Local Visions:
Birmingham’s Neighbourhood Planning Toolkit

I worked for Birmingham Community Matters alongside designer Kerry Leslie, the membership organisation Locality, and Birmingham City Council’s Neighbourhood Development and Support Unit. Together we produced www.localvisions.co.uk - a Neighbourhood Planning Toolkit to support residents in Birmingham to explore the possibilities of Neighbourhood Planning. The government department that was then called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities funded us.

A Neighbourhood Plan is a document that sets out a community’s wishes for the use and development of land in a designated area. It can include policies for protecting green spaces, protecting or developing community facilities, and allocating sites for housing. Once a Neighbourhood Plan is ‘made’ (brought into force), council planners must take its policies into account when they make planning decisions for that area.

My main role in creating Local Visions was writing and editing: taking complex information and making it easy to understand and inspiring. I worked closely with a Locality planning expert as well as Birmingham City Council planners to ensure the website shows what is possible for people to achieve using Neighbourhood Planning - as well as its limitations. We talked to people already engaged in Neighbourhood Planning in Birmingham to ensure the website addressed and reflected their own challenges and experiences.