City of Edinburgh Council in partnership with Portobello Community Council, Craigmillar Community Council and East Lothian Council are holding two public events to get your views on how well your area works as a place to live.

This will be in the form of a placemaking exercise, using a tool called the Place Standard.

What is placemaking?

Placemaking aims to create successful places.  Places that work well for the community have a significant positive influence on the health and wellbeing of individuals. The opposite is also true – places that do not work well have a negative impact on health and wellbeing.

One of the ways we can measure the success of a place is by using a tool called the Place Standard. This consists of a series of questions that allow the community to assess things like access to greenspace, general maintenance of an area and perception of safety. This tells us where a place is succeeding and where it can be improved.

How to get involved

This is a unique opportunity for you to get involved. This is the second time the Council has used this process. This approach was also used in a well attended series of events in Queensferry.

We’d like as many of the community as possible to get involved to help make the process work.

People will work in groups and a facilitator will ask a series of questions. As a group you will be encouraged to agree on an answer to the question. There will be someone taking a note of what is discussed. At the end of the questions a compass diagram will be drawn to show the output of the answers (like the one above).

This exercise does not replace the formal consultation process associated with any of the new housing developments in the area.

This process will give us information on Brunstane, Newcraighall, Gilberstoun and Joppa area – identifying those aspects where it works well as a place and those areas where it doesn’t work so well. The benefits of this process are that the information comes from the communities that live and work there.

The outputs from these discussions will help the Council, the community and other agencies to better understand the needs of the community in light of potential future changes.