The Royal Town Planning
Institute in Scotland
Convener’s
message
6 August 2008
This has been a time of meeting new faces. In spite of
occasional doubts and frustrations of our work as planners, there are
rewards. We’ve got to help everyone to
see the value of what the art of planning can do. It’s the link between a far-seeing
inspiration and the careful footwork on the ground here and now. There is no shortage of interest and
enthusiasm about the places in Scotland around
us, but people are puzzled about what their role might be and overawed,
over-sensitized and exasperated by events.
One of the most important tasks is to start to inspire people to get
involved. This may be part of the daily duties of our job, or it may be
something that we do outside it, through Planning Aid, or pursued in other
ways. “We are all citizens” was my theme at Tokyo a couple of years back
and it was clear that while the sense of interdependency and community remains
instinctive in many parts of the world, people don’t always see the point of
taking a more purposeful part in what goes on around them. So to inspire and explain we have to look at
the detail of practical achievements of the past and explore practical possibilities
for the future step by step. The small
drops make up the ocean, those individuals in action
will move the great public and private bodies, the communities and the nations,
just as they have always done.
As well as helping people to help themselves with more
buzz we need to encourage more of them to come into our profession. Barbara Illsley writes of the positive contribution planners around
Scotland are making to planning courses, and more and more are getting involved
in mentoring too. The profession can
draw more students in from related disciplines.. I
spoke last month to a conference workshop of UK
university teachers in the disciplines of Geography, Earth and Environmental
Sciences (GEES) who are keen to relate their world more closely to our
professional world of planning practice.
And we can help to inspire the young, there’s certainly no
shortage of interest and enthusiasm there.
I’m looking at what we might do to develop this with representatives of
other disciplines and with the teaching profession at the moment. In Iceland,
councils pay young people to look after open spaces,
can we learn something from this? Each
small part of Scotland has so many stories to tell, so many educational possibilities within
it, and so many mirrored connections all over the world. Wendy McArthur’s little book “What’s in a
Name” about the origin of the New Zealand streets and suburbs of
Invercargill, Bluff and Otara shows those
fine-grained connections to Scots people and places very clearly. Some training for planners in storytelling
might come in handy. Holidays over, back
to school!
-Roger
Kelly
PS I’m sorry I suggested reading Dr Burns Geddes Lecture in my last column, it can’t be done.
As I and many of you discovered, the text is not available,
though something is now being put together for the record. In his
lecture Dr Burns drew largely from his most recent Annual Report to Scottish
Ministers published last November: you can read this at http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2007/11/15135302/0
Roger
Kelly’s planning website is at www.place.makers.org.uk
Roger
Kelly convenes the Royal Town Planning Institute’s Scottish Executive through
2008.
This
message will appear in the August edition of the Scottish Planner
previous messages: June 2008 April 2008 January 2008
later messages: October 2008