YOUNG PROFESSIONALS 1 The importance of young voices in inspiring long-term visions

John Mason

John is an Associate at Carter Jonas’ Cambridge office, joining as a graduate after studying at the Universities of Vienna and Cambridge. As part of one of the largest planning and development teams in the Eastern region, he acts for a variety of clients, from local authorities to major housebuilders, on projects across East Anglia. He is part of Carter Jonas’ Equality, Diversity and Inclusion steering group and LGBT+ Forum, and has been a committee member of the RTPI East of England Young Planners since 2020.

John argues that long-term planning proposals must make a concerted effort to shift the balance towards younger people. ACES is also encouraging young surveyors through its FACES initiative. Although this article is centred on planning around Cambridge, it is equally applicable across the whole built environment, and communications in general. 

Planning, by its very nature, concerns the future. As such, it can be argued that those with the greatest influence in planning should be those with the greatest stake in the future – the young.  

Ambitious plans for Cambridge were initially launched by the previous government as Cambridge 2040 and then updated to Cambridge 2050. Here in Carter Jonas’s Cambridge office, we’re pleased to see the new government has formally supported the aim significantly to increase the city’s size and strengthen its tech industries – the sectors primarily responsible for the city’s success in attracting and retaining younger employees. 

Cambridge is a young city: with an average age of 34, the fourth youngest in the UK. Some of those who will be old enough to vote in 2040 are just two years old today. On the other hand, those who are most vociferous in responding to development proposals tend to skew older – and may never see the changes that they have brought about (or prevented). 

So the proposals for Cambridge 2040/2050 – or any other long-term planning proposal – must make a concerted effort to shift the balance towards younger people. 

How to involve young people 

Carter Jonas’ Cambridge office has a strong contingent of under 30s willing to address this challenge, which we have discussed in some depth. We agreed that development proposals in Cambridge do not routinely target younger people in the most innovative, engaging or effective ways: leaflet drops, notices on lampposts, newspaper advertisements and heated community hall debates simply fail to compete for time and attention. Those of us who have taken part in local consultations in a personal capacity had been made aware of them in a work context – through the Planning Portal, office chat or the property media. 

Yet consultations outside of planning succeed in engaging with young people: my colleagues had taken part in consultations through local bike stores, on a train journey, and of course through social media. 

During Covid, many planning consultations were run solely online. This was found to be very effective in achieving a greater balance in participation. Accordingly, online consultation has been developed with considerable success. 

But it is no panacea: the brevity necessitated by social media does not sit easily with planning’s complex nature. A local planning authority did recently use Tik Tok to promote a consultation on a new local plan, but it linked back to the council’s website which was full of lengthy documents. It’s not an easy leap from a 60-second video to a draft local plan. 

urban planning consultation

consultation table

Positive examples of face-to-face consultation do exist. The physical location matters a lot – popular cafés, shopping centres, the new CB1 business area around Station Square, and perhaps the market are all locations where a diverse array of people gather and pass through, and therefore places that developers might want to bear in mind. 

Food can work well as an incentive. I attended a very innovative and refreshing planning consultation which was successful in attracting young people, partly because the organisers arranged for food vans and performers to be present. The event itself was then interactive, with talks, debates and innovative use of technology – not just a procession of A1 boards to read. 

Providing a more accessible location can help address the balance, but evidence suggests that this only works to an extent. Recently a consultation event took place on Parker’s Piece, a large, popular public open space in the centre of Cambridge. This was clearly intended to appeal to a younger demographic but in reality was dominated by an older age group, to the extent that younger people left, feeling marginalised. 

Genuine dialogue is often best achieved through face-to-face communication within like-mined groups. There’s an argument that a younger consultee is better reached by a younger consultor. People can be intimidated by a situation in which a certain demographic takes over. It is often best to break discussions down into groups, ideally led by someone representative of that group, and to allow like-minded people to bounce ideas off each other. 

Can the principle of engineering consultation tactics to engage more widely also be applied to consultation topics? There are inevitably some topics that younger people are more inclined to comment upon: housing, education and sustainability among others. But on the other hand, it is presumptuous to exclude topics from the conversation: those who are single and renting today may be more concerned about home ownership and nursery spaces in 17 years’ time. 

If achieving a balance of views (let alone encouraging younger voices) proves impossible, there are means of using representative sampling to rectify the balance. For example, LinkedIn can be used to target people of a specific demographic. This approach, common in consumer market research, could succeed in achieving better balance, not only on the basis of age, but also gender and ethnicity. 

Taking the market research a step further could potentially involve ‘weighting’ responses to ensure that they are representative of the community. Could this work in planning? Due to the very discursive nature of a consultation, views expressed tend to be qualitative rather than quantitative. While percentages can be weighted, this is less easily achieved with commentary. But there’s an opportunity to use the summary of a consultation to weight responses according to the statistical representation in the community, to prevent a single group from being over-represented. 

The ability of planning to reach younger people has traditionally lagged behind that of other sectors, despite the fact that the young are those most affected by the changes. There is much that can be learnt from other sectors and large-scale projects such as the plans for Cambridge present the ideal opportunity to put this into practice. As the brief discussion in our office has suggested, perhaps the best way to achieve this is to consult with young people on how best to consult them!