On 28/11/12 20:46, Tom Chance wrote:
On 28 November 2012 19:40, Andy Robinson <ajrli...@gmail.com
<mailto:ajrli...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Some of the area’s most certainly are not “protected” as they are
actively being discussed for development.
These are probably areas that have been de-designated, or are being
considered for this fate, since the Telegraph's data source was compiled.
This points to the major flaw with importing this data - it changes
year to year, and we can't easily observe the changes on the ground.
We might spot development on green belt and so remove the designation,
we don't spot where new green space is designated as greenbelt. Unless
we had ongoing co-operation from local authorities, within a year we'd
be hosting a dataset that's out of date and impossible to check.
Hardly impossible, since it's public information. Green belt land is
supposed to be "permanent", if I remember the Town and Country Planning
Act correctly, so it should change less often than local government
boundaries, which have no evidence on the ground at all in most places -
yet we still maintain them in OSM.
Local authorities normally publish green belt maps as part of their
planning statements. Unfortunately these are often in hard-to-use
formats like PDF.
I'm not arguing for a rush to import this dataset, but it would be great
to have this information in OSM and much easier to maintain it after
import/tracing than to author it by hand. When I say it would be great
to have it, in fact I believe this is a huge opportunity for OSM to play
a vital role in local democracy. And when I say vital, I'm not exaggerating.
The Localism Act 2011 sweeps away a lot of restrictions on planning.
There is now a thing called "neighbourhood planning" which means that
communities - or in practice, the tiny proportion of people who take an
interest in planning - will be able to grant planning permission where
"they want" to see things built. It limits the powers of professional
planners to place restrictions on what will be built where - if "the
community" votes to allow building, it will be allowed without any
professional input. (Sorry, I mean interference from government.)
This means that property developers will be able to "convince" just a
few people to vote in favour of a development (you can use your
imagination how this convincing might be accomplished) and it will go
ahead. The only safeguard left against this will be to get enough people
involved in the process, and that requires people to be well informed.
I had some discussions with someone at the Campaign for the Protection
of Rural England a while ago and they sound very keen to provide tools
to help communities understand their local geography, given these huge
new responsibilities that we have been given. Maps are of course key to
this. If we can present this sort of information in OSM, it could even
become the de facto source of information for community planning activities.
Worth a shot, no?
J.
--
Dr Jonathan Harley : Managing Director : SpiffyMap Ltd
m...@spiffymap.com Phone: 0845 313 8457 www.spiffymap.com
The Venture Centre, Sir William Lyons Road, Coventry CV4 7EZ, UK
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