You’ve filled out the survey, you’ve come to our people’s assemblies, you’ve told all your friends… what happens next with Our Neighbourhood in 2040?
First off, let’s take stock of everything that’s happened so far. We kicked off in mid 2025 with the gem of an idea in David Somervell’s brain that it would be wonderful to contribute something to the City Plan 2040 for our local area. Many discussions and much hard graft later, we had support from the wider BANZAI team, backing from local partners and funding from the ECCAN Greenlight fund. Then the work really began.
Since then, we’ve appointed a project coordinator (me), printed and delivered 10,000 leaflets, designed an online survey and run three People’s Assembly events with the wonderful Kate Nevens (now a Green MSP!) and Gillian Baxendine. Thanks to the countless volunteer hours and shared resources from all sorts of fabulous humans and organisations, we’ve now received around 200 responses to our survey, including some valuable contributions from Bruntsfield Primary School, who were very enthusiastic in their participation.
We welcomed between 15-30 people to each assembly, giving local people a space to delve a bit deeper into what makes Bruntsfield, Merchiston, Marchmont & Sciennes so special, and what could be done to make it even better in the future. These discussions centred around our core topics: amenities and green space; community and social life; transport; housing and heating; safety and wellbeing, and climate resilience. As BANZAI is a climate action organisation, we wanted to make sure that the whole process was looked at with a climate lens, making it really resilient for future generations.
As part of the outreach process, we also tried our best to make sure we were reaching a diverse group of people across the area we cover in our project. To do this, we continually analysed the participant data and made an extra effort to speak to underrepresented groups. We noticed we weren’t getting many responses from younger people, so we went along to Edinburgh Student Housing Coop, Bruntsfield Primary School and even tried some targeted advertising on social media. We saw an overwhelming initial response from homeowners, so we made sure to deliver leaflets to tenements and in areas where renting is more prevalent. We made sure to cover the whole geographical area with our leaflets and partnered with Merchiston and Marchmont & Sciennes community councils to promote the project in less reached areas. We also contacted organisations run by and working with people of colour, who were less visible in the data. Some of this worked and some of it didn’t – but I’m pleased to say that the representation in the survey responses is particularly diverse in terms of age, location and length of time in the area. We are slightly under the city average for disability, ethnic diversity and home ownership.
With all this in mind, we wanted to give people even more chances to share their opinions on the proposed actions. Our wonderful team of volunteers took all the data that had been submitted through the survey and the three assemblies – including several hundred post-it notes – and managed to create a list of priorities to share. We printed those out on some nice big boards and took them on a tour – to the Meadows Festival, Fountainbridge Canal Festival and Edinburgh Climate Festival. We managed to gather even more post-it notes! These will be added into the mix for analysis and eventually written up into a final report and Local Place Plan to submit to Edinburgh City Council for the 2040 City Plan.
So what’s next? We still want to hear your thoughts – if you have a group, location or suggestion for presenting our results so far, let us know. We are happy to come with our boards and talk through the whole process, inviting feedback, comments and further suggestions.
We have also applied to ECCAN for further funding, to enable us to run these workshops, diversify our responses, and also give us time to write up all the results into the Local Place Plan needed to submit to the council. We would also love to write a community action plan with the many ideas that don’t fit neatly into the Local Place Plan – giving BANZAI and the community councils some clear goals to work towards for the next 15 years!
A huge thank you to everyone who filled out the survey or attended a People’s Assembly, to the wider BANZAI team, to Merchiston and Marchmont & Sciennes community councils and to those who have come on board during the process. Shout out to Dig In Greengrocers, Extinction Rebellion, Clean Heat Edinburgh for supplying much needed resources, St Oswald’s Centre and Pianodrome for hosting, many other community councils and local organisations for sharing their experience and knowledge of Local Place Plans. If you would like to partner or work with us on this project or something else, do get in touch on lpp@banzaiedinburgh.org.uk.
Written by Natalie Arnold