This month’s Smart Infrastructure Blog calls for planners to re-establish roles for the digital age.
Written by CSIC Investigator, Dr Li Wan, Assistant Professor at the Department of Land Economy, the Blog, titled 'Levelling up without planning – a wake-up call for planners', has also been featured as an Opinion article published by New Civil Engineer. Highlighting the UK Government’s recently-published flagship Levelling Up White Paper that aims to spread opportunity and prosperity to all parts of the country, Dr Wan observes: “A quick word search through the Executive Summary reveals that the word ‘planning’ appears only twice, one referring to the protection of Green Belts and another alluding to the seemingly stalled planning reform. The significance and responsibility of spatial planning (of infrastructure and land use) for tackling regional inequalities seems undiscernible in the white paper.”
While the role of planners has diminished over decades, Dr Wan notes that at least – in this latest report planners have not been scapegoated: “Against the backdrop of entrenched regional inequalities and a ‘broken housing market’ across the country, planning has long been criticised as a barrier to local economic growth and housing development.”
The Blog makes the case for change and cites CSIC’s five-year flagship research project Digital Cities for Change, funded by the Ove Arup Foundation that applies a socio-technical approach for identifying competence gaps in the planning, delivery and evaluation of digital-city projects.
In conclusion Dr Wan writes: “Digitalisation in and of cities offers new opportunities for planners to re-establish their roles in promoting social coherence and sustainability, but technology alone would not be sufficient. Critically rethinking the core competence of professional planners in the digital era seems imperative for the survival and revival of the profession in the post-COVID digital era.”
• Read the Smart Infrastructure Blog by Dr Li Wan, ‘Levelling up without planning - a wake-up call for planners’ here.
• Read the New Civil Engineer Opinion article here.