On November 8th Christine Whitehead gave the RTPI Nathanial Lichfield Annual Lecture on ‘Are planners really the problem?’ to an audience of more than 200 planners. Her presentation focused mainly on issues around new build. Organised in three parts, she spoke about the main barriers to delivery and how these relate to planning, described her experience with several initiatives with which she’s had direct involvement, and concluded with an answer to the question she poses in the title. Perhaps not surprisingly, the answer she gave is that, while planning policy and the planning system, rather than individual planners contribute to the problems of low housing supply the main culprit is often macroeconomic policy.
Click here to download the PPT slides from her presentation.
Last month, Christine Whitehead gave a presentation to RTPI’s president, past presidents, and senior officers on the report, Planning risk and development: how greater planning certainty would affect residential development, click here to read our blog about our report. There was general agreement on the findings of the report during the discussion session of the presentation. During this event, Christine was elected as an Honorary Member of RTPI given her significant contributions to academic and practitioner understanding of the relationship between policy, planning, and markets. Previously in 2016, her book, Planning gain: providing infrastructure and affordable housing, co-written with Tony Crook and John Henneberry, was presented with RTPI’s Research Excellence Award for the high quality, impactful spatial planning research in 2016.
