The Royal Town Planning Institute in Scotland

Convener’s message

3 April 2008

With the benefit of the convener’s ringside perspective, I’ve seen the cut and thrust of some new thinking, not least Graeme Purves’ insightful approaches to the National Planning Framework at our recent RTPI task group. As mentor for licentiate Kerstin Dueling, I’ve appreciated the good work on public involvement Cliff Hague and she have been putting together for Planning Aid Scotland with the help of advisers from different sides of the planning service. Good luck to Kerstin in her new post with the Harrison Grierson consultancy in New Zealand. My third year planning students at Dundee University brought some fresh ideas to the task of regenerating developments along the city’s Kingsway – congratulations to Garrie Watson, Oonagh Baxter and Fraser MacKenzie, the three shortlisted for Dundee City Council’s 2008 Civic Award which Garrie won. As a judge for the Geddes Trust student awards, I read some first rate analysis from planning schools around Scotland including Steven Orr’s “A Change in the Wind” on windfarms and Gille Young’s work on Public Protests and the Historic Inner City. And of course the annual Scottish Awards for Quality in Planning delivered their usual hits of inspiration –check out the details here in the Scottish Planner.

Travelling the Lothians and Borders as a guest assessor for the Edinburgh Architectural Awards let me see large and small projects on the ground at close quarters from the user’s point of view, notably the new Queen Margaret University outside Musselburgh, the flexible Stewarts Melville concert hall, the dramatic Heart of Hawick mill conversion and an elegant transformation of a coal bunker in Portobello. Seeing developments up close is something my retired planner cycling colleagues can also enjoy on our monthly jaunts around Scotland. It’s been a great pleasure to contribute to two well-organised SNH events one promoting participants in active citizenship, the other for students in planning and environment courses.

A breakfast seminar on the Scottish Government’s sustainable communities initiative gave me a welcome chance to exchange professional support with Jim Mackinnon, and the workshop that I took part in seemed to agree that sustainable communities could not be dropped fully-formed from above, that people hoped instead to pinpoint good ideas and examples of aspects of sustainable development to learn from in every part of the country, and that Scotland has to devise new funding arrangements to get the upfront infrastructure it needs. Later a UN-led conference in Dundee looked at how planning can tackle climate change, with business, community groups, and local government all contributing good ideas. At a BEFS Healthy Places workshop I heard calls from public health professionals for better design and citizen empowerment to promote wellbeing. This same healthy living objective inspired our profession’s emergence in Scotland at the hands of Partrick Geddes and Thomas Adams a hundred years ago, and it’s time we rededicated ourselves. Don’t miss Harry Burns’ Geddes Lecture on 4 June.

Dundee City Council’s 2008 Civic Award:

Garrie Watson, Oonagh Baxter and Fraser MacKenzie with Mike Galloway

Roger Kelly

www.place.makers.org.uk

Roger Kelly convenes the Royal Town Planning Institute’s Scottish Executive through 2008.

This message appears in the May edition of the Scottish Planner

earlier message January 2008 later messages June 2008 August 2008 October 2008