PlannerPod

Simon, Ben and Planner regular Nicola Gooch are joined by London planning maven Brett Leahy, and there's only one thing on their minds: the recently released draft London Plan. 
Brett, who was recently appointed interim growth and transformation lead at Brentwood Borough Council and Rochford District Council, spent nearly a decade in high-level planning roles at Enfield and Redbridge Councils. From green belt, housing targets, and nature recovery, he's well placed to dig into whatever the capital's new planning blueprint throws up... 
The team also runs through some of their highlights of the July/August issue of The Planner.

The tenth episode of PlannerPod sees the team welcome CityEd (AKA Ed), a YouTuber and practising planner who’s amassed 40,000 subscribers and more than more than 2.2 million cumulative views (!) across his videos. 
Ed sat down with Simon and Ben from The Planner to talk about all things placemaking, planning, and knitting: from his tentative first steps in creating videos to (relative) YouTube stardom. 
How did he get started? What sort of community has built up around his channel? How has the planning sector reacted to it? Where does he get those jumpers? We covered plenty in our chat with Ed – listeners will be disappointed to hear that editor Simon Wicks’ sartorial guidance on dressing for extreme heat didn’t make the final cut. 
Hosts:
Simon Wicks
Ben Gosling
Guest: CityEd

Even in places that are experiencing war, planning continues to function. But how? And how is the work of planners influenced by the need to contribute to healing in a post-conflict society?

Marina Milosev, a 2026 Planner woman of Influence, has spent much of the last year working on local plans in Ukraine, on behalf of UN-Habitat. She also lived through conflict during a childhood in Serbia.

In a conversation that ranges across the challenges of working in a region afflicted by armed conflict, the upheaval and trauma created by war and the need to support societies to heal, Marina talks about her work in Ukraine and how it aligns with the themes of equality and inclusiveness that have characterised her career to date.

The team also discuss the latest issue of The Planner, take a lengthy diversion into the work of Stephen Sondheim and consider the relationship between planning and music.

In which The Planner team meets Rachel Fisher, the new chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute, to chat about why she applied for the role, her thoughts about the future direction of the RTPI, the importance of town planning to social cohesion and the RTPI's role in building bridges between the profession and the public.
Along the way, the team also delves into the latest issue of The Planner, taking a closer look at our interview with Nick Tyler of the PEARL facility that monitors how people behave in real-world environments, and the growing role of large language models and artificial intelligence in planning. Is it a good thing? Or, as our article suggests, an innovation to be approached with caution?
Hosts:
Simon Wicks
Laura Edgar
Ben Gosling
Guest: Rachel Fisher

In which, to mark International Women's Day, the Planner team chats with Anna Sabine, MP for Frome and East Somerset, about the failure to mention women's safety in the draft National Planning Policy Framework for England.

During the course of our conversation, Anna and Laura (The Planner's news editor) discuss why women's safety in public spaces is such a pressing issue; Anna laments the absence of joined-up thinking between government departments which have failed to relate the government's violence again women and girls strategy with the planning for the built environment; and the team discuss eswhat planning policies devised with women and girls in mind might look like.

Anna then talks about her experiences as a new MP and Laura draws attention to the Planner's newly published Women of Influence list.