Making an Impact in the Corridors of Power - Civic Design PhD Student Whitehall Bound!
Dan Slade, a first year Liverpool PhD student funded by the ESRC’s North West Doctoral Training Centre (NWDTC) and jointly supervised by Liverpool and Manchester universities, has been successful in securing an internship within the UK Government’s Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG). The latter is the government ministry with responsibility for issues including planning, housing, urban regeneration, local government and community cohesion. Dan will be working for 6 months with leading civil servants and government ministers on the reform of the planning system following the ‘Taylor review’ of government planning guidance*. He will be reviewing consultation responses from a wide-range of stakeholders and really getting under the skin of how policy and governance works in practice.
Dan, whose PhD research is exploring the conceptual and practical dimensions of ‘residual’ urban spaces, commented that “during the first year of my PhD I wanted a real chance to experience the politics, conflicts and day-to-day workings of planning at the coalface”. He added that “I have always tried my best to gain some practical experience in my field of town planning, volunteering in charitable organisations and doing Planning Aid work when time allowed”. Dan’s PhD supervisor and the leader of the NWDTC’s ‘Planning and Environment Pathway’ at Liverpool, Dr. Olivier Sykes, commented that “Postgraduate research students can play a crucial role in fostering links between academia and practice, undertaking collaborative research with external partners and placements with industry, government and civil society organisations”. Congratulating Dan, Professor Thomas Fischer, Head of the Department of Geography and Planning, noted that “Promoting knowledge exchange and innovation is one of the University’s strategic objectives, and enhancing links between academia and the worlds of professional practice, industry and public policymaking forms a key component of the institutional drive to achieve this goal”. Dan’s Manchester supervisor, Professor Graham Haughton, who worked in the DCLG’s forerunner the Department of the Environment (DoE) during a previous period of reform and challenge for the planning system, also emphasised the value of engaging in practice and the enrichment and rounding of one’s academic perspectives that it can bring.