Sustainable Communities: Skills and Learning for Place Making

By University of Hertfordshire Press

Drawing upon interdisciplinary research conducted across various universities within the United Kingdom, this book offers insights into how local initiatives can enhance sustainable development and engage people in creating better places in which to live. Demonstrating how to embed sustainability in all levels of education, this account contains imaginative, practical, and accessible ways in which communities and built-environment professionals are working towards a more sustainable future. Themes such as sustainable development, community coherence, conflict resolution, planning, and environmental management will interest those in a variety of fields, including architecture, urban design, and geography.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Hertfordshire Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781907396502

Book preview

First published in Great Britain in 2011 by

University of Hertfordshire Press

College Lane

Hatfield

Hertfordshire

AL10 9AB

© Copyright the individual contributors 2011.

The right of Robert Rogerson, Sue Sadler, Anne Green and Cecilia Wong to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-907396-13-7

Design by Arthouse Publishing Solutions

Printed in Great Britain by Hobbs the Printers Ltd

Contents

List of illustrations

Notes on the editors

Notes on the contributors

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Peter Roberts

Chapter 1 Learning about sustainable communities

Robert Rogerson, Sue Sadler, Anne Green and Cecilia Wong

Creating sustainable communities

Learning from what works

Skills for sustainable communities

Reading the book

Looking forward towards sustainable communities

SECTION I LEARNING AS PROFESSIONALS

Chapter 2 Educating built environment professionals for stakeholder engagement

Sarah Sayce and Judith Farren-Bradley

Professionals

Working within a changing context

Stakeholder engagement in practice

Professional education for stakeholder engagement

Sites of learning: (i) practice

Sites of learning: (ii) the role of higher education

Necessities, opportunities and initiatives

Chapter 3 Generic skills and workplace learning: supporting professional development through online learning communities

Ann Hockey, Carlos Jimenez-Bescos, Janice Maclean and Martin Spaul

Introduction

Exploring the skills agenda

Trial learning experiment

Discussion: re-skilling, resources and commitments

Chapter 4 Developing the learning potential of strategic environmental assessment in spatial planning

Sue Kidd, Thomas Fischer and Urmila Jha-Thakur

Introduction

A framework for understanding learning through SEA

Learning in SEA: reflections from the case studies

Developing the learning potential of SEA

Chapter 5 Situated learning and the delivery of built environments for sustainable communities

Ian Smith

Introduction

Learning, knowledge and doing things differently

Producing new growth points

SECTION II LEARNING TO WORK TOGETHER

Chapter 6 Understanding and experimenting with skills for community planning

Brendan Murtagh and Geraint Ellis

Introduction

Skills, cohesion and ethnic space

The state of the skills gap

Confronting the challenge of identity and place

A framework for skills and ethnic space?

Conclusions

Chapter 7 Raising catchment consciousness: how imaginative engagement can help sustainable use of rivers

Paul Selman, Claudia Carter, Clare Morgan and Anna Lawrence

Introduction

Community participation in river management and planning

Raising catchment consciousness: creative writing and the river Dearne

Arts-based participatory approaches

Social learning through creative writing

A lasting legacy? The impact of imaginative engagement

Deriving benefits from imaginative engagement

Chapter 8 Confronting sustainable community issues in a contested city

Ken Sterrett and Frank Gaffikin

Introduction and background

Planning regeneration

Towards a new model of engagement

Learning through practice

Cohesion and community engagement

Confronting sustainable community

Chapter 9 ‘Chain gang conservation’: young people and environmental volunteering

Michael Leyshon and Robert Fish

Introduction

Research background

Problematising volunteering: the making of communities of practice?

Pathways to participation in rural environmental conservation

Chapter 10 Action research to promote leadership and agency in developing sustainable schools and communities

Barry Percy-Smith

Introduction

Developing a framework of sustainability learning and change with young people

Exploring the praxis of sustainability education: action research as a strategy for leadership and learning for change

Learning from learning in action

Chapter 11 The future of sustainable communities

Robert Rogerson and Sue Sadler

Skills and learning

Visions of sustainable communities

Leadership and envisioning

Taking forward sustainable communities

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1.1 Key requirements of sustainable communities

