I've just come across this paragraph in Charles Landry's excellent book The Art of City Making. Published in 2006, it is as fresh and relevant today as it was then:“"Planning is about to be differ...

Last week, I was in Northern Ireland, way out west of the Bann in western County Tyrone; a beautiful land of rolling hills, rich farmland and intriguing history. I was there to consider the futur...

This article was published in the Winter 2009 edition of Urban Realm magazine. If you're interested in a succinct summary of the main elements of current Scottish planning reform, read on. For muc...

For years, I've struggled with the concept of visioning. It's always seemed to me like a bunch of well-meaning folk agree a motherhood-and-apple-pie vision for whatever it is they're discussing -...

Engaging with communities is a big focus in contemporary urban planning - and a focus for a great deal of uncertainty about how to get it right. Most discussion tends to focus on how to involve "th...

Willie Miller's timely Small Practices and Procurement blog on the Urban Realm website draws attention to the increasingly difficult issue of the impact of procurement rules. To quote Willie:“"Fr...

Planning Aid for Scotland organised a seminar on 16 October to explore the increasing interest in using mediation in planning. As one of the co-facilitators at the seminar, in my capacity as a Dir...

The Scottish Government’s Council of Economic Advisers – who are advising the government on how to support sustainable economic growth in the face of recession – has recently emphasised that bett...

With ever more sources of information swilling around - printed journals, e-bulletins, blogs - it's all too easy to get swamped trying to keep abreast of what's happening in your own field, let alo...

It's only a weeks since the Scottish Government announced its investment proposals for how to improve the connections between our towns and cities (the Strategic Transport Projects Review, see my...

The Scottish Government has recently published two ground-breaking documents – the first Strategic Transport Projects Review and the second National Planning Framework (NPF2). Their publication in ...

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 eng...

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 ...

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 ...

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...

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...

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,...