Community Place Planning
Plans, plans and more plans! It can be a bit confusing to work out what all these different plans are for. This section of the website explains the different approaches, and provides links to tools and resources, that help communities to understand how they can contribute to the formation of local plans produced by public agencies and how to take control of their own Community Place Planning process.
Place Planning involves everyone in gathering the relevant information and includes assessing: available resources, effective delivery of essential services, use and availability of physical assets and how these have an effect on service delivery to the people intended to benefit. Findings of this assessment are then considered together to determine what, if any, action is required to ensure change and benefits to the whole commnunity.
The Planning (Scotland) Act 2019 now enshrines in law the necessity of community input to planning across Scotland.
Let’s look at some of the different terms applied to the process of Place Planning. Three of the most common are:
- Community Planning – used by public bodies in Community Planning Partnerships to produce plans including Local Outcome Improvement Plans and Locality Plans which we will look at later.
- Placemaking – often used by professionals e.g. architects and town planners. A popular way of carrying this out in recent years has been using Charrettes – which bring together the public, stakeholders and designers over a number of days to draw up proposals to make their towns and villages better places to live.
- Community Action Planning – developed by communities for their communities, these are “bottom-up” action plans. They demonstrate the needs and aspirations identified by the community , both in terms of the physical environment and in service delivery, and work out who needs to contribute to make them happen. There will be projects the community itself can accomplish, others that they can do in partnership with others and yet others that will need to be done by public agencies. These action plans can form a vital part of ensuring that services are delivered to meet local needs.
You can explore how to contribute to public agency plans (Legislation and Community Planning) and how to create your own Action Plans (Place Plans) using the links to the left.
Related Resources
Neilston Development Trust – Town Charter
This report describes and illustrates the process of creating a charter for Scotland’s first renaissance town. The town charter was created by the people of Neilston, for the people of Neilston. It illustrates their 20-year vision for the village.
