Three pieces of research highlighting cohesion in the area of sustainable communities.
Cohesion for Sustainable Communities (April 2008)
A report to define what community cohesion should mean to sustainable communities practitioners, exploring the gaps in current training in around this issue, identifying the skills that those practitioners need to facilitate greater cohesion in their localities, and resulting in a learning module to help them understand the contribution they can make. We commissioned this report, which was undertaken by the Office for Public Management (OPM)
Three pieces of research highlighting cohesion in the area of sustainable communities.
Cohesion for Sustainable Communities (April 2008)
A report to define what community cohesion should mean to sustainable communities practitioners, exploring the gaps in current training in around this issue, identifying the skills that those practitioners need to facilitate greater cohesion in their localities, and resulting in a learning module to help them understand the contribution they can make. We commissioned this report, which was undertaken by the Office for Public Management (OPM)
Promoting sustainable communities and community cohesion (Spring 2007)
We worked with the Institute for Community Cohesion to explore how the Sustainable Communities and Community Cohesion agendas may be promoted, developed and embedded within and across different professional disciplines and sectors.
In particular the work aimed to discover how routes to learning, programmes of professional development and the dissemination of information could contribute to:
A common language and understanding of both agendas
A more joined up approach
New ways of building social capital, citizenship, civic renewal and common sense of belonging
Promoting cross-cultural contact between communities increasingly differentiated by ethnicity, faith and location
Planning and Engaging with Intercultural Communities: Building the knowledge and skills base (November 2006)
Produced in partnership with Comedia
Planning is a key element in the development of sustainable communities. However, it is no longer acceptable to impose a planning solution upon a community, or to assume that all communities are alike and require the same pattern of provision. Rather, the challenge now for planning is to capture the rich diversity of communities and to reflect this diversity in intercultural strategies and actions.
The new model also emphasises the importance of engagement and participation; there are essential prerequisites for community ownership and provide the foundation of a sustainable community.
Rather than a ‘toolkit’ of techniques for consultation, this research aims to encourage a rethink of public consultation. It sets out to:
Identify principles of good practice in community engagement, participatory urban planning and development
Establish how participatory planning and development can contribute to community cohesion
Present a case for a new and dynamic ‘intercultural’ way of working which seeks out difference, is able to manage conflict, and is focused on adding value to our communities
It achieves these aims through the consideration of cultural competence and through the examination of the views of a wide variety of local authority officials.
Through a series of case studies it takes the generic skills identified in the Egan report and assesses how they can be applied in ways which encourage intercultural community engagement and cohesion. The research concludes with twelve principles of good practice.
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