Corstorphine Place Standard

Hello,

Luke and Katie have gone back to university and have left their successful Planning Edinburgh blog in the capable hands of myself (George) and Emma. We are planning students from Newcastle University and are here for a year, so keep your eyes peeled for blog updates on what is happening in the city in the coming months.

The first event I would like to tell you about is the Place Standard activity that I attended on the night of Tuesday 23 August in Kirk Loan Hall at Corstorphine Old Parish Church. The idea of the event was to give people an opportunity to assess a variety of aspects of the place in which they live.

The Place Standard is a tool to evaluate the quality of a place, and it is easy to use. There are 14 questions which cover the social and physical elements of a place. Each question is given a score out of 7 based on what people think and feel, 7 being excellent and 1 being poor. The interesting part of this exercise comes during the discussion of each question, because everyone around each table has to go agree on a score for each question. So if you have two people who are polar opposite on an issue such as facilities and amenities, it does create some entertaining discussion.

Once all 14 questions had been answered and eventually agreed upon, the results were drawn onto a simple diagram which can be seen below:

Corstorphine Diagram As you can see, the people who attended are very positive about their area. Although, it is also clear that traffic and parking is a big issue. That is why we do this exercise, it is easy to see what is working well and what needs to be improved upon, and for people to give their views and have a chance to express their feelings about the place in which they live and be able to show them a visual representation of what they think of Corstorphine at the end of the activity. I thoroughly enjoyed the evening and it was great to see people feeling empowered and listening to what they had to say.