The Data Day

The Data Day

Author: Samuel Stafford September 9, 2019 Duration: 47:59

Sam Stafford chats with Euan Mills of the Connected Places Catapult (https://futurecities.catapult.org.uk/) about how digital innovation, urban data, and user-centred design can improve the UK planning system.


Samuel Stafford hosts 50 Shades of Planning, a podcast that digs into the often perplexing world of the English planning system. Rather than offering dry policy lectures, these conversations embrace the sector's inherent complexities and occasional absurdities. The aim is to provide a wide-ranging view, bringing in diverse voices from across the fields of planning, property, design, and development. You'll hear from practitioners, thinkers, and critics, each sharing their unique experiences and perspectives on how places are shaped. A recurring series within the podcast, titled 'Hitting The High Notes', features in-depth discussions with leading figures, examining pivotal career moments and influential projects. These talks are structured around six key planning milestones, offering a concrete framework for understanding professional journeys and systemic challenges. By weaving together themes from government, business, arts, and social sciences, this podcast reveals how planning sits at a crowded intersection of politics, economics, and community life. Tune in for thoughtful, sometimes surprising, explorations of the forces that decide what gets built, where, and why.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 164

50 Shades of Planning
Podcast Episodes
Hitting the High Notes - Steve Quartermain [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:05:55
Hitting The High Notes is town planning’s equivalent of Desert Island Discs. In these episodes Sam Stafford chats to preeminent figures in the planning and property sectors about the six planning permissions or projects…
Licensed to IL [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:13:24
Think back for a moment to August 2020, to the ‘Planning for the future’ white paper, and to then Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s desire for “radical reform unlike anything we have seen since the Second World War. Not mor…
Life Lessons [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 29:18
A short while ago friend of the podcast Shelly Rouse got in touch with Sam Stafford asking for suggestions for a lecture that Shelly was giving for another friend of the podcast Charlotte Morphet and her soon-to-be plann…
All Politics is Local [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:43
A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. The planning system, it could be contended, is a triangle. At one vertex there are the officers, the professionals, the technocrats, battling gainfully to get…
No Hope? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:31
In June 2022 the Government consulted on proposals to abolish hope and development value when assessing compensation for land compulsorily purchased for certain kinds of schemes. Nine months after it closed, a response h…
A Conversation with Bethany Cullen [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 39:24
When Karolina Grebowiec-Hall contacted Sam Stafford about sharing her podcast with his LinkedIn network Sam went a step further and invited Karolina to share it by way of the 50 Shades platform. Karolina has created a we…
Planning for a Feminist City [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:33:32
Spatial planning can only deliver a safe, healthy and sustainable environment for all if it is sensitive to the needs of all, which means taking into account the different roles women and men have in society and the diff…
Life on the Front Line II [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:58
‘Are you planning a 50 Shades on the local authority staffing crisis?’ It was that message from a 50 Shades listener that prompted Episode 60 of the podcast, which Sam Stafford called ‘Life on the Front Line’. At around…
What Does a Good Local Plan Look Like? [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 57:47
Local plan-making is in something of a crisis. Lichfields reported in April 2022 on the 11 local plans that had at that time been overtly delayed, paused or withdrawn. Indeed the number of plans published in draft, submi…
More Homes. Better Places. So Far As Possible. [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 1:06:41
It will not have escaped the attention of regular 50 Shades listeners that a consultation on changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) was launched shortly before Christmas and, knowing that it was coming,…