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People’s Plans: Radical Planning for the 21st Century?
As the global economic crisis continues to bite, development pressure on local neighbourhoods shifts and new challenges unfold. Given the concerning trend of the prioritisation of financial capital over local social, cultural and economic aspirations in planning processes (in short, neoliberalism), this raises new challenges. But it also heralds opportunities. ‘People’s plans’, as they are often termed, are an alternative way in which local people (not officials or trained planners), seek to articulate alternative futures for their neighbourhoods in the face of these various and shifting pressures.
At a recent conference, PNUK brought together a number of people who have been involved in developing and implementing alternative plans to discuss how they did it and what impacts they think they had. The workshop had two aims: first, to enable people’s plan practitioners to share their experiences and build networks; and second, to generate a knowledge resource about the impact of people’s plans to disseminate more widely. Here we have provided a summary of the discussions, plus some resources from the various presentations, and links to other websites and resources (the links and presentations can be found on the right).
If you are interested in further activities concerning People’s Plans, please do get in touch with us!
Carlos Balsas opened the session representing the Wards Corner Coalition, alongside his colleagues Wendy and Mital. Wards Corner is an Edwardian building in Tottenham, London. Since being closed down as a Department store in the 1970s, it has since been home to a thriving local market. It was earmarked for redevelopment into a national supermarket chain and a tower of private apartments. Local concern grew about the proposals and manifested in a stated desire for local people to hold onto their market, their meeting spaces and the building they cherished. The result is the Wards Corner Coalition, a unique grassroots movement that has no traditional structure or recognised leaders and utilises a range of practices in mobilisation and campaigning. The movement is entirely founded on the ideals of inclusiveness and collaboration: the website, for example, is collectively and organically built by contributors. After a series of successful public meetings and a variety of other events, the Coalition, what Carlos described as a ‘network of networks’ prepared an alternative plan for the building and its use and galvanized a series of other campaigns and related activities in the neighbourhood. The coalition received help from an architect in their project. Carlos spoke about the experiences of the Coalition in preparing that plan, their efforts at inclusiveness in the campaign, and the extent to which the Coalition has, so far, achieved its goals.
Then we heard from Julia Udall from the Sharrow Community Forum based in Sheffield. Julia outlined her ten key points for what people’s plans should be aiming to achieve in relation to her work at the SCF developing the ‘Distinctive Sharrow Toolkit’. This was an excellent statement of the core ideals of planning and how to meaningfully implement them. People’s plans should, Julia said:
- understand the place in which they are situated
- be social, economic and physical, work at a range of scales;
- create a community around an issue of concern
- be fluid and flexible
- be useful and non-useful
- make room for conflict
- use different forms of representation
- sometimes benefit from there being no money
- make the need to develop skills, resources, knowledge and political awareness
- create richer architecture and urban environments
Julia showed some fine examples of how the Distinctive Sharrow Toolkit has been working on just these aspects in inner Sheffield and the challenges they have faced. This, like the Wards Corner Coalition, was a positive story of just how powerful grassroots planning action can be.
Larch Maxey from Lammas, and the Ecological Land Cooperative, then spoke. After introducing the critical and urgent issues of climate change and their relationship with land use and development, Larch shared how the various groups he is involved with have been campaigning for low impact development to be considered differently in the planning system. Based on both academic research and his campaigning and activism experience, Larch showed how it is both possible and critical to bring these together into communities of practice: the kinds of communities forming around key issues of concern that Julia Udall had spoken about earlier. Larch’s presentation included key points for others engaged in similar struggles and activities.
Coming from a different angle, Sylvia Wilson was the final speaker, and spoke about her work with Homes Under Threat. HUT is a network and website for people who are experiencing the threat of eviction or compulsory purchase. It began as a specific response to the Housing Market Renewal Pathfinder scheme which has resulted in the displacement of entire communities in the poorer neighbourhoods of British cities, yet it is important to say that the network reaches more widely now than only those affected by Pathfinder. Sylvia, the coordinator of HUT, explained how she guides and supports people in fighting eviction and compulsory purchase. Her talk was an inspired comment on how the British planning system is able to produce, and justify, profound injustice by disproportionately concentrating the cost of regeneration upon the shoulders of a few. She demonstrated the importance of guidance and support for those ordinary citizens faced with the threat of losing their homes to regeneration schemes and how others across the profession of planning need to respond.
Following the speakers, we had a lively and engaged discussion about the range of experiences we had heard and how we might ourselves form a community of practice for people’s plans. As ever, there are always more ideas than is possible to implement, but the need for forums in which practitioners of people’s plans could network, share experiences, swap information and learn from each other, was apparent. We hope to continue that work together, as a community of practice, in the coming years – keep an eye out here for further details.
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