Planning for a town centre? You need to know where it is

Bath town centre	Cribbs Causeway (out of town mall)

The UK’s Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) commissioned Geofutures to assist in the evaluation of a planning policy guideline requiring priority to be given to town-centre development, restricting the burgeoning of out-of-town retail centres. This required an agreed, workable definition of the town centre – something which means different things to different users – and usable statistics based on that definition.

The multiple functions of a town centre: office	The multiple functions of a town centre: retail
The multiple functions of a town centre: entertainment
The multiple functions of a town centre (office employment, retailing, entertainment, cultural activities etc) are mapped for town centres in England and Wales using available data on each. GI technology is then used to combine the data, producing a composite ‘data surface’, dubbed the Index of Town Centre Activity.
	The multiple functions of a town centre: cultural activity

This was mapped for the sample towns, where local stakeholder groups confirmed its accuracy and helped to determine an appropriate ‘contour’ which could stand for the best-fit town centre boundary.

An interactive 'flooding' image to show the varying town centre boundaries depending upon the flood level

The 2002 Bath town centre boundary

The time series of town centre statistics is the first of its kind. Yearly statistics will be published, enabling planners and other stakeholders to track changes over time. Changes may affect not only a town's statistics (numbers of people employed, for example) but even its spatial extent over time. The relative economic strength of individual town centres fluctuates in response to local and national conditions, changes which regularly published statistics help policy makers to recognise, track and forecast town centre trend.

Geofutures has been working with ODPM to make data available to users online, creating applications to allow more complex interactions with the information while maintaining data confidentiality - see Geofutures Online.

Avoiding disclosure of data on individuals and businesses becomes an issue when users change the boundaries of areas for which they extract statistics, and new methodologies are under examination which may allow accurate extraction at sufficiently small scales with assured non-disclosure.