The absence of proper planning for local COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT – is resulting in frequent failure to create and foster a sense of local identity and is a recognised factor in juvenile crime.  – E.g. Social disconnections, no family-linked sense of local personal and community identity, no means to assimilate cultural differences, no sense of local connection. All destructive to self-esteem, and devoid of means to identify and support the reasonable needs of growing families. None of these factors, that are obviously essential to creating proper community living environments for families, have apparently been regarded as important pre-requisites in the Planning approvals process for residential areas – and should be.

It is important that planners realise that objectively structured applied Social Science research should become a much more prominent component of professional neighbourhood planning. Actual evidence should be produced of that being applied, before future residential neighbourhoods planning approvals are given.

As noted in other Discussions previously, commercial land developers, by the nature of their business model, usually take no vested interest in either immediate or eventual social development in ‘sub-divisions’ for which they are given planning approvals. Such unsatisfactory outcomes could however be changed with more attention to how and when they are permitted to proceed around the time that the WAPC publishes broad zoning intentions for areas identified as potentially ‘residential’.
(Ref .e.g. see paper ‘Neighbourhood Planning’ on this website.)