Resources
This page hosts a range of relevant resources and is being updated over the duration of the project.
Project Outputs
Working Paper 3: Community Plan Content Review
This document outlines the structured review of over 100 CLPs. This paper sets out a content review of the sample of plans taken from across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The content review involves three elements: reviews of local authority status and of community–led planning (CLP) activity, and a content review of a sample of Plans found across under-represented places in the UK’s four constituent nations. The content review required confirmation of the number of plans and areas eligible for inclusion, before deciding on the review sample and then looking at those systematically. The product here is a series of summaries and tables (see annexes) that show which areas were in scope and the information harvested.
Working Paper 2: Literature Review
This document outlines the structured review of relevant literature published since 2010. The purpose of the review is to provide grounding for the later stages of the research and feed into the theoretical framework (WP1a). This ensures that key findings from the wider – particularly international – community-led planning (CLP) literature combined with the existing material from the team, which has centred more on the English experience. Each identified theme is synthesised into key points for the research project to consider.
Working Paper 1: Theoretical Framework
This report, issued as a working paper, covers the basis upon which the project rests in theoretical terms and is linked to Work Package 1 of the project ( Literature review). The coverage set out here stems from the Just Neighbourhoods? project first research objective; which is to explore understandings of social and environmental justice amongst communities in underrepresented areas. Therefore, the aim of this document is to establish the theoretical foundations of the research and thereby inform the methodology and subsequent analysis of the empirical findings. It is not intended as a theoretical contribution to the academic literature but we are hopeful that such a contribution will be possible towards the end of the project. As such, this paper focuses on the following questions:− How has planning theory engaged with issues of justice, and what forms of justice are we talking about? (e.g. spatial, environmental, social, procedural, outcomes-based)
− What is the relationship between justice and participation? (i.e. in terms of inclusion, exclusion, scope, depth and learning/knowledge development)
− How do issues of justice (and injustice) relate to issues of power? (i.e. asking how power shapes injustice)
− How do issues of justice/injustice relate to issues of ethics? (i.e. how things are done and with what purpose)
− How have theories of justice engaged with the concept of scale? And how can ‘just’ policies be achieved at the local/neighbourhood scale?
Have your say: Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods
Launched in September 2024, the Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods will review the current state of neighbourhoods across England.
It will rigorously examine the role of neighbourhoods in people’s lives, quantifying and qualitatively exploring the case for neighbourhood focused regeneration as a contribution to achieving wider social and economic objectives. The Commission will also establish ‘what works’ by drawing on both international and domestic evidence, with a particular focus on the most deprived and ‘left behind’ communities.
The Commission is chaired by Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top and supported by a small, cross-party group of experts, practitioners and others with a keen interest in neighbourhood issues. Its work will examine the case for a new focus on neighbourhoods in national policy as a means of addressing multiple disadvantage, regenerating communities and enabling government to achieve its mission objectives. Funded by Local Trust, the Commission is run by an independent secretariat and commissioners will be supported by an academic panel, a lived experience panel and a representative group of community sector organisations.
Individuals and organisations are invited to contribute evidence to the Commission responding to the question(s) below. The window for submissions will be open until the end of 2024. You can find out how to do this by visiting the website here: Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods
Organisations
Here are the logos of interesting and useful organisations which are involved with communities and planning – they might be worth you looking up – just click on the icons.
Book: Neighbourhood Planning in Practice
Research: Spaces of Hope: People’s Plans
A recently completed ‘sister’ project ‘Spaces of Hope: People’s Plans’ has produced the first sustained history of community-led planning in the UK, documenting the diverse and often hidden ways in which people have come together to care for the future of their local environments since the 1960s.
Existing academic work has tended to focus on how citizens have influenced official processes of public participation in planning. Alongside this formal system, however, runs a rich history of informal community organising around planning and urban change which has not been subject to much research. Given the contemporary significance of community action around urban and environmental issues this gap limits our understood of the roles citizen activism has played in planning and place-making. For more, see:
PeoplesPlans.org – Exploring the Hidden Histories of Community-led Planning in the UK
Website: Just Neighbourhoods. Socio-spatial Justice in Urban Neighbourhoods
Similar project title. Different scope!… This website shares details of research carried out by US and UK universities looking at a case in San Francisco, US. Completed in 2021, this work explored the extent which redevelopment projects at the neighbourhood scale contribute to achieving socially just and fair environments, and who benefits from them. The main objectives of the research included:
- developing a framework for evaluating different dimensions of injustice in urban redevelopment projects
- carrying out intensive fieldwork in the Bayview-Hunters Point area, including site observation, participant observation, interview, and archival research
- studying conflict between the community and the city
- producing a documentary film that narrates reproduction of urban injustice in BVHP.
See:
Just Neighbourhoods: Socio-Spatial Justice in Urban Neighbourhoods at Oxford Brookes University