Data-driven placemaking for Flintshire County Council
Using data to enhance the planning, design, and management of seven Welsh towns

Local data can provide illuminating insights into community needs, assets, and preferences.
Diverse datasets are increasingly being used in placemaking. They can enhance the planning, design, and management of public places and services. They can also evidence successful placemaking decisions and highlight areas where improvement is still required.
In Wales, ‘placemaking’ has been a priority and a matter of national planning policy since the landmark Well-being of Future Generations Act (2015). Welsh local authority planning decisions are required to consider well-being, sustainability and provide for the needs of all people.
The Welsh Government requires local authorities to establish placemaking plans to access grant funding for regeneration. These plans must draw on baseline data about the location.
As experts in placemaking and data, Urban Foresight was commissioned to support Flintshire County Council’s Regeneration Team. Our task was to establish baseline data for the seven largest towns in the county and advise the council on their placemaking plans.
Our work was part of a wider £1.5 million ‘Town Centre Investment Programme’ as part of the UK Government’s Shared Prosperity Fund. This was secured by the council’s Regeneration team to implement a range of projects across the county.
Urban Foresight audited all the data sets available to the council. This covered a wide range of open, publicly accessible data sources, as well as closed data sources that required authorised access. Our systematic process generated evidence and understanding to define the makeup and needs of each town.
In total, 100 data sets for each town were captured. These were related to the common principles of placemaking as defined by the Design Commission for Wales in their Placemaking Charter. Sources ranged from pedestrian sensors and town centre surveys to national census data. The data sets included:
- demographic data about the age of residents.
- health and employment rates of residents.
- footfall and economic data on shopping centres and high street spending.
- movement data outlining the use of public transport and town centre car parks.
We compiled a database into an easily shareable format for the council. This included links to open-source data to ensure that the information can be refreshed and validated in the future. This means Flintshire County Council can monitor trends within each of the towns for improvement or emerging issues and opportunities. An example would be measuring an increase in the local employment rate over five years.
To help the council to share the data and engage wider stakeholders we created a suite of factsheets for each town. These factsheets visually represent the key data points. They were designed to be used to guide conversations during the public engagement phase of the placemaking process, and to inform the development of emerging themes and priorities for the seven placemaking plans.
The process of data-informed decision making is key to developing placemaking strategies that tackle real issues experienced by towns such as unemployment, healthy life expectancy and education performance.
Data-led decision making allows the impacts of challenges such as reduced local authority budgets and the changing role of town centres to be properly and objectively understood.
The project benefitted from Urban Foresight’s expertise in placemaking and in providing insights and recommendations to improve outcomes for towns and cities. For example, our experience of creating a placemaking plan for Girvan and a Smart Island Strategy for Anglesey.
To find out more about our work in this field, please contact Principal Consultant, Emma Clement.