Show Notes
In which The Planner team meets Rachel Fisher, the new chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute, to chat about why she applied for the role, her thoughts about the future direction of the RTPI, the importance of town planning to social cohesion and the RTPI's role in building bridges between the profession and the public. Along the way, the team also delves into the latest issue of The Planner, taking a closer look at our interview with Nick Tyler of the PEARL facility that monito...
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Simon, Ben and Planner regular Nicola Gooch are joined by London planning maven Brett Leahy, and there's only one thing on their minds: the recently released draft London Plan. Brett, who was recently appointed interim growth and transformation lead at Brentwood Borough Council and Rochford District Council, spent nearly a decade in high-level planning roles at Enfield and Redbridge Councils. From green belt, housing targets, and nature recovery, he's well placed to dig into whatever th...
The tenth episode of PlannerPod sees the team welcome CityEd (AKA Ed), a YouTuber and practising planner who’s amassed 40,000 subscribers and more than more than 2.2 million cumulative views (!) across his videos. Ed sat down with Simon and Ben from The Planner to talk about all things placemaking, planning, and knitting: from his tentative first steps in creating videos to (relative) YouTube stardom. How did he get started? What sort of community has built up around his channel? ...
Even in places that are experiencing war, planning continues to function. But how? And how is the work of planners influenced by the need to contribute to healing in a post-conflict society? Marina Milosev, a 2026 Planner woman of Influence, has spent much of the last year working on local plans in Ukraine, on behalf of UN-Habitat. She also lived through conflict during a childhood in Serbia. In a conversation that ranges across the challenges of working in a region afflicted by armed confl...
In which, to mark International Women's Day, the Planner team chats with Anna Sabine, MP for Frome and East Somerset, about the failure to mention women's safety in the draft National Planning Policy Framework for England. During the course of our conversation, Anna and Laura (The Planner's news editor) discuss why women's safety in public spaces is such a pressing issue; Anna laments the absence of joined-up thinking between government departments which have failed to relate the government'...
After nearly eight years as the RTPI's chief executive, Dr Victoria Hills is moving on at the end of December. For episode 6 of PlannerPod, we caught up with the outgoing chief to look back on her time at the helm, her successes, her disappointments and her hopes for the institute and for planning. It's a relaxed and candid interview that digs beneath the surface of what drives Victoria and how she's grown into the role, including the revelation of the 'Hillsey gene' and ideas for a t-shirt f...