nick wright planning
Archive
Welcome to dedicated archive chronicaling all of the analysis and projects posts published on the site to date. You can easily navigate through the archive chronologically by clicking the below years.
outsourcing community consultation
21 Dec 2008
Richard Wilson and Alice Casey of the participation thinktank Involve have hit the nail on the head in their article in The Guardian about government outsourcing of consultation and community engagement. Their argument:“...government consultations, citizens' juries and e-democracy are very often delivered by external contractors... The problem is when...
Read More...revitalising Paisley town centre
11 Dec 2008
Throughout 2008 I've been doing work in Paisley town centre for Renfrewshire Council, with colleagues Ewan Imrie of Collective Architecture, Willie Miller of Willie Miller Urban Design and Alan Edgar of J & E Shepherd surveyors. The aims of the work have been to research the use and condition...
Read More...Anna Minton "Ground Control"
09 Dec 2008
Anna Minton's new book Ground Control: fear and happiness in the 21st century city makes a convincing case that planning and housing policies have, perhaps inadvertently, made British cities increasingly distrustful and alienating environments over the last thirty years. One of her main theses is that an excessive policy...
Read More...collaborative masterplanning | a new ecoquarter in West London
06 Dec 2008
A 19 hectare brownfield site in the heart of West London, and a client with ambitious aspirations for an exemplar development: this kind of opportunity doesn't come up very often. This study for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in Kensal did indeed have lofty ambitions. The brief...
Read More...glasgow from above | past, present and future
16 Nov 2008
Historic aerial photographs give a fascinating perspective on how places change over time - now all the more fascinating when compared with aerial photography from free mapping websites such as Live Search Maps or Google Maps. Scanning through aerial shots of Glasgow over the last 75 years in Glasgow...
Read More...culture change has suddenly got bigger
04 Nov 2008
Culture change, already a big issue for Scottish planning, is getting even bigger. The government has clearly signalled the paramount of economic development as the over-riding objective of the planning system with its decision on Trump's Aberdeenshire proposals. Controversial as it is, this decision should not really come as...
Read More...tennents lager
04 Nov 2008
It's not every day that mere planners get the opportunity to work with graphic designers on an exciting project that runs to the very heart of Glasgow - re-branding Tennents Wellpark Brewery on Duke Street, home to that famous Glaswegian commodity Tennents Lager for decades, and a brewery for...
Read More...a call to arms: unlocking planning's potential
12 Oct 2008
The current decline in planning applications witnessed in England and Wales as a result of the credit crunch - down by around 40% in Liverpool on last year, for example - is now starting to bite in Scotland too. This means that income from planning application fees for local...
Read More...the lunatic's house
04 Sep 2008
La maison du fada: that's the local name for Le Corbusier's famous - or infamous - unité d'habitation, or cité radieuse, in Marseille's suburbs. Much has been written about this remarkable creation, not least by architects. If you've not heard of it before, let me explain its significance: built immediately...
Read More...revised spp3 on housing
29 Jul 2008
The Scottish Government has just published its new statement on how planners should help meet the government's target of 35,000 new homes per year by the middle of the next decade - the revised SPP3 (Scottish Planning Policy 3). Lots of good material in there, much of which links...
Read More...credit crunch = sustainable development?
26 Jul 2008
For years there has been a divergence of thinking amongst built environment professions and the public about how new residential developments should look: suburban style 1970s and 1980s cul-de-sacs based on road layouts designed for cars, or denser walkable neighbourhoods with grid-style street patterns. Many planners and urban designers...
Read More...Andrés Duany at Holyrood
28 Jun 2008
I don't wish to sound like a sycophant, but I'd been waiting a while to hear renowned US architect-planner Andrés Duany in person. Watching him on youtube and reading about him in The Guardian is okay, but doesn't compare to the real thing. He isn't, arguably, the West's most...
Read More...a new park for Hartlepool
05 May 2008
'We'd like a linear park. Not just any park, but a linear park.' That was our brief. A linear park? What sort of park is that? One that's stretched out in a long line? At the outset, I wasn't too sure either. Fortunately, the brief prepared by North Hartlepool...
Read More...shrinking cities
30 Apr 2008
The British planning system is designed to manage urban growth, investment and development. But how well does it perform when our towns and cities are faced with decline, population flight and demolition? I was a planning student in Glasgow in the 1980s when the debilitating effects of Clydeside's industrial...
Read More...The Scottish Affordable Housing Debate
25 Apr 2008
Last week I facilitated a seminar for the Royal Town Planning Institute in Glasgow to discuss these thorny issues. What follows is a summary of the presentations at the start of the evening. I found them interesting: I hope you do too. The massive gulf between house prices and average...
Read More...brasilitius | a British disease too ?
31 Mar 2008
Brasilitius: the clinical condition for civil servants living in Brasilia, who have work, home... and nothing else. 'A beautiful plan, but an abject human failure', to quote Professor James C Scott of Yale University at his recent lecture in Glasgow, kindly hosted by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health. Prof....
Read More...building in flexibility
15 Mar 2008
Have you noticed how many projects have built-in obsolescence? Public realm schemes are a good source of examples, where soon after the redesigned street layout has been built it becomes clear that the design solves some problems but creates others – but it is so “fixed” that it can’t...
Read More...travel demo towns
14 Mar 2008
The Scottish Government has just announced £15 million to help create a series of 'sustainable travel demonstration communities' across the country. Why not follow the example of Bogotá in Colombia, and close the streets every Sunday until 2pm for people? Check out the video for the benefits that this could...
Read More...jobs, houses and the Kirkcaldy & Mid-Fife Local Plan
09 Mar 2008
I've just finished a small job for Fife Council Development Services as part of a team with TPS Planning, summarising and analysing the consultation responses to the initial 'Issues and Options' consultation stage on the Kirkcaldy and Mid Fife Local Plan, published in July 2007. Reading, summarising and analysing...
Read More...broadening planning's appeal
04 Mar 2008
It's good to see that community engagement in planning is making the national press - Scotland's Sunday Herald is now getting in on the act too, with an article about the fashionably named Sustainable City Visualisation Tool that has recently been developed at the University of Abertay, Dundee. This...
Read More...Hans Monderman - safer traffic management
25 Feb 2008
I've just been reminded that there is no substitute for direct learning. After years of informally educating myself about Hans Monderman's ideas about safer traffic management, and visiting British examples like Kensington High Street, I've finally heard the man himself speak. And it's well worth it. Sadly, Hans died...
Read More...communities thinking strategically - Wrexham
29 Jan 2008
Leading a team with colleagues from Cass Associates, we've recently completed two series of community workshops for Wrexham County Borough Council in Wales. The aim of the workshops was to feed community aspirations into their new statutory plan to guide development in the Borough for the next 15 years....
Read More...Barcelona | selling urban regeneration
14 Jan 2008
Community engagement is about a whole range of ways of communicating. On the one side, local communities are hugely diverse - in any one area affected by a development proposal or a new strategy, there will be people of all ages, ethnic groups, religions and levels of education. On...
Read More...cutting down the paper overload
05 Jan 2008
Well said, planning lawyer Stephen Ashworth! His call for the planning profession to cut down on paper overload in this week's Planning magazine is a point well made. The argument that Stephen puts forward in his article is simple:“Planning is overwhelmed by unnecessary information. Decisions are often delayed by...
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