Opening the PORTAL… how do planners understand community?

What do we mean by ‘community’? And why does it matter? These are questions being asked by a research project funded by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), led by the University of the West of England in partnership with Ecomotive.

The research builds on Dr Anna Rose Hope’s PhD research, which explored meanings of community within community-led housing and developed ‘PORTAL’, a framework to understand and work with community more effectively.

Our current project aims to test how the PORTAL framework could be developed into practical tools for planners, to support good practice in relation to understanding and engaging with community across the breadth of different planning activities.

Ecomotive have been facilitating workshops and using our community engagement experience to guide development of simple but effective tools that can really add value to planning practice.