Here and There

The further you go back in history, the fewer women you see. This trend is reflected in art, literature, science – and planning. We know that women have been around all the time, because there’s a lot of oil paintings of them lounging about in the nude; but we rarely see their work or hear about their thoughts or stories.  Their ideas are not obfuscated by the mists of time or lost to the annals of history; they were rarely recorded or preserved in the first place. Some of this phenomenon is due to the societal restrictions placed on women; prevented from accessing education and excluded from the workplace, they may not have produced work on the same scale as men. However, any work they did produce was also not treated with the same seriousness. Their art was just a pastime, their writing merely a hobby; it wasn’t to be viewed with the reverence reserved for the gleaming brilliance of male thought. Can you name a famous female planner from history? Of course you can – it’s Ja...

Imagine this: you get home ready to binge on a great TV show on Netflix, but someone else has already chosen what you’re going to watch. They always choose what you watch – the people who decide do so at meetings that you are not able to attend. You can ‘have your say’ but only after reading a 200-page document and navigating a clunky web interface. You’re desperate to tell them that you’d rather watch season 2 of Stranger Things than a documentary film portraying sugar as the physical incarnation of Satan, but they make it so hard. If the UK planning system was an online streaming service we’d have cancelled our direct debits long ago. We all inhabit this world and should all have equal opportunities to shape it. By being time-consuming, inconvenient and opaque, the planning system is unwittingly undemocratic and unfair. Localism and neighbourhood planning were ostensibly created to give more people a role in shaping their communities, but it is increasingly evident that these systems...