Insights from a Small City: How Can the Urban Planning Process Help Make Better Places?

Cleo Newcombe-Jones, Sustainable Places & Regeneration Service Manager, Bath & North East Somerset Council

Cleo is a senior leader specialising in place shaping, strategy, delivery, and regeneration with a strong record of successful delivery in local government working in Bath, UK. A chartered planner and recognised practitioner in urban design, she is knowledgeable, instinctive and passionate about place-making and its impact on people's lives.

As part of this issue we have asked her for her insights into how urban planning can help make better places.

What are some of the opportunities and challenges that have been impacting your work lately?

The need to reinvent high streets has been a core activity for my team for the last five years. We’ve been lucky to have two the High Street Heritage Action Zone projects, facilitated and funded by Historic England, which has seen over £6m investment in our market towns. We have delivered major public realm improvements, refurbished community assets such as a listed town hall now in community ownership, over 20 shop front improvements and cultural programmes bringing arts, events, markets and festivals to the high street. These interventions have been co-designed, funded and delivered with the support of the community.

Growing levels of high street vacancies, which hit a peak during COVID-19 lockdowns, also kick-started a programme of interventions to bring vacant spaces back into use on our high streets. The Vacant Unit Action Project has seen former vacant shops, showrooms and even former print works brought back to life as community spaces, artists residencies, pop-up shops for local artists and makers, spaces for pop-up music and performance theatre and has created high street space for counselling, housing advice, youth groups, dementia support groups and a pop-up mosque.

Thinking about our high streets differently is really exciting!

Can you tell us about the latest projects you have been working on?

One of our key projects is the Milsom Quarter regeneration programme. We’ve created a masterplan that has set the vision and ambition for change and received strong support. Our next step is to deliver on some of the key projects, and we are progressing with schemes to create a new fashion museum on the high street and make major improvements to the public realm, including an ambition to reclaim road space to create a new public square and the redevelopment of a former surface car park into creative workspaces for the future.

“I enjoy working alongside passionate and driven people who want to make positive changes to improve places – local government delivers that in droves.”

In the meantime, we wanted to see more immediate change and we have brought forward a programme of public realm interventions and have introduced a programme of events and festivals on Milsom Street, alongside artist takeovers, parklets, new street furniture, changes to movement and vehicle access and a meanwhile use programme in vacant shops focused on fashion, design and craft.

What are some of the trends you anticipate for the future of urban planning in your sector?

There are clearly big challenges ahead for city centres and high streets as they seek to remain relevant in our ever-changing lives. There are also difficult times likely for local governments, which do not always have big budgets to deliver change.

In this context, there are some interesting tactics we can consider deploying:

• Undertake Urban Acupuncture – the idea that interventions in public spaces don’t need to be expensive or dramatic to have a transformative impact. This has been our approach in Kingsmead Square, where we have created a vibrant pedestrianised square on a limited budget;

• Embracing the Meanwhile – ahead of, or as part of larger developments there is an opportunity to effect the change you want to see. This has been exemplified in our vacant unit project.

• Be Collaborative – work with partners and communities to find your common goals. We aim for all of our projects to be partnership projects; they are always better that way.

Tell us more about why you enjoy working in local government.

Being within an organisation whose core aim is to improve people's lives resonates with my personal values. I enjoy working alongside passionate and driven people who want to make positive changes to improve places – local government delivers that in droves.

A study trip to Freiburg, Germany, cemented my view that I wanted to effect change in local government. I heard first-hand the benefits of 20 years of an integrated city planning approach - which I could see had led to sustainable living and a compact car-lite city. Fostered by a focus on citizen participation, active democracy, and partnership, they managed to deliver radical change and made their city more inclusive, greener, more successful, and very beautiful. My aim is to bring some of that ‘Freiburg spirit’ to my home city of Bath.