Sustainable rural communities toolkit
In 2008, Roger Tym & Partners, working with colleagues from Rural Innovation, developed a toolkit for the assessment of sustainable rural communities. The work was commissioned by the Devon Strategic Partnership on behalf of a wide steering group including the Housing Corporation, Commission for Rural Communities and SW Regional Assembly as well as local authorities. The Council wants to develop a more sophisticated approach (within the planning system) to address the sustainability of rural settlements.
Simplistically, current planning policy tends to allocate development in rural areas to locations that can ‘tick' a list of criteria such as public transport accessibility and availability of a minimum set of services, deemed to indicate sustainability. By implication, this means settlements not ‘ticking the list' are deemed unsustainable and have no chance to change (and could be subject to pressures likely to render them even more ‘unsustainable'). The toolkit is therefore trying to find a new way of thinking about sustainability criteria which goes beyond a tickbox approach and looks at the way rural communities function in social, economic and environmental terms.
We worked collaboratively with communities, planning professionals and others to develop the toolkit, which allows communities and local decision makers to come to a view on how well or not a community performs against sustainability characteristics. The toolkit takes the eight sustainability criteria of the Bristol Accord as its starting point and develops a set of questions around each characteristic to prompt debate and enable judgments to be made.
Having established the current position, a community, its stakeholders and planning professionals are in a much better position to consider the sustainability implications of development. They can model the implications of development by revisiting the toolkit. In effect, the toolkit provides an evidence base which can be used to understand the current sustainability of rural settlements and help assess the impact of different actions and decisions.
