What is Shape My Town?
Welcome to Shape My Town! This practical guide will help you to play a part in shaping the future of the places that matter to you. It will give you tools and ideas to explore, discuss and transform your town, village or neighbourhood in Wales and beyond.
Read this page in Welsh
Shape My Town is a ‘how to’ guide giving you the tools to explore your place, identify what makes it unique and to contribute to its future.
Get together! Join with people in your community and set up a ‘Plan Team’.
Explore! Investigate the quality of your place, town, village or neighbourhood and it’s potential.
Talk to others! Gathering the opinions of local people and organisations is vital in considering change.
Make your voice heard! A clear vision and plan for your place will help you communicate and implement your vision. It will help you talk to your Council, Local Authority or developers, and can be useful if you’re looking for funding
Be inspired! Check out our case studies to inspire you and your community to make a difference to your town, from small scale and ‘Do It Yourself’ to larger transformational projects. Plus, there are lots of practical tips and links to get you connected and help you along the way.
Tell us what you’re up to! Let us know about any events or projects you are involved in. We’d love to hear from you, contact us or tag your project #shapemytown on social media!
Who is Shape My Town for?
This toolkit is for town and community councils, local residents, community groups and residents’ associations embarking on producing a vision for their place or a ‘Place Plan’ as part of planning policy. It can help you consider how your town, village or neighbourhood could become more sustainable and improve its social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being.
Are you:
An individual or community group keen to explore the future of your place?
A local business group aiming to influence a strategy for making improvements to your town centre?
A Town Council making a Place Plan or responding to a planning application
A Local Authority preparing a local plan?
A community group considering taking over land or an asset?
A developer seeking to better understand a place in which you are investing?
An organisation aiming to develop a sustainable future for a community?
Then Shape My Town could be for you!
SHAPING GROSMONT
The challenge: How can a pop-up event help collect the stories and ideas from local people?
Why Shape My Town?
Shape My Town aims to help you think about change. It provides practical guidance for anyone wishing to investigate the quality of their place, town, village or neighbourhood and to inspire you to plan for its future. Many places have a strong sense of community purpose, but local people are often not actively engaged in planning or development processes. By getting involved you can make a difference.
The future success of your place will also depend on how it can adapt to changes associated with climate. More frequent extreme weather events, flooding and changing temperatures have brought issues of climate to the fore, reflected in the Welsh Government’s Climate Emergency declaration and similar declarations made by many organisations nationally and globally. Considering energy sources, mitigating the risk of flooding and developing the resilience to cope with extreme weather events, will help to make your area more adaptable. But sustainability is about more than just the environment; it is about the social, economic and cultural aspects of your place too:
“Delivering great places that support the environmental, social, economic and cultural sustainability of settlements and their inhabitants has a key role to play in delivering the goals of the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. Our built and natural environments, clean air, decent homes, good transport, health and education services are the foundation of the quality of life we all need to thrive. There is more to do, plenty of room for improvement and a necessity for acceleration in the face of climate and biodiversity risk.”
Julie James MS, Ministerial Forward, in: DCFW, Places for Life 2, p.4.
Through the Shape My Town process, you can develop a plan to help shape the future of your place, making it a great place for you, local people and visitors to live, work and play, now and into the future.
THE RAILWAY STREET PROJECT, SPLOTT, CARDIFF
The challenge: How can a derelict site be reimagined as a multi-use community space?
Image: Mud and Thunder
What could you achieve?
Big rewards can come from getting involved in planning the future of your place. Not only can it enhance community well-being, support the local economy and build community resilience, but it can bring a community together around shared ideas for the future and help your place to thrive.
“The way places are planned, designed, developed and managed has the potential to positively shape where and how people will live, work, socialise, move about and engage. Placemaking is ensuring that each new development or intervention contributes positively to creating or enhancing environments within which people, communities, businesses and nature can thrive. It places people at the heart of the process and results in places that are vibrant, have a clear identity and where people can develop a sense of belonging.”
DCFW, Placemaking Guide, p.6.
A community-led plan for your place offers the opportunity for the people who know a place best to create a shared vision for its future. Through gathering information, building evidence, and engaging with local people, you can appraise your town’s strengths and weaknesses and explore the opportunities and threats to your place. Drawing on your place’s potential, you can produce a plan supported by clear objectives. You may wish to develop your plan as part of the planning process in Wales. The extent of your engagement with Shape My Town is for your group to decide.
Shape My Town can support you to:
Gather evidence about your area to understand its character and what challenges and opportunities exist in your place
Talk to the wider community and stakeholders about their experiences, how the area may develop, and what needs to be done for the future well-being of the community
Agree how you want the different aspects of your place to be in the future
Agree a community-led plan to work towards this future, including, where relevant, an action plan to set out how identified ambitions are going to be enabled.
The planning system in Wales manages the development and use of land in the public interest[1]. It prioritises long term collective benefit, contributing to improving economic, social, environmental and cultural well-being of places across the country. Each Local Authority prepares a Local Development Plan (LDP), setting out proposals and policies for future development in their area based on economic, social and environmental data. Through the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015, public bodies are required to think long-term and to work effectively with communities and local people, meaning all public bodies must consider what they do in a sustainable way. By considering local people and their needs and requirements your plan can support and enhance the wellbeing of your area and feed into wider planning strategies developed by your local authority.
Your voices can be strengthened by creating a clear Place Plan that can help you communicate your aspiration for your place. A Place Plan can be adopted as Supplementary Planning Guidance (SPG) for your area and can inform planning decisions. If you decide you would like your plan to be become SPG, you should contact with your Local Authority place planning team to talk about the practical considerations of writing a plan that can be adopted as Supplementary Planning Guidance. They will also be able to advise on the local planning policy that your plan should fit with if you want it to be considered in the planning process. The Local Authority may provide links to other specialist officers, such as heritage, ecology, tourism and community development to advise you on your Place Plan.
[1] Welsh Government, Planning Policy Wales, Edition 11, 2021, p.4.
MAINDEE TRIANGLE
The challenge: how could the community of Maindee, an inner-city neighbourhood in Newport, reopen and maintain essential public toilet services while creating a new public space?
Photo: Maindee Unlimited
How long will it take, and what will it cost?
Studying your town and developing a community-led plan could take anywhere from a few months to a year. However, implementing the plan will take considerably longer, as it should be forward looking with long term ambitions.
Shape My Town is designed to support you to create a community-led plan by drawing on the resources within your community. Costs will vary depending on the scale of what you want to achieve, what resources are available to you, and how much specialist help you will need. You might be able to get funding for parts of your project, but you will need some resources such as meeting rooms, printing, flip charts, pens and materials to help you on your way.