bottom drawer

One of the things about localgov work is that it doesn't often fit neatly with family life. There are limited windows in the year between elections to get stuff through member scrutiny and out to consultation between election cycles. Having spent all August getting a massive amount of planning work into Council scrutiny at the start of September, I've now spent all of half term preparing to launch a big Local Plan consultation on 1 November. Luckily our half term plans were blown off course anyway by a child catching Covid, so it was lockdown at home for one half of the family, while the other half went jollying up to Scotland 🤔 Last weekend I spent a lovely evening talking to with my old friend Ambrose Gillick for his podcast A is for Architecture . I talked about planning and participation and what it is I try to do. Then this week has been a flurry of logistical preparations, writing briefing notes about everything under the sun while overseeing printing, digital plan finet...

  I was asked to give a 'provocation' last week to a workshop led by the Glass-House Community Led Design and Urban Design London on co-designing design codes. My thoughts below are not exclusively about design codes, but could apply to any co-design process in the built environment. I wrote this thinking about my own two Gen-Z kids and I was rather aware - when giving this provocation - that most of the audience were in their later years in life. What if the only people we should be co-designing with are Gen-Zs? The new National Planning Policy Framework asks Local Plans to look forward a minimum of 20 years, and that this should be at least 30 years if you are planning for strategic scale new developments – the kind of things for which design codes are intended – new communities, new villages, urban extensions, major regeneration sites, which take decades to build out. Someone who is 65 now – possibly the typical person who has the time and energy to...