Sustainable Residential Development in Urban Areas

(ii) Many smaller towns and villages located more remotely from
the main urban centres and or the transport corridors between
such centres often face new challenges in sustaining their
population and attracting development in the face of a wider
process of economic restructuring of the rural economy that
they traditionally depended on. New plans for the types of
smaller towns and villages mentioned above should encourage
interventions designed to open up development opportunities
such as town or village centre renewal, redevelopment of
derelict sites or the development of mixed use proposals in
order to stimulate new economic development.
(iii) Smaller towns and villages, particularly heritage towns and
villages in coastal or other attractive inland locations often find
themselves under considerable pressure for tourism driven
and/or second home type development. The unique design
and built heritage attributes of such locations suggest the need
to put in place mechanisms such as Village Design Statements
(see below), that either elaborate LAPs or act as supplementary
local development frameworks and that accurately profile the
key attributes of the town or village concerned, offering advice
on how to successfully integrate new development.
6.5 As mentioned above, preparation of supplementary local
development frameworks might be appropriate in certain
circumstances to guide local development in small towns and villages
with a population of under 2000. Such non-statutory local
development frameworks can be useful where planning authorities
are already engaged in preparing a large number of Local Area Plans.
The County Development Plan should indicate where such
frameworks will be prepared over the lifetime of the plan. Such
frameworks must conform with the core settlement and housing
strategy elements of the overall county development plan with
respect to projected population and development land and they must
be prepared, where necessary and appropriate, in consultation with
local communities. Village Design Statements are an example of nonstatutory
local development frameworks. Such statements are a
useful non-statutory innovation in:
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Planning Guidelines