It’s almost the Meadows Festival and for the third year, the World Heritage Team will have a stall to promote the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh World Heritage Site.
At previous Meadows Festivals we spoke to people about the Management Plan for the Site, so this is a chance to see how this feedback has been turned into actions for the next five years….
World Heritage at the Meadows 2017
We’ll have information about the Site and activities for our younger visitors. We’re celebrating the Year of Young People with a specially designed game – ‘Auld Reekie Through the Ages’ – a big box of 18th and 19th Century objects which help tell the stories of characters and places that shaped the Old and New Towns of Edinburgh.
Last week, pupils from Firrhill High School, spent two days with the planning service to experience the range of work we do and to give us their ideas on what the city could be like in the future. The programme included:
Mapping how young people use the city
Sharing photos of their favourite places
Using the Place Standard to assess how the city works as a place for young people
An exercise on what the issues will be for the next Local Development Plan and how best to engage young people
The feedback from the school was really positive, with the young people having the opportunity to learn more about the work of the planning service and the challenges for the city. It certainly has given us lots to think about for the next local development plan.
We were also delighted to hear that the group of pupils who visited us, won first place as part of the school’s business placement exercise.
In December last year, working with PAS, we delivered three workshops with Hermitage Park and Craigentinny primary schools and Leith Academy. Together we explored the role of planning and how the young people would like to see Leith and the wider waterfront area change in the future. The storyboard below is a summary of the workshops. The full report on the workshops is also available.
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Last week the Council’s Planning Committee agreed a report which sets out how we can better involve children and young people in how we plan the city.
We were delighted that pupils from Leith Academy took part in the committee discussions to present their view of the workshops, what they thought was important about their local area and how they’d like to see it change in the future. The discussion can be viewed on the Council webcast (Item 3.1).
A big thanks to the pupils from @leithacademy and @PAS_tweets for meeting Councillor Gardiner today and sharing their views on the future of Leith and the waterfront at Planning Committee. We clearly have some young town planners in the making! #YOYP2018#SYPC18pic.twitter.com/v6GkLQeFge
We will be encouraging developers to engage with children and young people in major development proposals to ensure they have their say on the future of their city. Our guidance for applicants will be updated to reflect this ambition.
What next?
It is the Year of the Young People and we are committed to better involving children and young people in the planning system. We will be working in collaboration with other Council services and the Young Edinburgh Action programme to ensure we deliver more meaningful engagement.
In April we will be holding a ‘co-design’ session with young people. We hope they will help us shape how to best engage all children and young people in the next Local Development Plan and other projects.
As this progresses we’ll provide more updates on the blog, with a full update going to planning committee next year.
On 13 and 14 September we held workshops at the Junior Road Safety Event at The City Chambers to show school kids how everyday activities contribute to air pollution. The event is organised by colleagues in Road Safety and Active Travel who work with Junior Road Safety Officers (JRSOs) to help promote road safety and active travel amongst their peers. They do this through competitions, assemblies and events in school, and help them put together their travel plans to reduce cars on the school run, reduce congestion and promote walking, scooting and cycling.
This annual event brings together Edinburgh primary school children who are JRSOs and provides them with ideas to promote road safety issues in their school and local community.
Air pollution has been recently described by the World Health Organisation’s Director General as ’the major public health issue of our generation’. Because we can’t always see it, it is easy not to think about it.
But transport is a major source of local air pollution here in Edinburgh, and reducing vehicle emissions or using our cars less for example by walking or cycling instead, is one way we can help improve air quality.
Emma explained how each of us can contribute to generating air pollution.
Children choose the colours to add to their glasses depending on what pollutants are produced by their activities
The individual glasses of coloured water were poured into one jug
This jugful shows the combined effect of our activities on the air we breathe
The workshop activity used food colourings to represent pollutants in air. Adding drops of these to glasses of water (representing clean air) allowed the children to see how their individual activities including travel to school can pollute the air we breathe. The children compared their glasses and discussed ways they could reduce their own contributions.
The feedback we got from the children who attended the event was really positive and we hope it helps to give them a better understanding of some of the air quality issues in the city.
I have titled this post with a hashtag, as we were asked to promo the event on social media.
Emma’s blog post #4: #SYPC2017
SYPC stands for Scottish Young Planners Conference. The conference consisted of morning lectures with Q&A sessions, and afternoon workshops (and then drinks after). The whole day was geared around giving young planners the skills they need to be successful.
The first talk was given by Kevin Stewart MSP, titled “People, Places and Planning: skills and the planning review”. The Q&A for this was particularly good, as it gave us the chance to question the Minister on the planning review, and future prospects for planning in Scotland.
There’s a picture of the Minister that I took and put on the planning Edinburgh insta which you should all be following.
By the way, the most used buzzword was “collaboration” (we guess. We didn’t keep a tally or anything). Coincidentally, “collaboration” is the very word Bob Reid (former convenor of RTPI Scotland) said we should replace with “mobilisation”. Bob’s talk was all about “collaborating: working together to deliver development”, and he says there’s no point in talking about things if you’re not getting anything done; collaboration v mobilisation.
Nicola Barclay, CEO of Homes for Scotland gave a talk on “leading”. She spoke about her journey to the role she’s in now, and what helped shape her into the leader she is today. She recommended we all do a quiz (something like this) to see what positive traits we have that we might not recognise on our own. Very inspirational stuff, loved it.
I attended 2 of the afternoon workshops;
“Making development work: the economics of development”, given by Catherine Wood (Gladman) and Ian Drummond (Taylor Wimpey).
Despite this being largely maths based, the process of valuing land was explained to us in a way we (most of us, anyway) could understand…. That toss up between giving better designed places or maximising profit. Toughy.
Also “make yourself an asset: effective networking and business development”, from Sandra Lindsay (Springfield Properties) and Michael Halliday (Halliday Fraser Munro).
This, I could totally get on board with. We learnt how to do an “elevator pitch”, which was effectively me selling myself to a stranger in 1 minute without coming across as a weirdo… I’ll have to keep you posted on how I manage with that…
To conclude: the information provided was very good, we all learned a lot throughout the day, and I didn’t lose a bet about “vision” being the most used buzzword.
Emma
Ps. It took a solid 24 minutes for Donald Trump to be mentioned, and he was subsequently mentioned maybe 3 further times;
“Do not leave the wrong impression” – we were learning about how to effectively network, here
Planning Edinburgh 
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