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Designing Places

Planning and design guidance

An important function of the plan is to provide the basis for more detailed guidance on how its policies should be implemented in specific areas and sites. Unless the plan is supported by well conceived supplementary planning guidance (SPG), it is likely to have little effect on what is actually built.

SPG is additional advice provided by the local authority on a particular topic, explaining policies in a development plan. SPG includes urban design frameworks, development briefs, master plans and design guides. It must be consistent with the plan, prepared in consultation with the public and formally approved by the council. SPG status gives guidance considerable weight as a material consideration in the planning process.

Such guidance can be prepared by local authorities, landowners, developers, regeneration partnerships, development agencies, and business and community organisations, individually or jointly. Its clarity should benefit all of them. The best guidance will involve all relevant parties, whoever is formally responsible for it.

The choice of the appropriate type of guidance will depend on its purpose; on the stage of the planning and development process in relation to that particular site or area; and on the resources and skills available for preparing it. Those criteria will help determine who will prepare the guidance; who else needs to be involved; by what processes it will be prepared; and what formal status it will have.

The best of Scotland's tradition of making successful places was the result of a variety of designers or builders working with a degree of freedom within a framework of rules. These rules governed such matters as the layout of an area, the size of plots, the height of buildings, building materials and the line of building frontages. Sometimes the controls were set out by a landowner wanting to ensure that the value of the estate was not compromised by messy, thoughtless or substandard development. In other cases they were embodied in municipal building regulations motivated by requirements of public health, by architectural vision and by civic pride.

Those traditional controls may no longer operate, having been replaced by the planning system. Their legacy, however, convinces us that shaping the setting for life in cities, towns and villages in the modern age depends on us devising frameworks of our own. A range of possibilities exists. We must tailor them to whatever is appropriate in the circumstances and at the particular stage in the design, planning and development process.

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