RTPI Vision for Planning

The Royal Town Planning Institute is engaged in a programme of radical evolution, which is already leading to a body so different that, by reference to the RTPI of eight years ago, is widely seen as a New Institute. This process has reaffirmed our core values, whilst reinterpreting them to meet changing circumstances and new challenges. It has set out a 'New Vision for Planning'.

The programme commenced with the New Vision for Planning in 2001, a paper that generated wide dialogue between planners and communities about the way planning should evolve.

The New Vision established the following principles for spatial planning:

• Spatial - dealing with the unique needs and characteristics of places
• Sustainable - looking at the short, medium and long term consideration of social, economic and environmental effects
• Integrative - in terms of the knowledge, objectives and actions involved
• Inclusive - recognising the wide range of people involved in planning
• Value-driven - concerned with identifying, understanding and mediating conflicting sets of values
• Action-oriented - driven by the twin activities of mediating space and making of place.

Click on these links to be taken to a fuller description of each principle in the original New Vision.

• The original executive summary text of the New Vision for Planning can be viewed here.
• The original full text version of the New Vision for Planning can be viewed here.
• The original text of an RTPI Statement of Intent for the development of the New Vision can be seen here.

Progressing the New Vision for Planning:

Planning to Live with climate change

Since 2001, the RTPI has continued to use the principles framed within the New Vision to guide its operations and priorities. These principles and the concept of spatial planning have become more closely embedded in planning systems as legislative and policy reforms have been developed and implemented in a number of jurisdictions.  However, just as planning must always be prepared for change and use the best current data to chart a vision for the future of a place,  so the New Vision must also be updated.

As an outcome of a review undertaken in 2008-09 review, our major priorities for spatial planning to achieve through sustainable development are:

• the effective mitigation of and adaptation to climate change processes: by definition, development that fails to respond to climate change is not sustainable
• ensuring more equitable and efficient access to global and regional resources necessary to maintain and develop sustainable places, responding particularly to poverty and inequality of access to resources and infrastructures emerging in some parts of the world
• building sustainable towns and cities, recognising that the globe is now and is likely to remain a place where the majority of people are urban and hence where new development must be planned to accommodate sustainable urban populations
• making our existing communities sustainable, recognising that many existing places consume resources at a rate that cannot be sustained and that planning has a key role in identifying and providing solutions.

The theme of planning to live with climate change is being developed in a living action plan for the RTPI.

• Click here to view our action plan