Planning best practice guide
The key output from the SHAP programme for 2006-07 is the planning best practice guide ‘Planning for sustainable homes: meeting the low carbon challenge’.
The guide has been produced by URBED and the TCPA with extensive support and input from the SHAP steering group and wide ranging stakeholder engagement across the West Midlands region. The guide was launched at the first of two workshops at the BMW Centre on the 20th February 2007.
The aim of this guide is to provide a best practice guide to sustainable energy planning for low carbon homes in the West Midlands. The guide provides a framework of practical energy planning and enabling mechanisms that relate to each tier of planning system and different scales of development opportunity.
Target audience and approach
The guide is aimed at planners and enablers at all levels – from regional through to county, district and borough – as well as senior policy makers, sustainability officers, community strategy officers, regeneration agencies and property developers.
It seeks to provide local authorities and their partner agencies with a framework of practical planning and enabling mechanisms, selected to relate to each tier of the planning system; strategic planning and development control functions; and different scales of development opportunity.
The guide promotes a carbon management-based approach and recommends key actions that could take to install this approach into planning frameworks. This approach is aimed at cutting emissions in-line with headline targets for reductions.
Case studies
In order to demonstrate how this approach could work, the guide draws upon the lessons from over 20 ‘best practice’ case studies – including 14 from planning authorities in the UK, and 6 from planning authorities and major innovative housing schemes in the European Union.
The case studies have been selected to illustrate a number of different aspects of project delivery, complementing the planning and enabling themes of the guide. For each case study the guide highlights the critical success factors.
In order to start to make the link between best practice and current activity ‘on-the-ground’ in the region the guide also identifies a range of West Midlands case studies that illustrate work ‘in-progress’ – ranging from the adoption of new planning policies, to major housing development opportunities.
Download the guide
Below you can download a PDF of the guide and it’s executive summary
Executive summary (PDF 2.4 MB)
Email: admin@swm.org.uk | Tel: 0121 449 4406
