Community engagement encourages active discussion within affected communities about the plans, policies and projects that are changing their community. These interactions may be formal – such as public consultations – or informal like neighbourhood groups with local authority personnel attending. The most important thing is that participation is led by the community themselves, even if it is sometimes facilitated by others.
Given community is at the heart of community engagement, understanding the specific local context should be the first step in any community engagement strategy. That’s why it is important to take a place-based approach:
What Does a Place-Based Approach to Community Engagement Mean?
Taking a place-based approach to community engagement is about more than making a “laundry-list” of issues. Instead, a place-based approach is about developing a thorough understanding of an often complex local context, and then centring your community engagement strategy around what is most relevant for that area.
Placed-based approaches prioritise having a deep understanding of the area and local people in question. That may be as large as a whole constituency or as specific as a neighbourhood. While places within a region may share common features, there are lots of ways in which areas just miles apart may differ significantly.
Economic inequality, demographics of race and religion, the average age of the population, and the types of industry common to the area are just some of the ways in which different places within a town or city can vary. Between cities and constituencies, these differences can be even starker, encompassing natural geography, climate, environmental sustainability factors and the historical context of the area.
Place based initiatives seek to consider all of these factors at the heart of an engagement strategy, putting aside copy-paste policies and embracing differences, while also addressing demographic divides.
Why Is Having A Place Based Approach Important?
Having a place based framework inherently creates a collaborative process. It builds on the knowledge and understanding of a wide range of people within a given place. Getting different perspectives on an area allows the diversity of needs, desires and opinions of the local community to fully come through when conducting engagement activities.
Other benefits of place based strategies are:
- Ensures each policy or plan developed with the aid of an engagement strategy is suitable for the area.
- Strengthens relationships between stakeholders in the area by building trust and collaboration at the local level.
- Empowers communities by giving residents an active role in shaping their environment.
- Increases the relevance and effectiveness of policies and plans by addressing specific local needs and opportunities.
- Encourages inclusion and demonstrates representation by drawing on diverse perspectives to create context-specific solutions.
A Place-Based Approach to Planning
Planning requires local government and other public bodies to have a thorough understanding of the communities, service providers and localities impacted by planning decisions. With the new 2024 NPPF reforms, place-based planning takes on a new layer of importance in the Local Plans process.
Place-based approaches to planning can flag issues that may otherwise have been missed until it was too late. It can also demonstrate opportunities to address community needs that had previously gone unnoticed.
Planning decisions have the power to make or break a community. It is therefore essential that policy-makers get it right, and that means centring ‘place’ within planning. Participatory mapping as a community engagement tool is a key way to achieve this, harnessing geospatial mapping to give policy-makers a deeper understanding of the areas local plans will affect.
A Place-Based Approach to Healthcare
Healthcare is an area of policy that has to consider ‘place’ quite significantly in order to provide a good standard of service. Different areas have different healthcare needs, particularly where there is significant income inequality or other factors likely to impact public health.
“There is a critical role for local areas to play in reducing health inequalities across the life course, by taking a joined-up place-based approach.” – Report by Public Health England.
In Australia for instance, it’s essential to consider a place-based approach from both a human perspective and as it’s enshrined within government legislature. This is due to the country’s broad land mass, deprived areas, promotion of aid for the indigenous population and enormous pockets of isolated, rural communities.
A Place-Based Approach to Policing
Embracing ‘place’ is an essential for police community engagement. Policing is significantly impacted by local context. If a police force understands an area well, then it is possible to use resources effectively and make sure they are present when and where they are needed.
For police forces, a combination of effective communication with the public and the use of geospatial mapping tools to map crime can be an incredibly effective way to improve results with little cost.
Other Place-Based Approaches
Other use cases for adopting a place-based approach to community engagement include education, transportation, environmental policy, and many others.
Almost every area of public policy must consider local context, as understanding the unique challenges and opportunities within a community is essential. Particularly when addressing disparities and differences in public services, centring ‘place’ through community engagement delivers policy that really works.
How to Take A Place-Based Approach to Community Engagement
Spatial Planning
Spatial planning is the process of managing the development and use of land and space to meet the needs of communities while balancing other economic, environmental, and social objectives that a given council or public body might have.
