Responses & Commentary
Team response to the Plan for Neighbourhoods March 2025
The research team – Gavin Parker, Matthew Wargent, John Sturzaker and Tessa Lynn – penned a short response to the recently launched ‘Plan for Neighbourhoods’ asking how people will actually be involved.
Calls for Evidence
Independent Commission on Neighbourhoods (ICON)
Launched in September 2024, ICON is undertaking a comprehensive review of the current state of neighbourhoods across England.
The Commission is examining the role neighbourhoods play in people’s lives and exploring the case for neighbourhood-focused regeneration as a way of supporting wider social and economic objectives. Its work combines quantitative and qualitative evidence and pays particular attention to the experiences of the most deprived and ‘left behind’ communities.
To understand “what works,” ICON is drawing on both international and domestic research, building an evidence base to inform future policy and practice.
You can read ICON’s Interim Report, Neighbourhood Policy Green Paper, and all other publications on their website.
Books
Neighbourhood Planning in Practice
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Written by members of the research team, this book examines how communities have used Neighbourhood Planning since the Localism Act (2011), what they achieved, and what challenges they faced. It serves as a practical guide for anyone involved in neighbourhood planning or considering starting a plan. |
Related Information
Learning from Big Local is a new online resource capturing 15 years of learning from 150 communities across England. Drawing on one of the country’s longest-running place-based programmes, it brings together data, evaluation and lived experience to build a rich evidence base on community-led change.
The site includes 50 analytical articles, 150 area summaries, 100 resident stories and over 100 programme reports, offering insight into participation, power, funding models and neighbourhood-level approaches.
Research: Spaces of Hope: People’s Plans
This sister project documents the rich history of community-led planning in the UK since the 1960s, highlighting informal and often overlooked forms of community organising around place and urban change.
More information: PeoplesPlans.org – Exploring the Hidden Histories of Community-led Planning in the UK
Research: 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
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.
