Town Planning Defined

What is town planning?

Town planning is all about controlling the environment within which we live. How development works, the relationship between buildings; open spaces, where jobs are in relation to where people live, how they get there; transport. It's now become known as spatial planning because we've begun to realize that there are lots of decisions that are taken, that have a spatial dimension that affect the way we live. So things like hospital trusts deciding where they‘re going to invest in improving hospitals, schools or those sorts of other decisions that are being taken, need to be put in some planning context.

Why is town planning important?

Planning is important because it affects the way we live, not only in our personal lives but also how business operate and how efficient the country is in terms of its economic activity. A whole range of issues are interdependent. The better we can get at those relationships, the better it is for everyone.

Who is involved in town planning?

All the players involved in planning cover a wide range of disciplines. At the heart of it are town planners, but they might be working with architects, with lawyers, with engineers, transport engineers, and highway engineers. There may be landscape architects involved, or ecologists. It will depend on the planning issue that they are involved in. In addition to all the professions involved, it is a democratic process. It is governed by politicians, so ultimately they take the responsibility for decision making.

How does it work?

Planning works on the basis of proposals being formulated by people who are keen to promote them; having to go through a process of control, and other people deciding whether that's an acceptable thing, whether that's going to work well, and whether it could be improved in any way. Some of the non-statutory planning - the work that's being done on spatial planning initiatives - is simply multinational companies being given advice by people who are aware of how these spatial relationships work, in making decisions where they might want to relocate to, where they might want to establish the manufacturing plant, the distribution plant, or what the best transport connections that they could have are. Those sorts of issues. It's internal to the company or to a government organization like the health authorities, or someone who's in charge of a range of development across the country.