How did that get planning permission? Connecting cycle track experience with planning application processing.

This research begins from the notion that we are all impacted by the physical environment we live within, and in England this built environment is subject to planning control administered by the Local Planning Authority (LPA). It explores how the LPA planning application processing approach contributes to planning outcomes, and provides an understanding of the users’ experience of that resultant built environment. This contributes to the under researched field of LPA processing and its impact on the built environment and consequently peoples’ lived experience. A multi-methodology, multiple case study research design investigated three cycle tracks and the associated planning application records for those sites. An adapted historical archaeology was used to gain an understanding of user experience of the built environment and included the triangulation of surveys, site observation and written records. Institutional ethnography was then used to explicate the social organisation of knowledge within LPA planning application processing for each case-study, including the public running records and professional reports held by the LPA’s. The adapted historical archaeology identified four scenarios that differed across the casestudy sites, all demonstrating phenomena associated with the cycle track surface treatment. The institutional ethnographies mapped the processing threads that led to these surface treatment outcomes, and explicated the ways knowledge was socially organised within each LPA, identifying inconsistency and lack of alignment between intentions, texts, processing, output and outcome. By connecting user experience with LPA processing, the research makes recommendations for professional planning practice and their implementation. Application of an ambitions framework for a specific development can be used to structure processing consistency, alignment of output with processing and ambitions, and evaluation of outcome against the ambitions. Thereby creating a thread around which knowledge can be organised to support the creation of a built environment that is of benefit to all.