1.2 UK Government proposals using the ‘sustainable community’ concept

1.3 The Egan Wheel: components of sustainable communities

2.1 Generic skills: The Egan Review, ‘Skills for Sustainable Communities’

2.2 Skills gaps

2.3 Adequacy of the current skill base: the stakeholders’ viewpoint

2.4 Adequacy of the current skill base: the professionals’ viewpoint

3.1 A communal, participatory approach to generic skills development

4.1 Framework for understanding learning through strategic environmental assessment

4.2 Kolb’s theory of experiential learning

4.3 A taxonomy of learning in SEA

4.4 Assessment of the learning outcomes of the SEA process in the Southampton, Brunswick and Ravenna case studies

4.5 Barriers to learning in SEA: findings from the case study interviews

5.1 Expertise and learning episodes

6.1 Principles of good practice for intercultural community engagement

6.2 Cohesion-building competencies for core practitioners

6.3 Assessment of general skills on the Egan framework: Northern Ireland

6.4 Assessment of skills for managing community conflict

6.5 Assessment of skills for managing community division

6.6 Springfarm development planning phases

6.7 A potential framework for diversity planning

7.1 Extract 1 from My River Dearne, Anthology, Dearne Valley Writing Group

7.2 Extract 2 from My River Dearne, Anthology, Dearne Valley Writing Group

8.1 Participatory planning for sustainable communities - phases

8.2 Mount Vernon mural photo

9.1 Youth participation in rural environmental conservation: networks, pathways and identities

9.2 Demographic profile of conservation volunteers/unpaid workers up to 25 years of age (n=83)

9.3 Activities undertaken and capacities shaped through conservation activities

9.4 Facilitating the environmental conservation sector

10.1 Children improving their school grounds

10.2 Children critically assessing how sustainable their school is

10.3 Case study: inquiring into sustainable food

10.4 Encouraging sustainable shopping habits

10.5 Chipping sustainable community group

11.1 An evolving vision of sustainable communities

Notes on the editors

A team of academics at three universities, led by Dr Robert Rogerson, coordinated research on skills and knowledge for sustainable communities across a range of disciplines and expertise across the UK. This book presents a reflective analysis of both the detailed individual research projects and a much broader view of what has been learned across the initiative. The coordination of the initiative enabled the contributors to meet and share their research orientations and the coordinating team continued a rigorous and ongoing debate about the conclusions that could be drawn across the initiative. The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) jointly funded the research initiative in partnership with the HCA Academy, the skills arm of the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA).

Robert Rogerson is Senior Lecturer in Geography at the University of Strathclyde where he leads research on communities and sustainability. His research interests include urban policy and community, the role of the third sector in community development and changing sustainable behaviour. He has published widely on urban quality of life studies.

Sue Sadler is a researcher at the University of Strathclyde and an independent evaluation consultant. Her research interests include rural and sustainable development, the third sector and social accounting.

Anne Green is Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Employment Research, University of Warwick. Her research interests include urban, rural and regional development; local and regional labour markets; trends in employment and non-employment; the demand for and supply of skills; mobility, migration and commuting; and evaluation studies - including area regeneration and welfare to work initiatives. She is a member of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills Expert Panel.

Cecilia Wong is Professor of Spatial Planning and Director of the Centre for Urban Policy Studies at the University of Manchester. Her research interests include urban quantitative indicators and policy monitoring, housing needs and demand associated with neighbourhood change.

Notes on the contributors

The chapters in this book build on research funded through a joint initiative into Skills and Knowledge for Sustainable Communities by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Homes and Communities Agency. Notes on the leading authors and other contributors are given below, together with the reference for the final report for each project, which can be found at www.esrc.ac.uk.

Ann Hockey is Senior Lecturer in Spatial Planning at Anglia Ruskin University. Her research interests include workplace learning and skills for planning practice. She worked on this project with colleagues in the Department of the Built Environment: Ian Frame, Martin Spaul, Carlos Jimenez-Bescos and Janice Maclean. Inspire East was the principal external organisation engaged in the research. The project researched and developed web-based resources to support built environment professionals engaging with sustainable communities. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0009.

Sue Kidd is a chartered town planner and Head of Discipline for Civic Design at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include strategic spatial planning and sustainable development. She collaborated in the preparation of the chapter with colleagues in the Department of Civic Design, Professor Thomas Fischer and Dr Urmila Jha-Thakur. Local authorities in Southampton, Ravenna and Brunswick collaborated in the research. The project examined the learning potential of appraisal in spatial planning and provided a framework for assessment. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0018.

