Putting design back into planning, one conversation at a time

At Public Practice, we believe that increasing local government's placemaking capacity and embedding design culture for the long term will ultimately enable better places. Read on to learn about Jason Tsang's impact on design as the only in-house architect in his public sector team.

In 2023, architect Jason Tsang joined Canterbury City Council as its Urban Design Officer through the Public Practice Associate Programme. He arrived with project architect experience at ADP Architecture – most recently leading the delivery of a gateway workspace building for a higher-education client in the South East – bringing a delivery-focused, design-led perspective to Canterbury’s planning team. Stepping in as the council’s only in-house architect, he arrived just as officers were shaping the district’s ambitious 2040 Local Plan and negotiating a wave of strategic housing sites within one of England's most sensitive historic environments.

This story traces how Tsang’s cross-sector skills are raising design quality across the Canterbury district and beyond. At the £230 million, 800-home Lower Herne Village development in Herne Bay, he is steering the later phases of the development through reserved matters negotiations, securing better house types, improved landscaping, and stronger street layouts. He is applying the same rigour to the 1350-home Brooklands Farm strategic site outside Whitstable, whose outline plans include a primary and SEND school plus 30% affordable and 10% older-persons housing. On that scheme, Tsang guides the developer through successive design-review panels, balancing community concerns with the council’s quality agenda. Alongside these site-specific wins, he is strengthening collaboration between Development Management and Policy teams and, crucially, through the five-authority East Kent Design Code, he is spreading that impact far beyond Canterbury’s boundaries.

A key challenge for planning in Canterbury is meeting its housing targets: the district’s draft Local Plan says it must find space for 1149 new homes every year until 2040, if it is to stay on the right side of national policy. On the ground, we see community anxieties about the pace and scale of change. Major strategic sites, such as the 800-home Lower Herne Village and the 1350-home Brooklands Farm, have faced local opposition. Yet this also shows how deeply residents care about shaping their town’s future.

It is into this balance that Tsang steps. Tasked with lifting design quality while navigating communities that feel overwhelmed by numbers and unheard in the process. His challenge is as much about building trust as redrawing masterplans, proving that better-designed growth can answer housing needs without erasing the places people love.

On why he joined Canterbury City Council as a Public Practice Associate, Tsang said, “I understood the balance of design skills is quite heavily tilted toward the private sector, so I felt I could bring my expertise into the local authority and have a bigger impact on the built environment.”

“Having a design code is great, but if no one in the planning authority uses it, the playing field is tilted toward the developer,” Tsang reflects, setting out his mission in Canterbury. As the council’s only chartered architect, he quickly became the team’s “critical friend,” strengthening the twice‑weekly design‑surgery drop‑ins where officers bring live applications for rapid-fire design advice and helping them build confidence in their own design knowledge and in conversations with applicants. The conversations can range from a single in‑fill plot to a 300‑home layout.

According to Lizzy Johnson, the council's Heritage and Design Manager, this is where his architectural background is vital. “As an architect, Jason has that critical eye for fine detail, which can make or break schemes, while also championing wider urban design principles into practice,” she says.

That insider support soon shaped the Lower Herne Village project. “When the reserved matters drawings landed, we went through three or four iterative rounds, pushing for better house types and better layouts so they actually met the code’s objectives,” Tsang recalls. Each cycle sharpened the design with visible, measurable shifts creating a step-change in quality. His authority in those negotiations stems from practice and profession: “I’m the only architect in the planning team, so people quickly see what that perspective adds,” he notes. Tsang’s role is not limited to headline sites. He routinely “zooms in and out across scales, detail to masterplan,” ensuring small decisions support the wider vision and giving planners language they can deploy with confidence at the pre-application stage.

Development Management and Planning Policy were once a single service in Canterbury, but a restructure separated them in recent years. Tsang works across departments and joins the Principal Heritage Officer in regular catch-ups with the Policy team, offering “a critical view on emerging design and heritage policies.”

Those meetings give Tsang a platform to channel his private practice know-how directly into the plan-making process. “The specific Local Plan 2040 policies I have been working on with Policy are the Sustainable Design Strategies and the Residential and Non-Residential Design Policies, which my architectural experience has helped with greatly,” he notes. By feeding day-to-day realities from development management into these draft policies, he makes sure the wording planners will soon rely on is both technically robust and usable at the negotiation table. This collaboration is grounded in a shared philosophy.

As Johnson notes, “Good design, more often than not, starts with understanding context, and for most of our district heritage is the driving context of our built environment (this does not mean pastiche!).”

