[Image] In April 2012, I wrote a blog post arguing that UK planning policy for the countryside has generally emphasised landscape and biodiversity conservation over and above economic and social ob...

I’ve only caught one episode of BBC2′s Robert Peston Goes Shopping, but I’m glad I did. It sharpened my unease about the much vaunted “death” of the High Street. There are two facts that tend to g...

This article was published in the Scottish Planner (August 2013), the journal of RTPI Scotland. I was RTPI Scotland’s representative on the Fraser Review of town centres, which reported to the Scot...

Over the last five years, co-production and collaboration have become popular – the concepts of people and organisations working together to make better places, with a focus on action. For some exa...

In the last couple of days, I’ve twice come across the thought that towns and neighbourhoods that have ‘outlived their economic usefulness’ should have a policy of ‘managed decline’. For years I’v...

The Scottish Government is currently consulting on its proposed Community Empowerment and Renewal Bill; this paper is a contribution to that discussion. It has been jointly written with Hugh Moore,...