Michael Leyshon is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Exeter. His research interests include the ways in which young people become excluded from society. He worked with colleague Robert Fish (Senior Research Fellow in Politics) on this project, which examined what motivates young people to engage in voluntary conservation activities, the skills and values cultivated and the potential for impact on sustainable rural development. Key partners in the research included local authority youth and economic development services, Young Farmers Clubs, and the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0007.

Brendan Murtagh is a chartered town planner and Reader at the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research interests include urban regeneration, conflict and community participation. His departmental colleague Dr Geraint Ellis worked with him on this project, which examined regional planning practice in managing ethno-spatial diversity in Northern Ireland and proposed a skills framework for wider geographical application. Government departments in both Northern Ireland and the UK engaged with the research. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0019.

Barry Percy-Smith is Reader in Childhood and Participatory Practice at the SOLAR Centre for Action Research and Participatory Development at the University of the West of England. He collaborated with SOLAR colleague Professor Danny Burns for this research. The project examined how behaviour change in communities could be maximised through action research in sustainable development in schools. Key partners included schools, Peacechild International, Eco Schools, the WWF and Global to Local. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0038.

Sarah Sayce is Professor and Head of the School of Surveying & Planning at Kingston University. She also chairs the Centre for Sustainable Communities Achieved through Integrated Professional Education (C-SCAIPE), where her colleague Judith Farren-Bradley is Research Director. This research reviewed the generic skills developed and assessed in programmes leading to professional qualifications and in continuing professional development and investigated the views of practitioners and stakeholders about the application of such skills in practice. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0024.

Paul Selman is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Landscape at the University of Sheffield. He worked with colleague Rowena Bailey from the Department of Landscape, with Anna Lawrence and Claudia Carter from Forest Research and with Clare Morgan from Kellogg College, University of Oxford, on this research project. Creative writing was used to assist participants in learning about the history and environment of a local river and the approach was assessed for its contribution to long-term social learning and river catchment management. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0006.

Ian Smith is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Planning and Architecture of the University of the West of England, Bristol. The research, conducted in Devon, explored how individuals learn in the workplace and how such learning can be facilitated. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0021.

Ken Sterrett is Senior Lecturer in Planning and Design at the School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering (SPACE) at Queen’s University, Belfast. His research interests include participatory and community planning and he is active in local community-based regeneration groups. He worked with Frank Gaffikin, Professor of Spatial Planning at SPACE. The project focused on four communities in Belfast and explored community building within divided cities, examining the skills, knowledge and ability needed to make communities more coherent. ESRC Grant Reference RES-182-25-0037.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the contribution of all those who participated in the research projects that led to this volume; in schools, conservation and sustainability projects as well as communities of place and profession. We are grateful to referees who have helped us to reflect on the overall development of sustainable communities and for the willingness of all the individual contributors to respond to our requests.

This book would not have existed without the support and encouragement of the ESRC and the HCA in funding the initiative programme, and especially Peter Roberts who has helped to champion the research. Finally, we thank Jane Housham and the team at University of Hertfordshire Press for seeing the potential in the study as it emerged and their support and guidance.

The Editors

Foreword

Peter Roberts

Although the publication of the Egan Review of ‘Skills for Sustainable Communities’ in 2004 is often seen as marking a major shift in both the direction of policy and the nature of its implementation, what it proposed was very much a reflection of many years of development of both theory and practice.

The roots of sustainable communities thinking and ways of working go deep. From the late nineteenth century to the present day, politicians, practitioners and academics alike have grappled with the many difficulties associated with the creation and management of places in order to ensure that they continue to offer a high quality of life to all residents: rich or poor, young or old, engaged or disaffected, influential or powerless.

Ebenezer Howard tried to deliver what he called the ‘social city’ in the form of new and expanded towns, whilst other pioneers, such as Patrick Abercrombie and many of his mid-twentieth-century contemporaries, sought to produce other forms of balanced community. However, despite the good intentions of many, progress in relation to the creation of communities has often been difficult and patchy, and some interventions have had unintended negative consequences. With the benefit of hindsight - which is always a good thing to have in advance of taking decisions - some schemes for comprehensive redevelopment might not have proceeded at all or, at best, would have been implemented at a reduced scale and at a more moderate pace. Equally, if some of the negative consequences of building mass single-tenure peripheral housing estates had been anticipated, then it might have been decided that smaller, mixed-tenure, balanced communities would represent a better option. Although post-1945 planning and housing policy had many successes, there were also failures and a general unwillingness to question the dominant ethic.

