A good idea at the time ..

It must have seemed a good idea at the time, said one of the residents, peering at the Planning Aid map during their "drop in" session on 31st May.

The map in question was an Ordinance Survey map of the pathfinder area and the immediate area outside. People were invited to put on stickers for bits they liked and stickers for bits they didn't like. Ok so far. The only problem was scale and audience.

If you didn't like your neighbour's fence you put a negative sticker in your street. However the sticker covered the whole street and no meaning was conveyed. So did the sticker mean that you didn't like the pink colour of your neighbour's door or did it mean the whole street should be demolished. In other words it conveyed no meaning and, in the words of TV quiz shows, was just a bit of fun. Or, as the council have done in the past, will this less than accurate survey demonstrate that x percent of residents want their own street demolished. Who knows - that's the nature of the council's poor consultation process.

Of course the location of the drop-in, at the leisure centre, meant that literally anyone could put a sticker on the board or make a comment. The volunteer planners were delighted to hear a woman exclaim that she was excited by all the new design ideas for the area. A small crowd assembled beside her and one person asked her where she lived. It transpired that she didn't live in the area and she was just using the leisure centre but she was a design student!

So there we have it. Anyone could make a comment and place a sticker on a map. Neither were really finding out anything new about the area. Some would say that this was the whole point to generate a warm feeling about the appearance of listening to residents but in practice not even targetting the people who face demolition of their homes.