Innovation Exchange

East Dunbartonshire CPP: Regeneration of Lennoxtown Town Centre

Introduction

Key activities

Benefits and impacts

Learning

What was the issue?

 

Lennoxtown Centre and the main street had faced a number of issues that had caused problems for the local community, such as graffiti, few activities for younger people and the need for physical regeneration to create a more vibrant and pedestrian-friendly town centre.

Theme: Community Planning and Empowerment

To address these problems, the Lennoxtown Town Centre Charrette was commissioned in Spring 2016 by the Town Centre Regeneration Team at East Dunbartonshire Council. This public planning process sought to involve Community Planning partners as well as individuals and groups within the local community and Third Sector groups such as the Lennoxtown Forum.

 

The process was part funded by a grant from the Scottish Government and aimed to support local residents to develop an Action Plan for Lennoxtown and took place over a weekend using the Scottish Government’s Place Standard Tool to gather views from the public. This action plan has now been incorporated into the locality plan for Lennoxtown, known as the Lennoxtown Place Plan

 

 

What helped us to improve community participation? What was challenging?

 

While it took a long time to get the first report on the process out, people were really engaged once it was published. When the community began to see improvements to the area as a result of the process this had a positive effect upon engaging with the community. One of the unintended benefits of this process has been the closer working relationships developed between teams within the Council, such as the community development team and the regeneration team. These now sit beside each other in the Council and this has brought many benefits, such as better communication and learning between officers. The synergy between the different teams has brought new ways of thinking.

 

 

The process has been a real success in Lennoxtown and has developed a Plan that the community really engaged in. While the process started with urban design approaches, it soon spilled into economic development and dealing with other aspects of social regeneration, so that the outputs could be said to be both physical and social for the area.

Case study added to site: Sept 2018

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