A Local Place Plan in the community’s own words, in weeks rather than months
Stockbridge & Inverleith Community Council, Edinburgh · Autumn 2026
Objective
The City of Edinburgh Council invited the Stockbridge & Inverleith Community Council to submit a Local Place Plan: the community’s own proposals to guide future development in the area.
Problem
Local Place Plans are usually built through long surveys, workshops and public meetings. These take months of work and hear mostly from the residents who have time to attend, so the result does not necessarily reflect what the community actually thinks. As a volunteer body, the council had neither the time nor the resources for such a process.
Approach
Instead, the council put a single question to every resident on comCensus:
In which of these five areas of local life in Stockbridge & Inverleith do we most need to act — protecting what we value, or improving what falls short?
Over a few weeks, residents explained their choices and named the places to protect or improve. They also read, supported and questioned one another’s views, and changed their own when persuaded. The council then used comCensus’s analysis tools to turn the discussion into a community vision and compare it with City Plan 2030 and National Planning Framework 4.
Result
Nine days after the discussion closed, the council submitted a complete Local Place Plan, with very little work on its part.
The plan includes a community vision, an analysis against local and national policy, and a map of proposals. It is a direct expression of the community: every sentence of the vision links back to the residents’ posts it rests on, so councillors and planning officers can check it against what people actually said.
