Town and Country Planning articles from November 2006

Town and Country Planning archives from November 2006

25 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
November 1, 2006... JUST AS co-operatives are seen by many as means of healing the divisions in industry, so development trusts could help to resolve some conflicts which neither public nor private enterprise is able to handle. With confidence lacking in so many...

10 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
November 1, 2006... THE social housing issue is inextricably tied up with the general question of how and where we are going to provide the new housing; for if we fail to build enough market housing, the resultant inflation of housing costs will drive ever more...

5 years ago.(t&cp back bites)
November 1, 2006... IN THE days when politicians believed in regional policies for industrial growth, a very great deal of the efforts of both local authorities and the new town development corporations were devoted to modifying, softening or circumventing...

Context: news digest, October 2006.(Website list)
November 1, 2006... * 1.10 Biodiversity: Natural England (NE) and the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC) take on their full statutory responsibilities. NE brings together English Nature, the Countryside Agency and the Rural Development Service. Its role is to...

Nuclear the 'last option' in 'energy hierarchy', says TCPA.(HOMES AND COMMUNITIES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE)(Town and Country Planning Association)
November 1, 2006... * Policy Framework for New Nuclear Build. Consultation Document. Department of Trade and Industry, Jul. 2006-12-31 The TCPA Response HAVING DECIDED from its Energy Review that 'nuclear has a role to play in the future UK generating mix...

TCPA raises concerns over PDG consultation paper.(HOMES AND COMMUNITIES FOR A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE)(Town and Country Planning Association, Planning Delivery Grant)
November 1, 2006... * Housing and Planning Delivery Grant. Consultation Paper. Department for Communities and Local Government. Jul. 2006 The TCPA Response THE TCPA has expressed a number of concerns over the DCLG consultation paper on Housing and...

The sad end of the wired city.(The Regeneration Game)
November 1, 2006... MOVING HOUSE is always a stressful experience; but when one works from home and one's business depends upon e-mail and internet access, a break in connection can be not only stressful but also disastrous. The new house that my wife and I were...

New opportunities for community land trusts.(Talking Houses)
November 1, 2006... THERE ARE signs of growing interest in the potential of community land trusts (CLTs), especially to provide homes which continue to be affordable for future generations. In May 2006 the Affordable Rural Housing Commission recommended CLTs...

Planning for shopping.(Off the Fence)
November 1, 2006... I HAVE BEEN trying to explain retail planning to a stranger to the UK's planning system. There is the business of deciding on the physical location of shops (an activity which the RTPI insists we all call 'spatial planning', although the phrase...

Time to get on with it--before time runs out: the mock climate change planning policy statement recently produced by the TCPA and Friends of the Earth aims to provide a route map for action to be taken through the planning system.(planning and climate change)(Town and Country Planning Association)
November 1, 2006... AN ARTICLE written for Town & Country Planning back in July this year (1) stressed that climate change had soared up the political agenda. Encouragingly, this remains true, likely in part driven by the growing evidence of the havoc that climate...

What Katie did next: spatial planning is an important activity, but cannot be a cure-all for the ills of our society: if it claims to be so, its inevitable failure will be used to denigrate planning. So the Barker Review of Land Use Planning needs to resist pressures and temptations to seek 'short-term fixes' through changes to the planning system.(the planning system)
November 1, 2006... FOLLOWING THE REPORT of her Review of Housing Supply, (1) Kate Barker's latest report--the Interim Report of the Review of Land Use Planning (2)--was issued for comment just in time to pack it in your holiday suitcase. The main theme of those...

A vision for Natural England: Peter Jones, Daphne Comfort and David Hillier examine the aims and agenda of the new Natural England agency and the challenges it faces in bringing vision into reality.(habitat and biodiversity protection)
November 1, 2006... NATURAL ENGLAND, the new government agency created to champion the natural environment, was officially launched in October. A product of the Natural Environment and Rural Communities Act 2006, the new agency is the result of bringing together...