What Egan did was to raise the level of debate about many of these long-standing issues and, at the same time, offer a set of alternative approaches that when taken together addressed the issue of what a sustainable community might look like and how it might be delivered. In essence, such places can be seen as the spatial manifestation of sustainable development; to put it in words used by the proponents of sustainable communities, places where people want to live and work, now and in the future. As is demonstrated by the contributions to this book, this working out and delivery of sustainable development for places takes many forms.

The Egan agenda fleshed out the earlier Sustainable Communities Plan and also paid attention to how best to provide the skills and knowledge required in order to ensure the effective delivery of policy. A key element in the delivery of skills and knowledge was the establishment, in 2005, of the Academy for Sustainable Communities (now part of the Homes and Communities Agency).

Following the establishment of the Academy, it became evident that the quickest and most cost-effective route to tapping the understanding, insight and imagination of academic and practice researchers, with regard to the skills and knowledge required to create and maintain sustainable communities, would be to fund a series of projects that examined alternative pathways to a more sustainable future. Working in partnership with the Economic and Social Research Council, the Academy developed the details of a research programme and then identified and funded eleven projects that would attempt to tap existing knowledge and push forward our collective understanding of how sustainable communities might be delivered.

The chapters in this book reflect the many findings, insights and lessons for policy and practice that emerged from the eleven projects. Each project addressed specific research questions and was set in a particular place or places. As a consequence of this diversity of both subject and location, the sum of the projects offers a ‘rich picture’ of what exists or should be provided in terms of the skills and knowledge required to create and maintain sustainable communities. These lessons are equally relevant in old and new places, and are valued under different policy regimes. Irrespective of the particular method of approach or mode of practice followed by national or local politicians and policy-makers, there is an overriding need to ensure that local people have the skills and knowledge that they require in order to deliver sustainable communities. As ever, local solutions work best, but they need to be informed local solutions that benefit from the wealth of practice experience elsewhere.

This is an important book because it represents a link to the good (and bad) practices of the past, offers lessons for the present and provides pathways to successful localities. It offers a comprehensive and highly accessible guide to the wealth of experience that exists and it contributes to the writing of the future history of sustainable communities.

1 Learning about sustainable communities

Robert Rogerson, Sue Sadler, Anne Green and Cecilia Wong

In the forty years since the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) adopted a mandate with the aim of achieving the highest sustainable quality of life and the perpetuation and enhancement of the living world, the notion of sustainability achieved through the process of sustainable development has progressively moved to the forefront of international and national government planning. It has become the concern, too, of business leaders and non-governmental organisations at a variety of spatial scales.

Despite the passage of time, there remains no single accepted definition of what sustainable development is, although the Brundtland Report’s definition from 1987 is probably the most widely quoted: ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Indeed, this very lack of precision in both its definition and practice makes the notion of ‘sustainable development’ and ‘sustainability’ as a goal all the more attractive - but with its own difficulties. As the 2006 IUCN report, ‘Renowned Thinkers Meeting’, commented:

the concept is holistic, attractive, elastic but imprecise. The idea of sustainable development may bring people together but it does not necessarily help them to agree goals. In implying everything sustainable development arguably ends up meaning nothing. (Adams 2006: 3)

Sustainability has become an established ‘brand’ - not only one that expresses an aspiration to manage resources more effectively, but also one that imbues policy making and thinking with sensitivity towards rebalancing environmental, social and economic dimensions. Importantly, too, this brand can help bring about behavioural change by individuals, organisations and governments.

There is agreement that achieving sustainability requires balancing economic, environmental and social goals. Beyond that, however, there is dispute. For some people trade-offs between these dimensions are allowed, whilst others point out that the three dimensions are unequal, with the environment, for example, underpinning both economy and society and presenting a finite limit of human activity, but with economy and society, of course, impacting on the environment. Furthermore, there is no agreed way to measure sustainability and thus define the extent to which sustainable development is being achieved through any set of actions (Campbell 1996).

One of the central dilemmas with sustainable development concerns its vagueness and holistic nature. As Stephen Morse expressed it:

It does make one wonder whether we are perhaps trying to embrace too much. Is it all just appealing theory that spans many ideas, covers many approaches (quantitative and qualitative) and scales (social, spatial or otherwise) and readily absorbs an unlimited deconstruction? If so will sustainable development inevitably be flawed when put into practice? Is the translation from theory to practice impossible given the imperfections of human beings?

