Introduction

In 2008-09 the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) carried out a wide-ranging review of its New Vision for Planning (2001), to identify how everyone engaged in spatial planning should adapt their professional approach to plan for living with climate change, to advise and work in partnership with others and to campaign for fundamental change to shape a sustainable new future for humankind. This work points the way ahead for the RTPI, extending a culture change in our approach to sustainable development, both nationally and internationally, and ensuring that we plan to live with climate change as a high priority.

Our vision for spatial planning

Planning involves twin activities: managing competing uses for space and making places that are valued and have identity. These activities focus on the location and quality of social, economic and environmental change. Spatial planners use their skills to understand why change happens, where change happens and to ensure that change benefits society and the environment. The RTPI uses the term spatial planning to describe these activities.

Working from the strong starting point of our New Vision for Planning published in 2001, we have set out principles to guide the action that the RTPI is taking and will develop over the period of its next Corporate Plan (to 2014) and priority outcomes that the RTPI and its members are committed to achieve. In summary, these establish that: 

Spatial planning must help communities at all scales to achieve sustainable development and particularly to respond to climate change.

View the links below to see more detail about how the RTPI will develop its own policies, work with and support spatial planners and work more widely with international agencies, governments at all scales, non-governmental organizations, businesses and communities to respond to its principles and achieve its priority outcomes.

• Click here to return to the top of the page.

Priorities

The review identified the following priorities for sustainable development emerging from our vision for spatial planning:

• Planning must mitigate and adapt to climate change processes
• Planning must provide more equitable and efficient access to global and regional resources
• Planning must build sustainable communities, towns and cities
• Planning must make our existing communities sustainable

Principles

In moving towards these priorities, the review identified the following principles of spatial planning:

• Planning is global and local
• Planning should happen at the right scale
• Planning should use the right skills
• Planning is and should continue to be a ‘campaigning profession’
  
   
• Click here to read more about these principles
• Click here to return to the top of the page

Outcomes

It proposed that priority outcomes to be sought through spatial planning should be as follows:

• Spatial planning must help humanity, at the global to the local scales, to deliver sustainable development that enables us to live with and successfully manage and adapt to the climate change processes we have inherited and to mitigate and control the potential for additional and adverse climate change: ‘Planning to Live with Climate Change’
• Spatial planning must provide for the needs of future generations as well as the needs of the current generation: ‘Planning for Sustainable Development’
• Spatial planning must provide liveable and equitable settlements, where new urbanisation is sustainable and existing urban areas are progressively adapted to enhance sustainability. This should happen in ways that ensure a more equitable distribution of access to natural resources, social and economic well-being than is the case today, whilst safeguarding and enhancing biodiversity and natural environment values: ‘Planning for Liveable and Equitable Settlements’
  
  
• Click here to read more about the outcomes sought from spatial planning.
• Click here to return to the top of the page

Towards an action plan

The most important proposal emerging from the review was the need for an action plan that would:

• Draw together existing RTPI climate change work
• Identify scope for better work with partners
• Develop proposals for new work, and in doing all of this
• Seek views from RTPI members about what new work should be carried out
  
  
• Click here to read more about the action plan
• Click here to return to the top of the page

How were members involved?

• Click here to read archive pages about the member engagement process used to develop our action plan
• Click here to return to the top of the page

Author:

Rynd Smith

Publisher:

The Royal Town Planning Institute

Date:

16-Jun-09

Sections:

What Planning Does

This article has been read 2178 times.