Soapbox
My interest in 'spaces and places' is both professional and personal; I worked as a developer, in public regeneration and as a consultant. My interest was in the practicalities of organisation and the hydraulics of viability and funding.
Towards the end of my career, I did quite a bit of coaching and teaching; my victims ranged from the Civil Servants and the Planning Inspectorate to local authority planners, developers and university post-graduates.
Here are links to a small selection of the material on development economics and delivery strategies that I used. Most of this is quite old now, and a lot of the hard data and references to regulations are out of date, but the general analysis is still mostly relevant, and website analytics tell me that people still look for them. I hope you find it expressed here in rather more accessible terms than in the dreary and theoretical textbooks. The links will take you to my OneDrive repository. They are safe.
My recent thoughts (2024) on Labour Party proposals to rationalise local government and accelerate the planning system.
An 80+ page guide to development viability appraisals, what they tell you and what they don't, prepared as background material for lectures I gave at various universities, to civil servants and to local authorities through their training networks. It also supported a module I created for the RTPI CPD programme. This last edit dates to 2016. The numbers have changed since but the logic hasn't.
Delivery Strategies for Masterplans and Area Action Plans.
Written for the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors in 2008. They sanitised this a bit.
Personal practice note on how / if good design affects the value of a scheme, originally written for planning and architect clients.
Development Freakenomics Part 1.
Article for Town & Country Planning magazine on common misconceptions about development economics among town planners and architects. 2012
Development Freakenomics Part 2.
Ditto. 2013
Personal Practice Note on the provision of workshops, studios and small offices. 2010. The main change since then has been the growth of shared workspaces.
Planning and job creation – alternatives to the standard menu
Article for Town & Country Planning Magazine on alternative approaches to stimulating employment through the town planning system. 2012.