It involves setting out a comprehensive vision for an area that considers all aspects of the planning process, enabling effective Local Plans and Neighbourhood Plans. Spatial planning requires strong community engagement to ensure that new developments and policies align with the needs and priorities of the community.
Digital citizen engagement platforms facilitate consultations, providing accessible online spaces for the public to review plans, submit feedback, and contribute to decision-making. All spatial planning necessitates a ‘place-based approach’, and therefore the most effective tools for spatial planning are geospatial.
Participatory Mapping and Geospatial Tools
The ability to use maps and geospatial mapping tools during a consultation or engagement activity is extremely valuable to both facilitators and participants. When taking a place-based approach to these activities, particularly when engaging communities, they are essential.
Geospatial mapping allows participants to answer questions by drawing on a map or dropping a pin to indicate specific locations. There are various uses for these tools as a citizen engagement activity.
For example, respondents may be asked what areas they feel are unsafe due to crime, and geospatial mapping allows them to highlight specific streets and hotspots. This can then be used to inform community policing in the area.
Another example could be citizens reporting on traffic levels, letting planners know what areas are consistently becoming congested or where there is dangerous driving. This would help to effectively plan traffic calming measures and public transport priorities.
Other common uses include:
- Reporting on where there is excessive litter or fly-tipping.
- Demonstrating what areas are at risk from flooding, and planning flood defenses.
- Showing commutes to plan bus routes more effectively.
- Developing and getting feedback on a Local Development Plan.
Geospatial tools can also be used to demonstrate ideas and plans to a community in order to gather feedback. A community may respond very differently to the building of a new school or designated green lands depending on whether or not they know exactly where these would be.
Participatory mapping allows a community to feel involved in the planning process, improving trust and creating outcomes that centre community and ‘place’. Community engagement strategies that use mapping activities often see a higher response rate as respondents are helped to visualise the process.
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are now commonly used for delivering services within government. Mapped data must therefore be easily translatable between systems to ensure it is functional for all potential users, which is why geospatial tools must correspond well with the geospatial ecosystem as a whole.
“Participatory and community mapping has emerged as a key tool for identifying and communicating development needs and been further recognized as a means to support social change” – Logan Cochrane and Jon Corbett
How Police Scotland Has Used GIS Data To Revolutionise Its Approach To Policing: A Case Study
Police Scotland implemented a community engagement strategy that used a mixture of surveys and geospatial tools in order to take a place-based approach to policing.
As part of their ‘Your Police Survey’, they asked respondents a variety of questions about policing in their area. They also asked them to highlight areas of concern by marking locations on an interactive map. This approach allowed people to more easily describe their experiences, without the need to struggle to describe locations and areas.
Since Police Scotland began using a digital engagement platform and using the digital tools available to them, they have seen a 500% increase in engagement.
Surveys
Surveys are another way to ensure a place-based approach to community engagement. By asking citizens to share what their priorities and concerns are for their local area, facilitators can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the area as a whole.
Questions like ‘what are the biggest issues affecting your neighbourhood?’ and ‘what kinds of developments would your community benefit from?’ help paint a picture of the needs a specific area has. Just as no two responses will be the same, neither are two areas, necessitating a strategy that accounts for this.
Survey responses are useful for getting large amounts of qualitative data and giving facilitators a greater understanding of the local area. Surveys can also be paired with the geospatial tools discussed above to create more dynamic data.
Potential Difficulties in Implementing A Place-Based Approach
There are some potential difficulties in taking a place-based approach to planning and engagement. The two foremost difficulties to address are:
- Decision-makers are often somewhat removed from the areas they make decisions for, and do not necessarily have a personal understanding of the place. This makes consulting the community essential, but also makes it difficult to know where to begin.
- A representative community engagement activity will reflect the diversity and complexity of an area in its respondents, but it is often difficult to gain traction in marginalised communities and therefore uptake may be lower in these groups.
Both of these issues can be addressed by having a comprehensive community engagement strategy, which allows the community themselves to lead discussion. Engaging key stakeholders and community leaders can allow gaps in knowledge or participation to be addressed.
Citizen Space is the go-to platform for connecting governments, developers, and citizens. If you’d like to learn more about how our software streamlines public engagement and provides planners with enriched geospatial data, book a free demo and we’ll walk you through it.
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