street assessment – Planning Edinburgh

Four front covers of Town Centre Guidance documents - Tollcross, Leith, Portobello and Corstorphine. Each cover shows a row of shops with flats above and pavement & road in front.

Following the adoption of the City Plan 2030 our City Centre and Town Centre Planning Guidance has now been updated.

The updated guidance also takes into account

National Planning Framework 4 (NPF4)
changes to the permitted development rights to allow some changes of use of shops to other uses without planning permission

The eight town centres are

Bruntsfield/ Morningside
Corstorphine
Gorgie/Dalry
Leith
Nicolson Street/ Clerk Street
Portobello
Stockbridge
Tollcross

The guidance has been informed by a ‘public life street assessments’ carried out in 2016, which explored how town centres should evolve to maximise the potential for benefiting public life and a health check which has considered the centre’s strengths, vitality and viability, weaknesses and resiliencies.

The guidance assists the delivery of NPF4 objectives and policies, in particular to ensure town centres are vibrant, healthy and resilient places for people to work, enjoy and visit.

Town centres are an important focal point for people who live and work in Edinburgh. They provide shopping, leisure and community facilities in locations which are easily accessible by walking, wheeling and cycling or public transport. They also contribute to local living and 20 minute neighbourhoods.

The updated guidance is no longer statutory supplementary guidance, but will remain as planning guidance and a material consideration in the determination of planning applications.

The 2016 Public Life Street Assessments were undertaken by consultants and were funded by the ‘Smarter Choices Smarter Places’ programme. The studies were used in the preparation of the 2017 Town Centre Supplementary Guidance.

A series of studies investigating the public life of Edinburgh’s town centres reveal how each currently functions in terms of pedestrian/cyclist movement and as a place.

Public Life Street Assessments, carried out by design consultants HERE+NOW for the Council, involve a mix of direct observation methodologies, user interviews and more focussed sub studies such as facade, land use and activity studies. In-depth analysis of this data identifies trends in the way people currently use the street environment. This has informed suggested opportunities for improvement.

The assessments supplement the Council’s existing knowledge about how these town centres function and build on existing thinking and work to date, including the Local Development Plan, Town Centre Toolkit and Edinburgh Street Design Guidance.

The studies provide valuable information for all parties with an interest in maximising public life within Edinburgh’s town centres. They have already informed the preparation of Supplementary Guidance for each of the town centres, draft Locality Improvement Plans and a design and an improved public space trial project within Stockbridge.