Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Nice to see this: planning applications on a map across council boundaries.

This has been created by Adrian Short of Mash the State using the Planning Alerts API and yahoo pipes. Planning authorities across the land can now easily add this to their website and give citizens a nice picture of what is going on where. Bravo!

Nice backstory from Adrian on the IDeA’s Community of Practice platform. (Registration req’d).

5 years on monday…

Next week will be my 5^th anniversary working for the Planning Advisory Service.  I’ve been here from pretty much the beginning, when first there was three, then quickly four to now where we’re temporarily sitting on 15 people. 

I’m not a planner.  Didn’t really know much about it when I began… still can’t profess to know loads even if I sometimes feel I know too much about the government industry that surrounds it.  Our now departed ‘spiritual leader’ Sarah Richards used to try and tell me I’d find myself doing a planning course and becoming a planner before long. She wasn’t quite right.  For a long time I just couldn’t get into it as a profession, despite meeting a bunch of good hearted bods, genuinely enthusiastic about making the world a better place.

China is on my naughty list

Last month I wrote a post on our expectations for Copenhagen and urged that regardless of the outcome, we will all need to act to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Well, the results are in and they don’t look good.  In my pre-Christmas down time I’m reflecting on where we stand after Copenhagen.  The failure of these negotiations was the final blow to top off an incredibly depressing year globally.  You can blame Obama, the UN or the new global baddie – China.  Any way you slice it, Copenhagen failed to set targets and make countries accountable for their action.  So, to quote richardprichard, ‘ho bloody ho’.

Doing more with less

It’s tough running something like PAS. We spend public money and certainly sound like a quango (even if we’re not). Most of the things we do are delivered free at the point of delivery, so we don’t have the most perfect of feedback loops – people buying from elsewhere. Accordingly, we do our best to understand whether or not we’re doing the right thing and one of the methods is to have a steering board.

Top Ten Lists

It’s coming up to that time of year when the music industry starts going into list frenzy.  The Observer music monthly has already trotted out its (patchy IMO) take on the ‘best’ records of the decade and countless magazines and blogs and such will be dishing out their top ten, twenty or 100 records of 2009 mining varied streams of popularism and obscurity.  I thought the old top ten model might be a useful method for looking back on PAS ‘releases’ over the last year.

Maybe you’ve thought about an in-house planning top ten for ’09?  Ranked by s106 contribution? Design/aesthetics? Member/community support? Things that actually got built?

Anyway, here’s my take on a PAS top ten for ’09 – A mix of charting pop singles, debut acts showing promise and classic ol’ favourites rolled around again in time for Christmas:

Diary of a Planning Peer Reviewer – Day 3

We just gave a presentation of our findings to the planning chair, head of service, and others. It went down well. There were a few recommendations that will potentially be tough for some members to swallow. But everyone receiving the presentation felt that the changes would bring about positive outcomes.

Diary of a Planning Peer Reviewer – Day 2

It’s just after 8pm and we’ve just snuck out of planning committee. The second day of the peer review was long but fruitful as we started to get the right evidence to confirm our initial findings and drill down deeper on some of them.  As I said yesterday, I’m learning a lot from the rest of the peer review team.

No stupid questions

We’re trying a bit of an experiment. Be good to have your feedback/comments.

A good number of the comments on our web survey talked about the discussion forums. There was much love for the benefits they bring to the sector, but also some useful suggestions for how we might take them forward. Some of the comments suggested that it would be good to be able to post things anonymously – that part of the reticence people have is linked to not wanting to come across as daft or wanting to reveal which council they’re from.

Without wanting to heavily invest in some tech changes only to have this concept not fly we’re trialling it first by creating a new forum – “There are no stupid questions” – and encouraging people to post anonymously or under a pseudonym.

So don your thinking cap – come up with a funny name – bonus points for the best one – and maybe even a prize – and ask that question you’ve had thats been disturbing your sleep. No one needs to know it was you.

No Stupid questions forum

Register a new anonymous a/c
(you need to use a different email address if you are already registered)

J.

Diary of a Planning Peer Reviewer

Dear diary, planning peer reviews rock!*  This is my first day on a planning peer review. Peer reviews are run on a variety of themes that look closely at how a particular service performs and integrates with the rest of the council (generally speaking). We’re doing a review of a planning service in the south east. The head of the planning service here has worked very hard in preparation for our visit. And I think there are high expectations for what we’ll deliver.

The Jigsaw Puzzle

I have been to a couple of different seminars and workshops lately on the subject of -not surprisingly – spatial planning. Following these seminars I have been contemplating spatial planning in the real world……