town centres – Planning Edinburgh

Public Life Street Assessments

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.

Update – using the studies

One of the studies has already informed input to a Locality Improvement Plan (LIP) – the South West LIP includes reference to the Gorgie/Dalry Town Centre which was informed by the relevant study. More detailed work will be under taken to develop to a delivery plan with associated timescales.

The Supplementary Guidance, which are about to be adopted, will be used to determine relevant planning applications.

The studies will also be used as an input to the LDP Action Programme, due to be updated early 2018. We’ll share the Action Programme here on the blog and on Twitter when it’s out too.

The Edinburgh Local Development Plan Turns One!

We officially started using our current Local Development Plan (LDP) on the 24th of November 2016. This means that this time last week, our LDP turned one!

In celebration, we thought we would write a brief blog post to share with you five things we have achieved in the first year of our LDP. its my birthday

The LDP allocated almost 700 hectares of additional land for housing. This land could accommodate up to 10,000 new homes, meaning that we’ve now identified enough land in the city for over 31,000 houses.
Of the newly allocated land, sites that could provide over 3,000 homes are already under construction and an additional 1,000 units have received planning consent.
We adopted five Supplementary Guidance documents covering the City Centre Retail Core and the Tollcross, Corstorphine, Leith and Bruntsfield & Morningside Town Centres.
We updated two planning guidelines – the Edinburgh Design Guidance and Development in the Countryside and Green Belt.
We carried out our first feedback survey that asked you how effectively you’d been involved in the creation of the LDP. We look forward to engaging with you more as we move towards our next LDP, LDP 2.

Housing Land Audit and Delivery Programme 2017

The Supply of Land

The Council use something called the Housing Land Audit and Delivery Programme (HLADP) to assess the supply of effective land for housing in Edinburgh.

What is effective land?

Effective land must be free of any constraints that could prevent the building of homes. These constraints can include:

who owns the land;
contamination;
how easily the land can be sold;
infrastructure (including roads and schools for example) and;
how the land is currently used or has been used in the past.

The Strategic Development Plan for South East Scotland sets out how many new homes the city needs. This figure is currently 20,222 to be built by 2026.

Our latest housing land assessment in October was the 2017 HLADP. We have identified effective land for 23,329 houses on a mix of both brownfield (55%) and greenfield (45%) sites.

Sites included in the 2017 HLADP are in the Local Development Plan or have planning permission.

HLADP MAP

The Delivery of Homes

The HLADP examines the supply of land and the expected delivery of new homes.

table for blog

The output target is a five-year segment of the housing land supply target. The delivery programme is the number of homes likely to be built over the next five-years. We calculate this figure in agreement with Homes for Scotland.

Accelerating Delivery Rates

Many factors, including the strength of the economy and the demand for housing, can affect the construction of new homes. Even if we have enough land, it won’t always mean that houses will be built.

The credit crunch has affected the construction of housing in recent years. Although the country is still recovering from this, completions have doubled in the last four years. Current build rates in the city are steadily growing.

We are working to find ways to further speed up build rates in the city. The diagram below highlights some of the factors we have identified.

HLADP table

What’s next for the HLADP?

We will be using the HLADP to update our next Local Development Plan Action Programme. We’re also doing work to identify potential interventions to increase the delivery of housing. That will be reported next year.

Look out for our next blog post about a housing site currently under construction in the city.

Southside Place Standard Online Survey

Hello All,

Last week (22^nd and 26^th November) we ran a couple of Place Standard events at Southside Community Centre. The events were generally well attended, with some really good feedback from both sessions.

What an experience! Thanks @planningedin and #southsidecommunity doing #placestandard aka #planners listen to people! pic.twitter.com/3zEDoPG0TQ

— Lenka Svorcova (@LenkaSvorcova) November 22, 2016

Following on from these events, we are now running a short online survey using the questions from the Place Standard tool, which, if you live, work or spend time in the Southside, we would love it if you could spare 5 -10 minutes to complete it.

Just a reminder of what the Place Standard is, it is a tool to evaluate the quality of a place. 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 results of the events and the online survey will help to inform future policies and change in the area, so it is vitally important that you have your say on what needs to be improved.

Thank you in advance for taking time out to complete the survey.

George.

The Southside Place Standard

Hello,

The Southside Placemaking Exercise

The City of Edinburgh Council in partnership with various organisations from the Southside, will be holding a Placemaking exercise to get your views on what you think works well and what doesn’t work so well in the Southside.

How to get involved

We will be carrying out a placemaking exercise using the Place Standard tool which has been developed by A&DS, the Scottish Government and NHS Scotland. We will take groups of people through the exercise in facilitated sessions. We’d like as many of the community as possible to get involved to help make the process work.

generic-place-wheel — The Place Standard wheel shows how people scored different aspects of their area. 1 being very poor, 7 being excellent. (This is an illustrative example and not the scores for the Southside).

This is the third time we have used this process, so we know it is a successful tool. It will help inform the Town Centre Supplementary Guidance and the Southside Locality Improvement Plan.

When

Tuesday 22^nd November

1^st Session 17:30
2^nd Session 18:45

Saturday 26^th November

1^st Session 10:00
2^nd Session 11:00

Where

Southside Community Centre

Please let us know if you’re interested in coming along to one of the sessions by contacting george.oldroyd@edinburgh.gov.uk

What is Placemaking?

Places that work well for the community have a significant influence on the health and well-being of individuals. The opposite is also true – places that do not work well have a negative impact on health and well-being. The aim of placemaking is to create successful places.

We can measure the success of a place through the use of a tool called the Place Standard . This consists of a series of indicators that allow the community to assess things like access to greenspace, general maintenance of an area and perception of safety. This tells us where a place is succeeding and where it is failing.

The Scottish Government’s policy on Architecture and Place – Creating Places sets the context for how we can deliver great places.

What will happen after the exercise?

This process will give us lots of information about the Southside and how it works well as a town and where it doesn’t and we can use this to inform what we do as a Council and how new development can support the qualities of the Southside.

This is not just another consultation, it is an opportunity to make a difference to the area in which you live, work and visit.

Information regarding these events is also available on the City of Edinburgh Council’s consultation hub.