Living Places is a national programme about culture and sport-led community regeneration, chaired by MLA and based on an agreement between five of the leading cultural agencies: Arts Council England, The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), English Heritage, the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA), and Sport England, their sponsoring department, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG).
New communities are being established in a number of places in England as our society grows and changes. Living Places believe that access to culture and sport is an important part of the quality of life and that planning for new communities needs to take this into account. With that in mind Living Places have worked closely with the Town and Country Planning Association to produce a comprehensive toolkit of advice, guidance and case studies for a variety of practitioners to use. The toolkit went live in April 2009 and is available online on the living places website at www.living-places.org.uk.
Cultural and Sport Planning Toolkit
The Culture and Sport Planning Toolkit (CSPT) has been developed by the Living Places Partnership. The toolkit is available at www.living-places.org.uk and sets out a simple five stage process to build culture and sport into places.
It includes a wealth of information, best practice case studies and planning tools. Users can learn from the experience of others and base their own development plans on the processes and principles that have succeeded elsewhere. Cultural and sporting facilities are important to new communities and regenerated areas. Aside from their intrinsic value, they create a sense of place, contribute to the economy and bring people together around shared interests. Due to differing statutory requirements people working on the built environment and people working in cultural agencies are operating in separate spheres.
The toolkit brings these two professional communities together. It will help built environment professionals find new ways to deliver sustainable communities through culture and gather the evidence they need to recommend culture-led plans for regeneration. It will also help local government cultural officers navigate the planning system, so that they can make the case for museums, libraries, theatres and sports facilities in the right way and at the right time.