A passion for place: neighbourhood planning and community attitudes to house-building

State strategies of localism have promoted place identity and place attachment as mechanisms to overcome community resistance to house-building. This populist appeal to a passion for place may conflict with the model of liberalised housing growth fostered by state interventions in spatial policy. Place attachment is firmly associated with feelings of collective efficacy and the protests of communities against economic development. In attempting to harness these passions to engage communities in acceptance of new house-building, the policy of neighbourhood planning introduced in England from 2011 was innovative and experimental. It devolved limited powers to communities to shape development in their neighbourhood in the anticipation that this would secure their compliance with a pro-growth agenda and increase the number of sites allocated for housing. The aim of this paper is to explore how a passion for place was expressed in neighbourhood planning and to chart the impact of narratives of place on community support for house-building. It draws on the body of housing policy developed across England by neighbourhoods since 2011 and on fieldwork research with a national sample of 50 neighbourhood plans carried out between 2013 and 2015. The paper argues that the mobilization of place attachment and place identity in neighbourhood planning created opportunities for communities to advance new socially and environmentally sustainable housing solutions that conflicted with the market model of house-building. This, in turn, unsettled the depiction of citizens’ groups as protectionist and opposed to all economic growth and demonstrated the power of place to generate more democratic inclusion in the politics of the home. The paper concludes that the passions of place might point the way to new approaches to housing supply that engage communities in needs assessment, planning, design and delivery.