Ann Hockey

Planning for an ageing society: voices from the planning profession

The population of the United Kingdom is ageing inexorably, a trend which requires policy-makers, including spatial planners, to be creative and innovative in meeting the needs of older people. The significance of place in the lives of older people has been demonstrated by many researchers (see for example Peace et al., 2006; Gilroy, 2008) and underlines that spatial planners must be age aware. This paper uses qualitative research with planning practitioners to explore the extent of their age awareness and the means by which the opportunities and challenges of an ageing population are factored into their work. This is examined in the context of the wide-ranging multidisciplinary literature on the spatial experience of older people, and concludes that a clearer articulation of the elements of older peoples relationships with place would assist planners in unpicking this complex subject and building locally appropriate age-integrated solutions for our ageing population which reach beyond predominantly physical dimensions of the environment.

Older people in unfamiliar environments: Assimilating a multi-disciplinary literature to a planning problem

This article considers aspects of the assimilation of academic research to town planning guidelines and policies, in particular research conducted in terms, and with methodologies, remote from practical town planning processes. It grew out of an interdisciplinary project examining the experience of older people in unfamiliar spaces, and drew on a wide literature dealing with spatial experience from a range of perspectives. The project sought to retrieve a set of outcomes from the interdisciplinary environment of enquiry for use in the town planning process, requiring the translation of a complex knowledge base to a clear framework, and raising issues about how the richness and diversity of the original research might be preserved during this process. The article concludes that the straightforward translation of knowledge from a range of disciplines into practical policy outcomes cannot reasonably be achieved without a re-consideration of the scope of policy-related discourse.

Future imperfect? Insights from the challenging and changing context of planning

In 2010, the UK-Ireland Planning Research Conference brought together academics and practitioners from a mix of discipline to debate the challenging and changing context of planning today. The Conference theme ‘Diversity and Convergence: Planning in a World of Change’ hints at some of these challenges. For example, the experiences of recession and recovery are now familiar global phenomena, with a characteristic range of divergent outcomes and responses, and these have shaped attitudes and approaches to the mitigation of climate change, and to the interpretation of and moves towards just and sustainable communities. Whilst the key challenges may be recognized, the ‘how’, ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘why’ and ‘when’ may be many and varied, with effective responses requiring perspectives from a number of disciplines. This special issue of Local Economy includes selected papers, mostly presented at the Conference, and illustrates the multiplicity of issues and responses. There emerge several common themes: defining and interpreting the problem; collaboration and co-operation; looking outside traditional boundaries, be they territorial, organizational or theoretical; responsive governance; assessing and framing innovative, integrative and inclusive solutions. In a Feature article entitled ‘Older people in unfamiliar environments: Assimilating a multi-disciplinary literature to a planning problem’, Martin Spaul and Ann Hockey consider some aspects of the assimilation of academic research to planning guidelines and policies. They make the important observation that increasingly a different realm has a claim to primacy in planning research: the flux of urban life, and its practices and discourses. In the months since the Conference took place, planning in the UK has undergone fundamental changes. The change of government in May 2010 brought with it a stated change of emphasis, from central control to local control. Out went the strategic functions of the regional planning and development organisations and regional government offices; in came the