Scottish Government

Background

This briefing paper captures three main priorities agreed for the Mixed and Sustainable Communities Learning Network:

• connecting housing with wider regeneration and community planning
• improving the understanding about the importance of place-making
• identifying new funding and delivery models

It draws from SCR publications which describe in more detail the main issues and lessons learned from the learning network programme during 2009 - 2011.

It is intended primarily to provide feedback to policy colleagues in Government. It highlights major issues facing practitioners and shares the main lessons and learning which can help inform policy decision making and continue to improve practice.

1. Housing - its contribution to regeneration and community planning

What are the issues?

• Housing associations need to ensure that their regeneration activities contribute successfully to local outcomes. Effective engagement is not about board membership in Community Planning Partnerships but more about knowing local approaches and structures and how to work successfully within them. Knowing who to talk to and how to influence community planning partners is an essential networking skill for housing associations in the next few years.
• Housing associations need to maximise their role as community anchor organisations? In particular they offer: strong links to their local communities; involvement of local people in their management committees and boards; and the fact that they are regulated, stable and sustainable social enterprises owning assets and having secure revenue streams.
• It is essential that the community are a key partner in regeneration projects. In certain circumstances, regeneration can be led by the community from the start. In all cases it is important to take the necessary lead-in and preparatory time. It is also important to manage expectations among participants with realistic timescales for achieving particular goals and maintaining ongoing communication so progress updates can be given on a regular basis.

What can be done?

• It is ever more important for housing association officers to understand community planning/regeneration structures and processes at both national and local levels. In turn, this understanding is vital for housing association boards and management committees to make strategic decisions on why they should engage in particular activities, and from there incorporate them into their business plans.
• Measuring impact of regeneration activity needs to be mainstreamed. If housing associations are keen to take this forward they need to consider whether broader regeneration activity is or will be part of their organisation's strategy. If so, they then need to develop their position on measuring impact and integrate it with the organisation's overall strategy.
• Housing associations need to be better able to demonstrate and measure the social value of their non core housing activities. This can help achieve better mutual understanding and stronger partnerships between those involved in community planning at a strategic level and housing associations delivering services at a local level.
• It is important for housing associations to build their own 'skills to engage'. And for community planning partnerships to find effective and inclusive ways of capturing the outcomes potential partners such as housing associations can help deliver.

2. Placemaking

What are the issues?

• Better places are not being consistently delivered on the ground. It usually happens because no one takes responsibility for the whole - the 'place'. This is because place-making often falls through the gap between 'planning' operating at a strategic level and individual development projects.
• Placemaking needs strong civic leadership. This needs leaders with the ability to stick to core principles over time despite changes in political administrations. It also needs a strong sense of community and social responsibility to live in a sustainable way and a detailed understanding of how people and communities function.
• Well developed, yet flexible, masterplans are needed that allow for plot by plot development. These could also enable local residents to hire their own architects if they wish. The focus should be not just on building mixed tenure communities but ensuring that other educational, business, retail and leisure facilities are also provided at early stages. And high density development should be considered which maximises the use of the land and encourages community integration.
• Active community involvement in designing neighbourhoods is vital. This should happen through the whole process of developing the vision, putting in place the implementation arrangements and particularly in and agreeing the level and type of management with residents as part of the longer term stewardship. There needs also to be provision of shared facilities to encourage greater community cohesion, particularly in social spaces by limiting demarcation of public and private areas and in the use of naturalised play areas.

What can be done?

• Leadership matters. This is because it initiates confidence and action. It nurtures a place vision, prepares the brief for, commissions and controls the masterplan. It orchestrates the array of different bodies and actions that contribute to place delivery. The leader engenders participation allowing space for assembling the contributions of others into a greater whole
• Councils need to have the power of conviction and strength of argument to make and follow through on key decisions. In particular this relates to removing the domination of the car, creating a first class public transport network and a sustainable environment that is accessible to all and not just the wealthy. Public transport is key to a sustainable community with local services. Creation of work opportunities in a community is also vital to reduce the need to travel.
• Planning and placemaking must come first over making money or profit. Buildings should be multi-functional; developers should be involved only once a consensus about place has been reached and then the local council should set strict parameters that can't be compromised; it should also actively participate in all ventures rather than pass things onto the private sector.
• The vision is about more than just building houses. It needs also to embrace integrated green infrastructure and recognise that strategies that involve local people are often the best and most sustainable.

