Planning applications for temporary development in England's core cities 2000-15 (5,890 cases)

Planning applications data, derived from each core city local authority, provided a record of all applied for development activity over a prolonged period of time. In England, all local authorities have a legal duty to make available certain details relating to planning applications (as a public register) on the internet (PARSOL, 2006). A wide range of information and documentation are made available across a range of data fields. Eight data fields were extracted for our analysis, these included, ‘application number’, ‘status’, ‘application address’, ‘postcode’, ‘development description’, ‘date received’, ‘decision’ as well as ‘appeal decision’ (see PARSOL, 2006: 21). Habitually some data fields were empty requiring a more thorough analysis of the supplied documentation to obtain missing information.

Similar to applications for traditional development, applications for almost all forms of temporary use are subject to an application for planning permission. Seven key terms/concepts associated with temporary urbanism were employed to search for and extract applications for temporary development within each core city, these included, ‘temporary’, ‘temporary use’, ‘period of’, ‘use of land’, ‘short term/short-term’, ‘interim’ and ‘meanwhile’. The systematic collection and collation of planning applications data resulted in an end dataset of 5,890 applications for temporary use across the eight core cities over the fifteen-year period of 2000-15.

The 5,890 cases were then coded across a range of structural variables associated with the discourse on temporary use to amass city datasets capable of looking in depth at the characteristics of temporary development in the core cities.