Tag: scottish young planners

Engaging children and young people in Planning

The planning service has over the years undertaken various events, workshops and engagement exercises with children and young people to help share what we do and get their views on planning in the city.  This has included The Forth Bridge short story competition, Shops in Town Centres and the Junior road safety and air quality events.

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).

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.

#SYPC2017

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