Making Space

Last week saw the annual congress of the Academy of Urbanism take place Scotland. There was a real sense that planning and urban design was changing from simply describing spatial patterns of streets and squares and buildings to understanding the life in a community and freeing up space to facilitate that life to grow and improve. The one fly in the ointment, particularly for a discipline that grew out of a health promotion agenda, was that the redevelopment of Scotland’s more deprived communities was not having the positive impact on health that was hoped. Although there is good understanding that communities structures need to support healthy lifestyles choices; there was little understanding that part of community life – the way people access public service – is changing.

Development planning is, in many areas, working on the basis of an outdated mode of service provision – one where the local health service is a GP practice, but you go to hospital for most anything else. With health services being more about managing long term conditions in the community; and the move to more services, and more co-ordinated services, being based in the community, the needs placed on the physical infrastructure of a neighbourhood in terms of buildings and connections change. Planning communities where small plots are scattered about for different service types limits the potential for joined up services. Providing only for the ‘walkable’ choice can make health services less accessible to the most poorly, for whom a 15 minute walk or the bus may not be realistic options, and also makes peripatetic services difficult. Combined, these could lead to public sector commissioners choosing edge of town sites where larger plots allow more services to come together, more room for parking and better road connections for out-reach and in-reach services. If development planning doesn’t catch up with service planning, and make spaces and places for well connected community services and assets, we’re in danger of the public sector being forced to repeat the ‘out-of-town’ move that retail made; with this we miss the opportunities that public sector investment could bring to improve the life, amenity and impression of our local community centres.