This Best Practice Guide to Place Visioning was written for by Katie Norman of the Design Council for the High Streets Task Force and published in 2024.
Introduction to place visioning
The guide describes a place vision as a galvanising resource that describes the future aspirations for a specific location. It sets-out how it captures the place’s values, represents local people’s aspirations, and outlines what the place may look like in the longer-term. It proposes that a place vision can shape decision-making and can help direct resource allocation towards reaching specific outcomes and help bring people and ideas together. As the process, it helps generate accountability and establishes shared understandings of what success looks like for the place, encouraging collaborative working.
The importance of a place vision
The guide summarises how place visions can have many positive outcomes for the places they help steward, and that these primarily include:
- providing direction and focus
- promoting community cohesion and identity
- guiding sustainable development.
- shaping adaptability and resilience.
- attracting resource and investment.
- improving quality of life.
Developing your place vision
We especially support the way this guide sets-out how it is important to consider both the physical assets and, what it calls, the intangible, when creating a cohesive place vision. We would probably expand on the consideration of the intangible or ‘softer’ assets of a place, to include the business mix, culture, events, identity and distinguish this from the ‘how’ of partnership development through funding strategy, community engagement and communications.
The guide suggests the following useful structure for developing a place vision:
Understanding the place-specific context is vital
Consider the challenges and opportunities of your town centre, including environmental, social, economic, and cultural factors, alongside existing assets.
We would greatly support the suggestion of undertaking additional research where data is lacking to clearly define these challenges and opportunities.
Consider the scope the vision needs to cover
Is it just the high street, or should it encompass the wider town or city? Would a town-wide masterplan be appropriate, or would more specific be better suited to reach the desired outcome?
Interesting considerations that relates to our own thinking at People & Places of the value of considering the town centre with an increasing perspective on the context within the wider town. We have become much less supportive of a masterplanning approach in favour of the mix of a wider framework that looks at the ‘hard and soft’ aspects of revitalisation, a strong focus on delivery and a more tactical approach to transforming public spaces.
Conduct community engagement to shape a shared vision
For a vision to be embedded within a place, it is vital to involve the community from the beginning, listening and learning from them as the vision emerges.
We strongly support the emphasis on engaging the community in visioning conversations and using this to explore possibilities, identify shared values, and prioritise actions to build consensus.
Begin to shape your vision
Once evidence is captured, a place partnership can then begin to distil learnings into a vision and outline actionable steps forward. Elements of defining this vision include:
- Ensure a vision statement is captured that is a clear and concise expression of aspirations or a summary the collective ambitions for a place. The statement should be inspirational, galvanizing, place specific and actionable; providing clarity and direction for everyone to get behind.
- The remainder of a vision document can be split into sub-headings formed around “place pillars”, values and goals, short-term tactics, and long-term strategies. This will help break the high-level vision into specific and actionable steps.
- It is important to develop plans alongside the vision, assigning roles and responsibilities to ensure that work is carried out and movement is made in the right direction. Prioritising outputs and outlining timelines is another helpful way to build clarity and accountability.
This Best Practice Guide to Place Visioning provides a welcome summary of this key aspect of place shaping in a way that can help lay solid foundations for re-imagining places.
