People-powered:

People-powered:

Daisy Froud, strategist specialising in brief development, community engagement and participatory design

Our planning system is supposed to be an arbiter of competing interests. But when it comes to people’s perceptions, they feel excluded and mistrust it. Perhaps that is because it takes decisions on people’s behalf but often not in their perceived interests, Daisy suggests. The pandemic has pushed planning online disadvantaging many. Yet planning remains ‘a good thing’. We need to restore trust in it by engaging people earlier, she argues, with ‘big public conservations’ about our most important issues.