Impacts of AirBnB regulation in New York
New York has long been a money spinner for AirBnB. In January 2023 there were 38,500 listings. As…
Planning a Refugee Camp
In 2010 the Commonwealth Association of Planners held its first Student Essay competition. The winners were Jeremiah Atho…
Kes Revisited – The welfare state and community in the late 1960s
Ken Loach’s film, Kes, was released in 1969. What does it tell us about life in a coalfield…
Place Identity, Participation and Planning
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Regional and Local Economic Development
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Cliff is a freelance consultant, researcher, author and trainer. He was the Chair of the Cockburn Association 2016 – 2023.
He is Professor Emeritus of Planning and Spatial Development at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh.
He is a Past President of the Royal Town Planning Institute, and of the Commonwealth Association of Planners.
He is a past Chair of Built Environment Forum Scotland.
He was awarded the O.B.E. in the 2016 Birthday Honours.
Books
Some articles fromall categories:
Long-established Planning course to close
The closure of one of the oldest undergraduate Planning courses in the UK has been announced. The BSc (Hons) in Town Planning at Heriot-Watt University, one of the oldest undergraduate Planning courses in the UK, has ceased to recruit new students. The course had been under pressure for some time over concerns about recruitment. To…
Planning a Refugee Camp
In 2010 the Commonwealth Association of Planners held its first Student Essay competition. The winners were Jeremiah Atho Ongo and George Wesonga Auma. Their essay looked at the skills in Making Planning Work and their application in the undergraduate planning programmes at Makerere and Maseno, and in the planning of the huge Dadaab refugee camp…
Rural reform is on the OECD agenda
This blog was first posted on 8 October 2014. A new OECD report, Regions and Cities: Where policies and people meet, makes the point that regional disparities in income are widening. It calls for a place-sensitive approach to policy making, in other words it recognises that policies need to be tuned to specific characteristics of places, rather…
Geddes and Fellini – Place, Work and Folk
It is doubtful if the Italian film-maker Frederico Fellini knew of the work of the Scottish luminary Patrick Geddes – biologist, ecologist, sociologist, educationalist and planner. Fellini’s films have a strong sense of place, and of the relationship between people and place, which was an important theme for Geddes. I want to explore one of…
A World Viewtime-line of planning over the past century: Part 2
This second half of my World View Timeline for planning globally over the past century covers the period 1964-2013. The first part, 1914-1963, was covered in an earlier blog. It highlighted the ideas and practices that shaped 50 years of planning – from Patrick Geddes’ “Cities in Evolution” to Jane Jacobs’ “The Death and Life of…
Shaping Metropolitan Growth
Metropolitan growth receives less attention than it deserves. The spread of metropolitan regions is one of the defining features of the age, yet as most of it is taking place in the developing world it goes largely unremarked by Western planners and urbanists. Of course, we have our own metropolitan regions that are deeply problematic…
UK Launch of “Leading Change” book
A conference at the University of Birmingham on 22 March, 2018 on “Planning Challenges in the Commonwealth” was the venue for the UK launch of the book “Leading Change” My co-authored book, “Leading Change: Delivering the New Urban Agenda through Urban and Territorial Planning” had its UK launch at the conference “Think Planning – Think…
Local food networks – how what you eat can drive local developmentv
Local food networks are attracting increasing attention. This week I picked up Issue 1 of Nourish Scotland Magazine, which is produced by Scotland’s sustainable food network. Pete Richie, Director of Nourish Scotland, sums up the organisation’s basic vision. It is to “reimagine farming as a service: and a service which is increasingly co-produced by farmers and…
A public services watershed
This first appeared in Planning on 16 January 2004 and is reproduced by kind permission of Planning Resource.
New possibilities for using scenario planning tools
This blog was first posted on the Planning Resource website on 24 April 2012. Scenario planning tools are increasingly being used in North America as means of community engagement. The state of the art is reviewed in a new publication that attracted attention at the recent American Planning Association conference in Los Angeles. The development of web-based GIS and…