Разработка идет о более чем строительство домов. Речь идет о строительных сообществ, которые является Поэтому мы хотим, чтобы люди уже живут и работают рядом с потенциальными изменения, которые будут вовлечены в первой возможности.

Planning problem: Beware of the leopard!

Does the above make any sense to you, asks HOT’s John Knowles? Me neither: it might as was well be in Russian… Planning has a problem.

Recently, I fought a campaign against a development in Shepherd Street, St Leonards-on-Sea. Despite many wins and even the Secretary of State coming down in our favour, the developer eventually won and now we will have a four storey block of apartments built on Shepherd St, robbing neighbours of light, creating a wind tunnel and adding to a mess of architectural styles, which the council seems powerless to do anything about (aesthetics and community are not high priorities in any planning consent).

Development is about community: it affects all of us in the end, from parking to overuse of local amenities and to the simple right to light and not to be overlooked. The council even suggests that developers work with the communities in which they plan to build:

“Development is about more than constructing houses. It’s about building communities which is why we want people already living and working near to potential developments to be involved at the earliest opportunity.”

Oh, by the way, that’s the translation of the Russian text above.

But let’s say you have the typical developer, one who isn’t going to outreach to the public: how does the democratic process work in planning? Someone posts a note on a lamppost near the proposed development site or sticks a formal letter through your door. The letter is very formal and quite technical, as is the process of making your voice heard. The planning notice only works for the literate; there are no visuals on the letter or posted notice and access to visual plans is on-line is through an often bewildering set of instructions and documents and is to say the least, time consuming. Any debate takes place through a highly formal written system and is often open to abuse by developers who are allowed to have posts in favour of their developments from third parties who are clearly gaining financially from them or have a financial relationship with them (oh and this relationship does not have to be disclosed, handy that).  In short, the community as a whole is excluded from what should be an accountable process and even those who do wish to pursue the case are often beaten down by the process.

“No representation without a conversation.”

Planning shouldn’t just be about tick-boxing developments because we need more houses and allowing developers fulfil easy quotas. It should be about engaging with local communities to discuss how they feel about developments on their streets, in the neighbourhoods and in our shared spaces. The recent fish and chip shop hut on the Sydney Little-designed seafront, clearly shows that the council has no aesthetic remit or even the most basic understanding of the heritage that they have inherited. They say that nobody objected, yet plenty of people I have spoken to knew nothing about this cheap over height shed till it was too late. Now the beautiful lines of Sydney Little vision are home to a plastic shed and tacky signs.

So what is my rambling point? It’s this: planning should be more vigorous, involving the community and weighted towards the community and not the developer. The long-term inheritance, which we pass on to our children, should not be one drawn from the short-sighted needs of quotas.  Engagement with the public means more than sticking a technically worded document to a lamp-post. I suggest that the council is in actual fact failing in its duty to inform its citizens of what is happening and that some might say that this is by accident, whilst some might say it’s by design. After all, the less objections, the quicker the decisions. It might also be a genuine mistake that I was personally informed by a member of the council staff that the plans for Shepherd St would be rejected – and so I needn’t worry about them. I wish I had objected more than I did, because with my guard dropped, I was sucker-punched, I didn’t for instance create a petition, which I had on previous applications.

My advice? Don’t drop your guard; work with your neighbours; inform people who you know may have concerns; inform all of your community and not just those who can read about what is happening, get a petition. Above all, remember you are the vanguards of your community. The current system benefits the developer and in the end it’s the community who pays the price.

See also The Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy on planning:

“But Mr Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months.”

“Oh yes, well as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn’t exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything.”

“But the plans were on display …”

“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”

“That’s the display department.”

“With a flashlight.”

“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”

“So had the stairs.”

“But look, you found the notice didn’t you?”

“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

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