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 ...

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 D...

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 ...

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 creatio...

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 S...

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-sa...

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...

'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 t...

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 de...

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 foun...

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...

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 th...

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 Colombi...

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' ...

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 Sustai...

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 Briti...

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 c...

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,...

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 p...

This year has witnessed the first concerted effort to train local authority Councillors about planning. This might seem somewhat strange, since Councillors have been legally responsible for decid...