A new geography of Britain? Analects for a non-autobiography.(mega-city regions)(Country overview)(Cover story)
November 1, 2006... Although it would be neither quick nor easy to achieve, public policy should try to emulate in the North of England the evolution of the South East 'mega-city region' by finding ways of encouraging non-core northern towns to develop a 'new...

Connectivity and city revival: Peter Taylor and Rolee Aranya explain how measurement of connectivity within a global city network has provided concrete evidence of the beginnings of economic revival in UK provincial cities.(city economies)(United Kingdom)
November 1, 2006... 'Connectivity is critically important for successful cities' M. Parkinson, T. Champion, J. Simmie, I. Turok, M. Crookston, B. Katz and A. Park: State of English Cities. ODPM, London, 2006 CENTURIES may be artificial social constructs...

Faith in the city-region? There is a need to pause and take stock of the city-region debate before it begins to frame important policy choices on the basis of weak evidence and faulty reasoning.(city-regions)
November 1, 2006... CITY-REGIONS are not a new idea, nor a particularly British one. There has been a longstanding European concern with the role of cities and regions and the relationships between each (see, for example, Dickinson, (1)), but recent interest in...

Place development in a relational world.(strategy-making)
November 1, 2006... 'Strategies' for cities and regions are today being promoted as a 'magic ingredient, to draw disparate initiatives and processes together, but many of the economic development and urban regeneration initiatives that have resulted have been...

Planning, trade-offs and the environment--can we have our cake and eat it? Are trade-offs between development and environmental goals inevitable in planning decisions? The aim of achieving 'win-win-win' outcomes that are good for people, the economy and the environment is challenging, but also realistic and achievable in many cases, says Simon Marsh of the RSPB.(planning and environmental protection)(Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)
November 1, 2006... THE INTERIM REPORT of Kate Barker's Review of Land Use Planning in England raises many interesting questions for environmentalists. (1) Kate Barker recognises the central place of sustainable development in the planning system and its important...

An alternative to development land tax: were the 'Planning Gain Supplement' or any similar scheme to be introduced, it would be bound to fail, just like previous development land taxes.(land and development taxation)
November 1, 2006... CONSIDER a farmer who seeks planning permission to build houses on a field worth 9,000 [pounds sterling] per hectare. The farmer succeeds and the field is now worth 2.5 million [pounds sterling] per hectare. Obviously, we should tax this...

Coding--bringing architects back to the volume housing table.(Design Matters)
November 1, 2006... IN SEPTEMBER, HTA Architects organised a fascinating evening during which four teams of architects critiqued the Upton Design Code. Each had been responsible for designing a phase of English Partnerships' flagship Upton project in Northampton,...

Holiday home sophistry.(Low-Impact Living)
November 1, 2006... WHY ARE holiday chalets, caravans and farm-building holiday conversions allowable in locations where permanent residential chalets, caravans and similar structures are not? What is the reasoning behind the policies that (for example) allowed a...

Protecting what is ordinarily glorious.(Going Local)(England in Particular)(Book review)
November 1, 2006... ONE OF THE most unexpected best-sellers this summer has been a large tome by the two founders of the organisation Common Ground, Sue Clifford and Angela King, called England in Particular. It is written in the style of an encyclopaedia and...

Building capacity for territorial co-operation--the Mission operationelle transfrontaliere.(The Euro-Files)(cross-border operational mission)
November 1, 2006... THE LAST EDITION of 'The Euro-Files' considered the evolving context for territorial co-operation and cross-border working in Europe and the renewed emphasis being placed on cross-border cooperation in the new European cohesion policy regime....

California goes it alone ...(Inside America)
November 1, 2006... ... WELL, not exactly, since California seems to have finally joined the rest of the world in trying to address global warming; but given the mulish refusal of the Bush administration to recognise human agency in climate change, it does feel...