'Community' is a widely used concept within planning, yet the meaning of this word is often unclear and can shift depending on context. This paper presents interim findings from an ongoing RTPI-funded research project exploring how ‘community’ is understood and worked with across different areas of planning practice, and how this shapes both processes and outcomes.

The research draws on the PORTAL framework, developed through earlier work on community-led housing, which understands community as a multi-dimensional spectrum, including physical, organisational, relational, transformational, aspirational and liminal aspects. This project focuses on translating that framework into use within planning, working alongside planners, built environment professionals and community participants to explore how it holds up in practice and where it could prove especially useful.

The paper reports on a series of interviews and a participatory workshop where PORTAL was applied to real planning scenarios. Early findings suggest that the framework helps to make different understandings of community more visible across various planning activities and processes, offering a shared language that can support conversations between professional roles and with communities. It also highlights aspects of community that are present in lived experience but less easily captured within formal processes, prompting reflection on how these might be more fully acknowledged in practice.

Building on this, the research is developing a modular toolkit to support use in practice, combining diagnostics, prompts, facilitation approaches and practical guidance. The next phase will test these tools within live planning contexts in the South West.

In the context of electrical energy demand doubling by 2050, this paper considers the public and social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructure (Batel et al., 2013; Zaharuddin et al., 2025). The focus is on largely urban settlements framed as “left behind”, meaning where knowledge and agency are shaped by people’s attachment to places (Pike et al., 2024). Whilst such places lose out to the economic growth model centred on cities, I argue that their history of industrial infrastructure and related employment may be suited to new transmission, supply plants and storage than more rural settings.

The case is framed historically. Sparsely population areas of north of Scotland pioneered hydro energy in the 1940s and more latterly have contributed hugely to wind energy. However, they have relied on extensive transmission infrastructure. More recent planning hurdles have led developers to complex solutions such as undersea cabling. In comparison, politicians in post-industrial settings look to more emotive messages to harness the local potential of renewable. For example, a Mersey Tidal scheme is framed as providing thousands of jobs and powering every home in Liverpool City Region.

Methodologically, this paper discusses participatory online spaces (Radtke and Bohn, 2026) to help stakeholders to grasp the joins and ruptures in planning systems and related data. The latter is illustrated by a series of workshops and short film led by the author in 2025 to visualise energy supply futures in the Wales and the mountainous region of Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan.

(references available as requested)

Environmental planning systems have traditionally treated technically contentious publics as obstacles to consensus-building and efficient decision-making. Yet communities living alongside environmentally controversial developments increasingly challenge not only the social legitimacy of planning decisions, but also the scientific assumptions underpinning Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) processes themselves. Drawing upon literature from planning theory, environmental justice, science and technology studies, and citizen science, this paper argues that planners should engage more rather than less with such “awkward” publics. In particular, the paper advances the concept of the “community scientist”: locally embedded citizens, campaign groups and non-governmental organisations who gather, interpret and mobilise environmental data from the bottom up, often in collaboration with universities or independent experts. This paper argues that these actors represent an important form of situated and experiential expertise that conventional technocratic planning systems frequently marginalise. Rather than viewing contentious participation as irrational, disruptive or anti-scientific, planners should recognise community science as a potentially valuable form of co-produced environmental knowledge, particularly in relation to air pollution, cumulative impacts and lived environmental risk. The paper further suggests that greater engagement with community scientists reconnects contemporary planning practice with earlier civic planning traditions associated with Patrick Geddes and the principle of “survey before plan”. Ultimately, the paper contends that the future legitimacy of environmental planning may depend upon planners becoming more willing to work with technically informed dissent rather than attempting to neutralise it.

Digbeth, Birmingham, is undergoing rapid transformation. The arrival of the BBC at Typhoo Wharf, major housing and infrastructure investment, and the designation of a Digbeth Growth Zone have brought significant resources and attention to an area whose cultural identity was built not by institutions but by artists, makers, social enterprises and informal networks operating at low cost over decades. This paper asks a pointed question: when cultural communities are recognised as assets within regeneration narratives, does that recognition translate into meaningful influence over the decisions that shape their future?

Drawing on co-creative research undertaken as part of the AHRC Creative Communities Community Innovation Practitioner programme at City-REDI, University of Birmingham, the paper presents empirical evidence from 25 stakeholder interviews, four participatory workshops and walking conversations with cultural practitioners, planners, policymakers and grassroots organisations across 2025–26. It examines the gap between stated commitments to community participation and the practical governance mechanisms — planning obligations, affordable workspace policy, local plan provisions, anchor institution behaviour — that determine whether creative communities stay or are displaced.

The paper argues that participation in regeneration remains largely consultative rather than constitutive. It identifies the conditions under which cultural knowledge moves from being heard to being treated as evidence in planning and investment decisions, and offers transferable lessons for devolved urban governance in the West Midlands and beyond.