What was the brief?
South Gloucestershire Council is developing a New Local Plan, which includes a new strategy and policies to guide and manage growth and change in the area over at least the next 15 years.
Given the complexity of South Gloucestershire's planning landscape, there was an aspiration to create a series of interactive maps, each focusing on a different policy area, to spatially set out site-specific policies and proposals contained within the draft Local Plan.
What did we do?
Following on from the success of the digital platform created to support the Yate Town Centre Masterplan, Participatr was commissioned to disseminate the site specific policies contained in the draft Local Plan through a series of interactive maps linked from the South Gloucestershire Council consultation pages.
Participatr worked with council officers in the planning policy team to link site specific policy data to existing existing geospatial data created to support the plan, and make this information publicly available in a series of easy-to-use interactive maps. The maps translated complex site-specific policies across hundreds of sites into an easy-to-navigate public interface.
Given the success of this approach for the Phase 2 consultation, Participatr was commissioned to create interactive maps for both the Phase 3 and Regulation 19 consultations, each with a different set of maps and policy areas. In Phases 2 and 3, the digital platform was also used to capture feedback on each of the site-specific policies, allowing the officer team to quickly and easily analyse feedback filtered by policy area and site.
What was the outcome?
In the most recent Regulation 19 consultation, the interactive maps were accessed by 2,288 people.
Visit the Locational Strategy for South Gloucestershire interactive map
An example of a South Gloucestershire Local Plan interactive map - click to enlarge