Planning has played a transformational role in improving the quality of life of all our communities. It has the potential to secure outcomes which can enhance our wellbeing by ensuring access to high quality environments and economic opportunity and by giving communities a voice in their future.
However, planning has become increasingly disconnected from people’s lives and from a key founding objective of the planning movement, namely to secure greater social equity. The heart of the Planning Out Poverty research project is the question: ‘How can we re-focus planning to be more effective in dealing with social exclusion?’ Analysis of the policy themes distilled from this study suggests that to achieve this goal we need both a profound reconsideration of the social purposes of planning and detailed actions to enhance its effectiveness.
