Prospect magazine scours Scotland for its Carbuncles Awards. The infamous Plook on the Plinth is awarded to the place deemed worst for planning and architecture. Glenrothes was the winner this ye...

With ever more sources of information swilling around - printed journals, e-bulletins, blogs - it's all too easy to get swamped trying to keep abreast of what's happening in your own field, let alo...

Richard Wilson and Alice Casey of the participation thinktank Involve have hit the nail on the head in their article in The Guardian about government outsourcing of consultation and community eng...

I've just finished a small job for Fife Council Development Services as part of a team with TPS Planning, summarising and analysing the consultation responses to the initial 'Issues and Options' ...

It's good to see that community engagement in planning is making the national press - Scotland's Sunday Herald is now getting in on the act too, with an article about the fashionably named Sustai...

Community engagement is about a whole range of ways of communicating. On the one side, local communities are hugely diverse - in any one area affected by a development proposal or a new strategy,...

We now have a new suite of spending plans and national policy from the Scottish Government, focussed on the Scottish Budget Spending Review 2007 and the Government Economic Strategy. Planning ha...

A common refrain amongst the planning profession, even my more enlightened colleagues. But I believe this myth has no place in 21st century planning. Over the last five years, reforms to the sta...

The Global Cities exhibition at the Tate Modern proves that the public can be engaged in thorny questions of future planning strategy. It poses really big questions about the future of cities - d...

Here's my Foreword to Planning Aid for Scotland's Annual Review, written in my role as chairman... Scottish planning has had a busy year. We have new planning legislation which contains the promis...