SCALLOWAY LOCAL PLACE PLAN
LOCATION : SHETLAND, SCOTLAND
DATE : 2018 – 2019
PROJECT TYPE : LOCAL PLACE PLAN
COLLABORATION :
PHASE OF WORK : FEASIBILITY / VISIONING
In early 2018 Shetland Islands Council (SIC) required a suitably qualified team to deliver a ‘vision’ for Scalloway through the Making Places Initiative, a community-led design process that was based on community engagement and participative design workshops held within the village.
Iglu and GL Hearn were the team appointed by SIC to deliver that ‘Vision’ for Scalloway, which would subsequently be used to inform SIC’s next Local Development Plan. This was ‘Re-Create Scalloway’.
VIEW ACROSS SCALLOWAY
The project turned out to be fundamentally about community empowerment as much as developing a ‘Vision’ for the village.
The Shetland Partnership Plan 2018-28 had identified early on, just prior to the project starting, that people in Shetland whilst very keen to be a part of any decision-making process did not feel empowered with only 27% feeling that they could “influence decisions affecting their local area”.
This suggested that those locals who had taken part in previous community engagement events in Shetland felt ultimately that their voices had not been heard. To this end community control, inclusiveness and transparency were at the heart of the approach to the Scalloway Making Places Initiative.
Re-Create Scalloway was very much a collaborative and inclusive process that sought to promote community dialogue within the village, and empower the community to realise a place where they want to live and be, as well as about its future and role in Shetland (as well as drafting Shetland’s first ‘Local Place Plan’). To empower the lives of all, young, old, heard and seldom heard.
Community engagement was the tool and key to community empowerment, including pre-engagement sessions with local schools, community and business. The pre-engagement identified a series of issues relating to housing, transportation, and public space provision.
These issues were taken into the main engagement process which included questionnaires, website and web voting, and conversations with local stakeholders including Shetland Islands Council. The engagement process also included workshops and community participative events including a youth walk and a youth workshop experiment (photo opposite) where the children tried to navigate Scalloway by wheelchair, crutches and with blindfolds. The last event was a Soup and Sweet voting event.
ENGAGEMENT EVENTS
IDEAS FOR FUTURE CHANGE VISUALISATIONS
The final report was submitted at the end of 2018, approved by SIC at the start of 2019, and has been developed at the start of 2020 into a Local Place Plan, Scalloway Local Place Plan.