What is Community Planning?

The Royal Town Planning Insitute's working definition of community planning (20-Apr-07) :

“Community planning means the strategies, techniques and capacity building required to encourage and enable communities to take a full and active role in both the statutory and non statutory planning processes”.

An introduction to community planning and the benefits of getting involved and how to decide what approach to use can be found in the 'about community planning' section of communityplanning.net

Key concepts for community planning include:

Added value – through the contribution of participants;

Co-operation – breaking down barriers to ‘non co-operation’ and fostering close working relationships between all stakeholders;

Engagement – of all stakeholders;

Equal value – of the contributions of all stakeholders;

Empowerment – of all stakeholders to enable them to influence the decisions which affect their communities;

Evolving – combining the best of the past with the best of the new;

Integration – of a wide range of policy areas eg physical, social and economic;

Learning – through involvement;

Organic – growing from the bottom up rather than imposing solutions;

Outward looking – taking a holistic view;

Process – as important as the end products;

Realistic – taking into account the resources available and what can practically be achieved.

Sustainable – contributing to the building of sustainable communities