The fastest way to find out about new planning applications in Edinburgh

If you've been to our website recently you'll have noticed a new tab on the top menu for "The Planning Map."

As it's name suggests, we've set-up a planning page which shows a map of all the current planning applications, and the latest 'Tweets' from the City of Edinburgh Council planning department. 

This makes it easy for anyone to see which new planning applications might affect them. 

Now that our "We Love Leith" project has finished, we've also converted that Twitter account to tweet new planning applications as they are added to the planning portal. Having watched this work for about a week now, it seems that these tweets go out before the 'weekly list' which most people use to find out about planning applications. Therefore, it would seem that if you want a nearly immediate notification service about planning applications in Edinburgh then you should sign-up for these updates. 

It's worth noting that this is not an 'official service' as it has been put together by volunteers, using the Scraperwiki service. So, if the council change their website in the future it might break. In the meantime, we'd like to thank everyone who has put time and effort into making it work.

The council planning department have recently finished consulting on how they can improve their community engagement. It will be interesting to see if they decide to provide an official service like the Planning Map.

It could certainly be improved - for example, we're pretty sure most people would want to only get notifications about planning applications in their area.

Also, it would also be good to be able to combine a local planning notifications system with news about new local Traffic Regulation Orders too. Afterall, both planning applications and TRO's allow public comments on changes to the built environment.

In the meantime you might not know that the council already publishes lots of useful planning information. If you want to find out more about planning issues in your area you might also want to check out:

• Map of Development Briefs, Frameworks and Masterplans
• Map of Conservation Areas and Listed Buildings
• "Weekly Lists" of planning applications and decisions

Sadly, it's not possible to publish the maps above on other websites. If it was we'd add them to the Planning Map page.

If you have any ideas on how council planning information could be made more accessible to people, please add your thoughts in the comments below. 

If you have any techy skills and would like to help build on what has already been achieved, we'd love it if you got in touch.