As in to ‘win’ a planning consent: to receive permission in the normal way, usually for a particularly meretricious proposal from a particularly desperate planning authority. Rumours that the new National Planning Framework, trailed in the Localism Bill, will introduce a ‘Strictly’ style talent show format into the process are as yet unfounded.
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A New Quarter for... (np)
January 13, 2011A desperate area of usually remote vacant and contaminated land, hitherto occupied by noxious and noisome activities, excluded from the historic development of any urban area, and generally unknown and unloved by all bar Iain Sinclair. Often found accompanied by a fantasy masterplan detaching the area from any relationship to its history or surroundings, and prepared by an ennobled architect who is sometimes good at designing buildings but untested at large scale urban design, and a glossy brochure full of images of improbable comparisons to real places in other parts of the world produced by an increasingly desperate and deluded development company.
Read moreOlympic Legacy (n)
January 13, 2011A vibrant (qv) and growing branch of urban theology whose core belief is that spending a very, very, very large amount of money on sporting venues in a very, very, very, small part of the country, will bring potentially limitless benefits to a potentially limitless number and range of people, or possibly Tottenham Hotspur
Read moreDriving
January 20, 2011(vb) good regeneration never simply occurs, or takes place, it is driven, as in 'driving forward the creation of a new market led tech based new innovation economy for (perm any place out of several hundred)'. In the tradition of regeneration, the amount of driving is usually in inverse proportion to the progress actually acheived. Often it is explicitly 'driven forward' - which tends to means that, in fact, it is likely to end up some distance behind where it started. It is understood that the Localism Bill is introducing the new Coalition concept of 'driving regeneration backward', where it may well have significant success
Read moreGreen Belt (n)
January 13, 2011An invention which served to bring the urban evolution of the UK to a juddering halt as first the automobile, then the decline of industry, and now the growth of technology placed increasingly impossible demands on its obsolete urban shape and structure.
Read moreS106
February 12, 2012A largely futile attempt by planners to get developers to cough up for all the glamorous things the developers promised at the time of the application but had no intention or capacity to deliver. Often part of an attempt by planners to pre-empt a revised planning application.
Read more'Outline' planning consent
February 12, 2012A term, now used ironically, to apply to the process whereby a quick decision on the simple principle of development has been turned into a mammoth existentialist drama which is only resolved, if ever, long after the conditions which spawned the original development proposal have long since departed. Often closely associated with s106
Read moreTo 'win' planning consent
February 12, 2012Exactly when planning consents ceased to be granted, and begun to be 'won', is difficult to establish, but it there does seem to be a telling alignment with the arrival and ascendance of 'X Factor' and similar TV shows . Reports that DCLG are considering adopting a phone -in celebrity-led system of planning decision making as part of a new neighbourhood approach 'to make planning more exciting', have not been denied by Ministers, although stories that Simon Cowell might be enobled in the next Honours List to take charge of this are as yet unconfirmed
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