Investing in Commonplace: Empowering communities to fight NIMBY-ism
“A new school? Great idea, we need more schools! But not too close to my house please” — fictional response to a fictional planning application.
For those not in the real-estate world, NIMBY might not mean much. But for developers, local authorities, housing associations, and infrastructure projects, NIMBY is a huge problem.
NIMBY stands for ‘not in my back yard’ — which is the common knee-jerk reaction to any change which may be great for the neighbourhood, city or country but might create an inconvenience to the individual.
This is especially problematic in the current UK planning system, where planning decisions are made at a local level and where the input of residents — otherwise known as community engagement — is a requirement for almost any construction project.
Community engagement used to be — and still is in many cases — treated as a necessary evil, better kept to bare minimum to avoid “kicking sleeping dogs”. The need to consult the local community is, therefore, handled with an ‘old school’ approach — imagine 30 people in a town hall with a few plans on the wall at 3pm on a Wednesday afternoon and you get the picture.
And yet, this approach to community engagement consistently fails to capture a fair and accurate snapshot of residents’ perspectives, leading inevitably to distrust and frustration. Put simply, working people cannot attend these inconvenient meetings, and young people never find out about them, and so developers and city planners are never able to capture a representative snapshot of the views of an entire community.
Within this ‘old school’ model, actual decision-making takes place elsewhere in an opaque process. Even when negative feedback returns from communities, developers typically find a way to circumvent their views and secure planning — leading to greater dissatisfaction and frustration from residents.
But Facebook and Twitter reshuffled the deck.
Suddenly, grassroots movements opposing construction started springing up, opposing new developments, and postponing the creation of much-needed housing. Suddenly, local politicians can no longer push planning through and ignore the voice of their constituents and new developments ground to a halt.
There’s an Aramaic saying that roughly translates to ‘a coin in an empty jar makes a lot of noise’ and, fuelled by social media, small groups can now make a disproportionate amount of noise and set the agenda.
In most instances, residents supporting — or at least not opposing — a project have no reason or incentive to be heard. It is the same dynamic with review websites, which tend only to capture extreme reviews or comments.
A hypothetical example: a developer wants to build 100 new flats in Islington. The area has a shortage of flats, young people would love to be able to buy or rent these new properties, but a local group sets out to oppose the project, mostly because they are concerned about the noise and traffic disruption it will cause. This is where Commonplace comes in.
Commonplace moves community engagement to the digital realm, enabling the developer to solicit thousands of comments from local residents — as opposed to the tens of comments captured using traditional methods.
Commonplace co-opts the silent majority within the planning process, shifting people from combat to collaboration. Objections stem as much from people feeling excluded from the process as from people having a fundamental problem with the result. If you bring them into the process, they become more collaborative and less reactionary. Proposals suddenly experience a far greater chance of a broad base of support in the local community.
Commonplace empowers communities to voice perspectives on a platform that reflects their digital lifestyles, providing them with the tools to engage with development projects at any time, wherever they are. The result is far higher representation from younger, working population in responses to proposals and surveys: three-quarters of people who have participated in a Commonplace conversation are under 45, an age group that is woefully underrepresented in traditional consultations.
The ease of using the Commonplace platform also drives far better outcomes for development proposals and engagement projects. After a period of engagement on the Commonplace platform, where residents can review and reflect on proposed projects, developers are more likely to receive a positive outcome — 65 percent of contributions made through the platform were in support of projects.
This is a vast benefit for local authorities and developers, as the potential risk of rejected planning proposals can be a substantial drain on time and resources. Stacking the odds in favour of a positive application through using the Commonplace platform is a no-brainer.
By enabling property developers to have a better understanding of the local community — their customers — they can also drastically improve their product — housing and infrastructure. Not only does this create better developments, it improves brand and reputation, creates places that are in greater demand from customers — and ultimately enables the developers to make more money.
While the government has set its sights on a total reform of the planning process, potentially removing local decision-making power, it is clear that decision-makers are putting local community at the front and centre of this move. The first bullet point in the planning reform announcement reads “Local communities will be consulted from the very beginning of the planning process. By harnessing the latest technology through online maps and data, the whole system will be made more accessible.”
This creates a tremendous opportunity for Commonplace as the preeminent digital community engagement platform, enabling the UK’s place-makers to reshape the urban spaces underpinning the next chapter of the British economy, and driving wellbeing, local economic growth, social cohesion and sustainability in the process.
