Questions to consider in initiating a local Placecheck project

How might a Placecheck help here?

A Placecheck can:

-          Provide a focus for bringing people together to work in collaboration

-          Identify what needs to be done to improve the place.

What area should the Placecheck cover?

A Placecheck can cover a street (or part of one), a neighbourhood, a town centre, or a whole district or city. The setting might be urban, suburban or a village.

Who will initiate the Placecheck?

The first step is for a local partnership or alliance of people with a stake in an area’s future to come together and agree to carry out a Placecheck. The initiative can come from anyone, in any organisation or sector.

Who should be involved at the start of the Placecheck?

There is no need to get everyone signed up at the start: people can be drawn in later to the Placecheck process and to whatever collaboration and action follows. Potential participants at the start or later may include:

• Businesses

• Community leaders

• Developers

• Development agencies

• Faith organisations

• Housing associations

• Landowners

• Local authority officers (concerned with such matters as housing, planning, urban design, conservation, economic development, neighbourhood renewal, education, community development, transport, and environmental health)

• Local councillors

• Local media

• Partnerships

• Planning, architecture and design centres

• Police

• Professional practices

• Residents

• Residents’ and tenants’ associations

• Schools

• Sustainable development (Local Agenda 21) groups

• Town centre management initiatives

• Traders

• Training agencies

• Transport operators

• Universities

• Women’s groups

• Youth and community groups

What resources are available for carrying out the Placecheck?

A Placecheck can be carried out with whatever resources are available, even if that is no more than a few people with a few hours to spare. A more ambitious Placecheck (which might follow that initial run-through) may require significant resources. These might include:

• People who are in a position to organize the project.

• Local programmes of which Placechecks can become a part.

• Skills such as organising, facilitating, drawing and photography.

• Financial support

• Venues

• Publicity

What might the Placecheck lead to?

People who initiate a Placecheck may have a clear idea of where it will lead to, or they may use it simply as a means of understanding the place and deciding the next step. Some Placechecks will prepare the ground for the sort of documents that councils, regeneration partnerships, developers and local communities produce to guide future development in an area.  Others will be of immediate use to residents, local traders or business-folk.

Here are some examples of how the Placecheck method can be used:

• Residential street

• Village or countryside

• Placecheck for planning, urban design, highways and parks

The Placecheck method reflects the approach described in the ODPM/CABE design guidance By Design.

What might our first Placecheck event be?

Options for a first Placecheck event include:

• A walkabout of the area

• A meeting or workshop event

• An exhibition

• A questionnaire

• An event at a community festival

• A combination of more than one of these.

Will a facilitator be needed to plan, organize and run the event?

A facilitator is someone who is experienced in planning and running events so they run smoothly and achieve their aims. What sort of facilitator is needed will depend on the number of people involved in the event. For a large event a professional facilitator may be useful, though there are other people (including some community workers and built environment professionals) who are good at facilitating events.

What expert advice (if any) do we need at this stage?

What (and whether) expert advice is needed, and at what stage, will depend on the aim of the Placecheck and what the initial run-through reveals. Care should be taken to avoid professionals taking over: the point of the Placecheck is to enable a wide range of people, professionals and non-professionals, to set their own agenda.

How should the Placecheck be recorded?

The investigation process and the results can be recorded and presented in a variety of ways, including maps, plans, diagrams, notes, sketches, video and photographs (disposable or digital cameras are useful), audio tape, or a video camera.  Participants can write directly on the Placechecklist, either the one available through this website, or one tailored to your own requirements) or write notes.

It is useful for everyone (or at least one person in each small group) to be given a form to fill in at the start, with three columns: the first to note the location (a street number for example), the second for comments and the third for suggested action.

• Short Placecheck form  - click here to download

How can we make best use of a walkabout?

It is useful for the organisers to have thought in advance about how the walkabout will be organised and followed up.

Break up into pairs or groups of no more than six people, and agree to meet again at a specified time (an hour is probably long enough). Each group should nominate one person to take notes (although everyone can take their own notes, as it helps to concentrate the mind).

At the end of the walkabout, everyone gets together and runs through the points they have raised. One person makes a note of the main conclusions. Decide on a few things that you will try to achieve in the next seven days, and agree who will be responsible for each. Also decide on a few things that you would hope to achieve in the next year.

Agree to meet again in seven days’ time (in someone’s house or office, in a community centre, or in a café or pub, for example). This will be a chance to report back on what people have done in the week since the walkabout, and to decide on the next steps: what to aim for and who to get involved.

What questions should we add to the checklist?

The checklist is intended to prompt you in thinking about what might be relevant to your area. There are likely to be other matters important locally that it does not cover. Think what these might be and add them to your list of priorities.

What happens if different people give different answers to the questions in the checklist?

Different people no doubt will give different answers to some of the questions. The checklist should help people understand each other’s points of view, and serve as a useful starting point for discussing the issues and finding common ground. The discussions should be as wide and as open as possible. The value of the Placecheck may depend on what efforts are made to involve people who might otherwise be left out.

How should we use the checklist?

The checklist sets out some questions it might be useful to ask. Which of them are appropriate for your circumstances is for the organisers of the Placecheck to decide. You will need to take account of the size of the area, the aim of the Placecheck, and how familiar the participants are will the sorts of concepts and issues the checklist deals with. The checklist is meant to prompt thoughts, not to be a comprehensive list of what should be considered. No doubt many of the questions will not be relevant to your circumstances. Leave them out, and concentrate on the issues that seem important. Don’t put people off with a daunting list of questions in the early stages of a project. Select a short list of questions first. Add more later if participants want to go into greater detail. The checklist is in three parts (A,B and C): start with whichever part seems to be asking questions of the right level of detail.

Part A

The checklist starts with three simple questions. These will get people thinking, and in some cases no more prompting will be needed. The last of those questions, ‘What needs to be improved?’, may start people wondering what the options are.

Part B

The second part of the checklist sets out 15 more specific questions. The first six ask who needs to be involved in changing the place for the better, and how they can be involved in achieving that. The other nine questions focus on how people use the place and experience it. These questions may be enough to draw out the information that is required. If not, the next part provides more prompts.

Part C

The longest part of the checklist goes more deeply into those 15 questions, listing a series of detailed questions (more than a hundred in all) under each one. This part is fairly comprehensive. It does not have to be gone through slavishly. The idea is to help you check that you have considered what issues might play a part in improving the place.

Five examples of how an initial Placecheck might be carried out

1.    People meet for a walkabout of a street or other local place. They ask themselves the three basic questions (Part A). They may go on to ask other questions on the checklist, either now or on a later occasion.

2.    The organisers of the local Placecheck draw up their own tailor-made checklist after selecting the questions that seem most relevant and adding any more that seem important locally. This checklist is then distributed to participants in a walkabout or a meeting. The participants can also refer to the full checklist if they need more ideas.

3.    A small group reads through the checklist together, answering questions that can be answered easily, ignoring those that are not relevant, and agreeing which questions need to be looked in to in more detail.

4.    The organisers of the local Placecheck select ten questions from the checklist  (and, if appropriate, some that may not be on the checklist but seem important locally). These are then discussed at a meeting, with the full checklist available for people to refer to if they need more prompts.

5.    At a small meeting, people choose the ten questions on the checklist that seem most important to them. They compare notes and agree a list of what seem to be the most important questions to focus on.