Through these workshops we aimed to:

• Learn about people’s previous experience of campaigns and discussions about spatial planning in Greater Manchester.
• Help participants understand how decisions are currently made, and find out about promising examples of how things have been done differently elsewhere.
• Link up people interested in this topic from a range of angles, and explore what possibilities there are for starting to build a better quality of debate in Greater Manchester.
• Share our learning with key policy actors, and support members of our group to make change themselves.

The Democratic Society led on bringing together a small group of people interested in this topic from a range of different angles. You can read reports from three of the four workshops on the DemSoc website.

Workshop 1: A better debate about what's built where
Brought together a small group with a stake in this issue from a range of different standpoints to talk about their experiences of this topic and to start thinking about what a better conversation might look like. Read more.

Workshop 2: How does Spatial Planning work, and how can it work better?
Drew on some expert advice to explore how spatial planning decisions currently work and how communities can feed into these decisions, and sharing some examples of how people have tried to build more productive debates elsewhere. Read more.

Workshop 3: Making a change
Just Space, an organisation that has built a different way of working in another city, shared some of their experiences to help us reflect on what opportunities and barriers there are to building a different way of working in Greater Manchester. Read more.

Workshop 4: Keeping it going
The last workshop reflected on what has happened so far, considered key messages, and explored possibilities to carry forward what we learned together.

This project was delivered by The Democratic Society in collaboration with Jam and Justice.

To hear about The Democratic Society's role in this work, write to mat@demsoc.org.