Using Planning as a Tool for Subversive Localism: Ambition Versus Rules in Localism Transition Arenas

Communities are exposed to both pressures on land and the built environment as well as opportunities to make places better. As we saw Chap. 3, the planning process covers various issues, ranging from where houses and employment sites are located, which community facilities are protected and enhanced, how they can be made more sustainable and support the environment, renewable energy or more accessible sustainable transport routes. These pressures—and opportunities—have led to an increasing interest among some environmental groups (notably Transition (town) Initiatives) in the relevance and importance of the planning process to formalise community-led, alternative development approaches, such as economic relocalisation, cohousing, self-build and ‘tiny homes’; thus, effectively galvanising them to act in increasingly political and institutional arrangements. This chapter outlines Frome’s development challenges and the relationship between relocalisation, planning and the development industry. Under the Independents for Frome (IfF), Frome Town Council (FTC) sought to use the rights made available under the Localism Act 2011 to address key development challenges they believed were threatening the town’s character and to fulfil a more ‘positive’ development model for the town, which one respondent described as “as a lever” for relocalised intentions. FTC was considered to be in a good position to capture the more “radical” potential of the localism agenda and support more resilient communities, drawing heavily on the ideas already cultivated on greener development within the local Transition Initiative, Sustainable Frome. We examine how Frome-based actors sought to respond to the opportunities afforded to them by the localism agenda to deliver locally-led solutions and the role of the Neighbourhood Planning (NDP) process in actualising mechanisms to do so and introduce the objectives, key actors and governance arrangements of Frome’s NDP. Again, as in the previous chapter, we use the notion of ‘conditions’ (in bold) to explore the key challenges, contestations and opportunities of localism to deliver innovative, or even more subversive, sustainable (relocalised) forms of development.