(Morse 2009: 126–7)

Concerns about how to put the notions of sustainable development into practice have long been the subject of debate, and after thirty years Hugh Barton (2000: 246) expressed with considerable exasperation:

there is a prevailing lack of determination on the part of the public and private sector agencies who shape the physical environmental to convert the noble (over-rehearsed) rhetoric of sustainable development into practice.

One result has been difficult challenges in connecting critical issues at the global level, such as climate change, with local actions and daily lives where more immediate issues have to be addressed. At the start of the twenty-first century, Barton expressed this as a lack of will. This, he argued, had impeded greater empowerment of local communities and development of partnerships for action, failing to change the prevailing culture of local decision makers and professionals, or to align fiscal priorities and institutional remits with their laudable aims for sustainability.

Barton’s central argument was that government (and thus other people’s) actions and policies are fragmented, often pulling in different directions. Economic development priorities, for instance, reinforce the need for new housing to be concentrated in regions such as the South-East of England where land use pressures are already severe, which, in turn, reinforce its role as the economic powerhouse of the country. And conversely, policies which support greater mixed land use or brownfield site development have been easier to achieve when associated with regeneration of older industrial areas in other parts of the UK than in those areas where people are seeking to live.

Finding ways to bridge the scalar divisions of global and local, and for greater coordination of action alongside local empowerment, lies at the heart of sustainable communities. The intention of creating places that offer high quality of life to residents and contribute to national and global sustainable development principles, as Peter Roberts notes in the foreword, is the essence of the contemporary notion of sustainable communities.

In this book we explore how, in the context of the UK, sustainable communities have emerged as a focus for government policy and for community action. Drawing on research conducted across UK universities and with community-based groups, the chapters offer insights into how local developments can enhance sustainable development and engage people in creating more desirable, higher quality of life places in which to live.

This book not only illustrates some of the trans-disciplinary research that exemplifies this approach, but also presents accessible and practical examples of the processes by which communities and built environment professionals involved in the generation of a more sustainable future are working together, and learning together. It considers how such learning can result in more inclusive, imaginative and desirable places to live, for the residents of today and for future generations. It shows how those involved - both professionals engaged with the construction and maintenance of the built environment, and community members - can work more effectively together to create communities that offer more sustainable futures. And, in so doing, it brings together elements of debates as diverse as sustainable development, education, community coherence and conflict resolution by drawing on the experiences of nine locally based examples from across the UK.

This research has been conducted in a period of political change, where the notion of sustainable communities has been emerging within the political mainstream. Associated with the devolution of powers to the Scottish Parliament and the Assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland, responsibility in government for aspects of policy relating to sustainable development and sustainable communities has become more dispersed. As a result, we make reference to different parts of the UK as relevant, with the geographical descriptor ‘UK’ being used where either action covers all parts, or where there is a shared national approach. Similarly, where reference is made to government, it refers to the UK Labour Government in power from 1997 to 2010, with reference to the current government, elected in May 2010, as the Coalition Government. Whilst acknowledging these political changes, however, we argue that the relevance of the studies extends beyond the specific temporal and spatial frames in which they were conducted.

The first few months of the Coalition Government have seen the institutional structure within which community development and skills policy is set dramatically altered. The Department for Communities and Local Government has signalled, for example, the demise in England of regional development agencies, regional spatial strategies, the Audit Commission, and the Sustainable Development Commission amongst other bodies and agencies. Alongside this, however, the Coalition Government has signalled its support for an agenda of further change in relation to empowering local communities, the role of local government, and partnership working across different sectors of society. In this new environment, the messages of this volume about the different and sustainable ways in which people influence place making are ever more relevant.

This introductory chapter sets out the context within which this research took place. First, we outline the emergence of debates over sustainable communities within the wider policy arena of the UK Government. Government policy has been a major driver for engagement with the goal of sustainability within communities across the UK, shaping and re-shaping approaches to development within environmental, planning and housing contexts. And in this process of re-shaping, political policy has also brought to the forefront connections between skills, knowledge and place making. In the second part, we consider how the research upon which this volume is based was brought about, in terms of both the funding of the studies and the emergence of debates over skills for sustainable communities. Finally, we offer guidance on how,