Town and Country Planning articles from December 2005

Town and Country Planning archives from December 2005

25 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
December 1, 2005... THE SECOND and unspoken part of the government's vote of confidence in the public's ability to regenerate dying cities is 'Good luck folks--you're on your own.' When the Minister was asked how people were meant to bring about the necessary...

10 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
December 1, 2005... A WRITTEN political constitution safeguarding environmental rights and guaranteeing political representation for environmental interests would turn environmental decision-making upside down. Radical intentions for the environment will remain...

5 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
December 1, 2005... PLENTY of us would doubt whether the manipulative cunning now needed to win room for low-income citizens in the new countryside is necessarily part of the training of planners, or even whether it should be. The right of low-income people to...

TCPA.
December 1, 2005... The charitable purpose of the Town and Country Planning Association is to improve the art and science of town and country planning. It is the only independent organisation concerned with planning and housing covering the UK and is the longest...

Planning for the North East.
December 1, 2005... RESPONDING TO THE draft Regional Spatial Strategy (RSS) for the North East, the TCPA welcomed its central themes of promoting an urban and rural renaissance, contributing to the sustainable development of the region, improving connectivity and...

Time to think in circles.(Planning World)
December 1, 2005... ALAN DAY, a celebrated transport economist, said long ago that the cheapest way to improve the country's highway system was to send all Department of Transport engineers for psychoanalysis, since they had an obsession with circles. He had a...

PGS and the 20 per cent tripwire.(Off the Fence)
December 1, 2005... AT THE beginning of December, as this edition of the journal was going to press, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the consultation on Kate Barker's ideas for a 'Planning Gain Supplement' (PGS). (1) The Government is in a twist over the...

A golden thread?(The Regeneration Game)
December 1, 2005... 'What do successful UK neighbourhood regeneration schemes have in common?' SOMETIMES a question is so blindingly obvious in its implications that you kick yourself that you havn't asked it yourself. I had received an email from a...

London and its city-region--the great leap backwards: Stephen Crow looks at definitions of the city-region of London from the days of Dick Turpin and his fellow highwaymen and compares earlier recognition of London's city-region with the present split of the region into three or more pieces.(city-regions)
December 1, 2005... WHAT HAS Dick Turpin got to do with defining the London city-region? All through the 18th century to the beginning of the 19th, highwaymen preying on road transport entering and leaving London were considered as much a menace to society as...

The environmental importance of front, gardens--can planning help? David Alexander looks at the environmental importance of front gardens and examines both the significance of their increasing loss and a multiple-use approach that is being put forward to alleviate the problems caused by current trends.(environmental quality)
December 1, 2005... DURING THE past year or so, there has been a flurry of correspondence in the planning press and elsewhere concerning the trend to pave over increasing areas of domestic front gardens--an incremental land use change that is making significant...

Joined-up urbanism: Stephen Marshall suggests a way of combining neo-traditional urbanism and transport connectivity in an integrated street-based code.(urban coding)
December 1, 2005... MODERNIST PLANNING based on mono-use zones and open-plan layouts structured by a hierarchy of distributor roads may no longer be considered the ideal model for urban development, but it did form a coherent urban package, bought into by...

Built to last--sustainable development in the construction industry: Peter Jones, Daphne Comfort and David Hillier look at the sustainability agendas being addressed by the construction industry as revealed by a review of company websites.(sustainable construction)
December 1, 2005... IN AUGUST 2005 the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) announced the launch of the 'Sectoral Sustainability Challenge', (1) designed to promote sustainable development on a sectoral basis and to 'provide business sectors with a framework to...

Lament for the milk bottle.(Future Work)
December 1, 2005... NOT LONG AGO I was listening to a spat on Radio 4 between Local Government Minister Phil Woolas and Local Government Association (LGA) Chair Sir Sandy Bruce-Lockhart. The argument centred around why the LGA was looking for a further 2 billion...

Changing urban forms in the new knowledge economy: Paul Benneworth and Peter Timmerman look at universities, role in planning and development to accommodate the knowledge economy, using the University of Twente as a case study example.(knowledge economy)
December 1, 2005... CONTEMPORARY economic activity is increasingly dominated by so-called knowledge-based activities. Just as manufacturing displaced agriculture as the backbone of economic activity in the 19th century, since the 1970s services have come to...

Rural housing for the rich, the poor and in between.(Low-Impact Living)
December 1, 2005... SOMEONE WHO I shall call David Randall rang Chapter 7 the other day I with a query. His son had put in an application for an affordable, eco-friendly home, on the edge of a village. The application more or less conformed with the rural...

A hole in the budget for potato prints.(Going Local)
December 1, 2005... IT'S AMAZING, when you think about it, how something as apparently irrelevant to planning as psephology or education can shape the places we live in. Since South West London swung to the Liberal Democrats--starting with the London Borough...

Carbon-neutral initiative.(Connections)
December 1, 2005... THE DIRECTOR of Planning at Swindon Borough Council, David Potter, has recently highlighted the confused roles of planning and the Building Regulations in encouraging sustainable development. He claims that members of his planning committee...

A sense of place.(Connections)
December 1, 2005... A COMMON complaint is that our high streets and housing estates all look the same, their design giving no hint as to where they are. We are living in 'anywhere Britain'. And the same is true of our motorways. But a trip to France shows...

Don't tell the CPRE.(Connections)
December 1, 2005... CONSERVATION crime usually entails the destruction of a rare species or habitat. But this has been turned on its head in California, where an environmentalist who 'discovered' a rare wildflower, Limnanthes vinculans, on a proposed development...

From panorama to zoom lens.
December 1, 2005... It is a fascinating experience to look at the same scene from different viewpoints--in my case giving large-scale and micro-level views. The large-scale view involved representing the UK on the EU Committee on Spatial Development (CSD), which...

EU Ministers strike a deal for sustainable communities.
December 1, 2005... Ship-shape and Bristol fashion, the two-day Informal Meeting of 29 EU Ministers held in Bristol in the UK at the beginning of December culminated in the announcement of an agreement to deliver sustainable communities throughout Europe. The...

Learning by demonstration.
December 1, 2005... Learning through workshops Each of the APaNGO partners is running a demonstration project on involving communities/the public in their respective country's planning processes, thus providing an opportunity for others to learn from their...

APaNGO and INTERREG IIIB.
December 1, 2005... INTERREG III is a Community Initiative which aims to stimulate inter-regional co-operation in the EU. It is financed under the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and runs from 2000 to 2006. INTERREG III is made up of three strands: ...

POLYNET and the mega-city region.(INTERREG IIIB FEATURED PROJECT)
December 1, 2005... The POLYNET project, led by Sir Peter Hall and Kathy Pain at the Young Foundation, London, and funded by the North West European INTERREG IIIB programme, has uniquely examined an emergent phenomenon in North West Europe: the global 'mega-city...