Author Archives: Quintin Bradley
Green Belt – a capacity to engage
Green Belt is an environmental designation internationally adopted by spatial planning regimes, and famously associated with the arousal of passionately loyal identification. The passions aroused by Green Belt are often disparaged by the planning profession, but the capacity to arouse … Continue reading
Public support for Green Belt: common rights in countryside access and recreation
Public support for Green Belt is legendary. It is unquestionably the most popular planning policy, and perhaps the only one that is readily recognised and fiercely defended. This passionate support is often dismissed as sentiment or as an attachment to a … Continue reading
The use of direct democracy to decide housing site allocations in English neighbourhoods
In this new paper I want to investigate the use of direct democracy to decide the location of new housing in England as part of a suite of participatory practices known as neighbourhood planning. I am not satisfied with the way … Continue reading
Neighbourhood planning and the production of spatial knowledge
This paper explores the production of what counts as authoritative knowledge in neighbourhood planning in England. Its aim is to evidence the process through which the intelligibility of place was established in neighbourhood planning and to chart the exclusions and … Continue reading
The impact of place identity in neighbourhood plans
My latest paper to be published in Planning Theory and Practice discusses how neighbourhood plans represent a sense of place and how a convincing narrative of place impacts on policies for housing development. It argues that neighbourhood plans invoke the subjectivities of … Continue reading
The new normal: is a planning orthodoxy being imposed on neighbourhood plans ?
Does it matter that three neighbourhood plans failed examination last year? With over 2000 neighbourhood plans underway and 240 now passed referendum, are these failures to be expected as the number of plans increases? Or is it, more worryingly, the … Continue reading
The impact of neighbourhood planning on house-building
Neighbourhood planning has created opportunities for communities to advance new socially and environmentally sustainable housing solutions that conflict with the interests of corporate house-builders and unsettle the depiction of citizens’ groups as protectionist and opposed to all economic growth. The … Continue reading
The Housing Crisis Weaponised
The government does not intend to solve our housing crisis. Instead it aims to use the housing crisis as a weapon of policy against the beliefs and attitudes that sustain a welfare state. Much of the attack on the welfare … Continue reading
A Passion for Place
Planning scholarship tends to shy away from the emotional realm and planners in practice assert their distance from attachment. The policy of neighbourhood planning in England is unusual in that it addresses people’s emotional commitment to place, or their place … Continue reading
The New Patchwork Politics of Place
In a new book ‘Building Sustainable Futures‘ edited by Dastbaz and Strange and published by Springer 2015 I contribute a chapter on neighbourhood planning and sustainable communities. The concept of sustainable communities has come to define a particular type of governance … Continue reading