3. Funding and delivery models

What are the issues?

• Place-making is often a twenty-year plus development project. Growing place value goes beyond the short-termist 'in/out' role of the developer and is about looking ahead, taking a long term perspective by considering what happens to an area over time and what might happen downstream. This involves having the right amount of time for the right part of the project. This makes it essential to have the project led by an organisation with the time, resources and inclination to spend a much longer amount of time than usual at the design stage.
• There are significant practical challenges for local authorities and development partners. Reducing up front costs in itself does not resolve the underlying requirement for finance through the development process. And new ideas using "deferred receipts" mechanisms involve challenges including: control (for the authority, the developer and especially now banks), risk limitation, ensuring best value, the need for transparency in procurement, and accounting for the amount and timing of the receipt.

What can be done?

• Delivery capacity matters. This provides a signal of clear intent, generating confidence and certainty that what is planned will actually happen, thereby encouraging confidence to participate that helps to reduce risk. Local authorities need to be 'risk aware' as opposed to 'risk averse' and be prepared to take risks with infrastructure to encourage development - but minimise that risk with good planning.
• Control over land development matters. This provides the real power to assemble and deliver better places. Control through land ownership is more direct and proactive than planning control, and can ensure 'things happen' at the time and in the form and location desired.
• Having infrastructure in place encourages development. It also addresses public concerns that it only happens, if at all, long after development is finished. Proportional contributions to infrastructure can open up access to development and enable developers of all sizes to bid for sites. Better medium to long term planning can help reduce infrastructure duplication and costs. And there has to be cross boundary working to ensure consistency in planning of major infrastructure.
• Development funding matters. This provides the discipline of appraising and agreeing what is economically viable. Place vision and masterplanning need to be supported by sound investment principles. Councils need to be willing to review payment schedules to ease developer cash flows and find new ways to attribute infrastructure costs more fairly amongst development partners.
• Procurement in development matters. The process methodology will determine the scale, quality and variety of participation of those delivering the place products.

Scottish Centre for Regeneration

The Scottish Centre for Regeneration supports public, private and voluntary sector delivery partners to become more effective at:

• regenerating communities and tackling poverty.
• developing more successful town centres and local high streets.
• creating and managing mixed and sustainable communities.
• making housing more energy efficient.
• managing housing more efficiently and effectively.

We do this through:

• coordinating learning networks which bring people together to identify the challenges they face and to support them to tackle these through events, networking and capacity building programmes.
• identifying and sharing innovation and practice through publishing documents detailing examples of projects and programmes and highlighting lessons learned.
• developing partnerships with key players in the housing and regeneration sector to ensure that our activities meet their needs and support their work.

What have we been doing during 2009 - 2011?

During the last two years, the SCR has organised a series of events and activities to help practitioners share good practice and learn from others. Some of the events have been large scale (as in the launch event) but most have been smaller, focusing on creating greater opportunities for learning network members to actively participate in debate and engage with others from different backgrounds and settings.

Of particular note has been four action learning sets operating over a six month period which allowed participants to focus on their own individual issues and challenges but work in a small group setting, with expert facilitation, and share lessons and learning as they attempt to put new ideas into practice.

We have published a range of documents as outlined above and used our website to act as a knowledge portal by linking to other agencies' publications. And we have encouraged network members and others to keep in touch by subscribing to our e-bulletin and taking part in our on-line forum.

What next

SCR will be organising an event in January 2011 to share the lessons and learning from a major piece of scoping work to identify successful place-making approaches. The event will provide academics, policy makers, practitioners involved in place-making and community regeneration in Scotland with the opportunity to explore the above issues in detail.