org.uk.