The resulting feedback loop enhances both services: policy writers gain real-time intelligence from live applications, and case officers know the Local Plan will back their push for better design. In practical terms, the council speaks with one voice on what “good” looks like, whether an applicant is reading policy text or sitting across the table from a case officer. By embedding that design-literate viewpoint inside Development Management, he is proving that rigorous, early critique can speed up approvals, improve outcomes and crucially reassure communities who worry that growth means settling for the lowest common denominator. In short, he is putting design back into planning from the inside out, one conversation and one iterative redraw at a time.

In addition to his caseload, Tsang is currently working on the East Kent Design Code (EKDC), taking shape thanks to a joint effort by Ashford, Canterbury, Dover, Folkestone & Hythe and Thanet councils that together secured £250,000 from the Government’s new Planning Skills Delivery Fund in February 2024. The grant supports urban design capacity through a cross-district code that will guide future development. By pooling money and staff, the authorities expect the work to be quicker and more cost-effective than five separate commissions, while still allowing locally specific coding. Representing Canterbury, Tsang sits on the working group. “We are building an evidence base that will be crucial for DM officers to secure high-quality design,” he explains.

With Design South East, BPTW and specialist consultants on board, the East Kent Design Code will: strengthen cross-authority partnerships and skills; pool money and effort so each council can adapt a shared approach without duplicated work; publish a shared approach to character and local distinctiveness and a tailored vision-and-coding plan for every district; create community panels to keep residents at the table; issue a clear toolkit so parishes, landowners and developers can write their own codes; digitise everything in a uniform, easily updated online format; and train officers in each council to safeguard consistency as the code evolves.

Though the initial funding is for the first two stages of the Design Coding Process, baseline analysis and visioning, the shared framework promises practical efficiencies for the development of Design Codes in the future. Developers operating across district lines will have a clearer understanding of district design priorities instead of five subtly different versions, cutting duplication and uncertainty. The extra funding tackles a chronic design skills gap by paying for specialist support that smaller teams could not afford alone, while the co-production process itself upskills officers as they draft the vision of the code. In effect, the EKDC turns five separate planning services into a single design-literate front, raising the bar for quality and consistency across the whole of East Kent.

Over his first 18 months, Tsang has helped secure tangible gains. The 296-home Phases C & D at Lower Herne Village gained consent in June 2025 after three design-code redraws that replaced standard house types with a stronger block structure and street hierarchy. At Brooklands Farm, the 1350-home outline has been through design review panel and now moves forward on a masterplan that will be determined imminently. The Heritage and Design Team and Planning Policy meet regularly, and live-site lessons feed straight into the Heritage, Sustainable Design, Residential and Non-Residential policies of the 2040 Plan. Region-wide, the East Kent partnership has finished its baseline study and is drafting the vision-and-coding plan, giving five councils a shared evidence base. Informal heritage and design surgeries are a mainstay of the planning assessment process, embedding design critique in routine workflow, and as Tsang says, “Half of the job is giving officers a chance to develop their own design skills, being a critical friend so they feel encouraged and up-skilled.”

Tsang’s placement distils three transferable lessons. First, getting design expertise early saves time rather than adds it: working through code-led sketches early shaved time from Lower Herne Village’s review and prevented late redesign, because priorities were set upfront. Second, a single specialist can catalyse culture change; as Canterbury’s only chartered architect, Tsang’s “critical-friend” role has lifted confidence across the whole DM team.

Johnson confirms the value of this interdisciplinary approach: “As a heritage officer, it is enriching, rewarding and above all very natural working with an architect,” she says. “I think we speak a very similar language.”

Third, regional collaboration maximises talent and budget; the East Kent partnership funnels a single £ 250,000 grant into shared evidence, joint training and digital tools, resources no local authority could fund alone. Together, these insights show design is not a bolt-on: embed expertise, co-write policy with practitioners, pool capacity, and quality rises while decisions quicken, and elected members feel more confident defending ambitious outcomes at committee.

Tsang’s goal is to embed a design culture that thrives whether or not he’s in the room, creating a self-sustaining design culture rather than a design bottleneck. The Sustainable Design Strategies, Residential Design and Non-Residential Design policies he has helped craft with the Policy team now sit in the Regulation 18 Local Plan 2040, ready to bake higher standards into every future decision. His open-door “critical friend” sessions continue to give case officers a quick sounding board for design questions, embedding day-to-day confidence inside Development Management, while region-wide, the forthcoming East Kent Design Code will hand five councils a shared evidence base and a single yardstick for applicants, aligning quality expectations across the sub-region.

As Tsang sums it up, "Raising the bar of design across the district, catching things early in the design process and pushing forward the need for good design, sets a trajectory that eventually leads to better built design outcomes."