Something near you has changed in the last few years: a road, a shop, a housing estate, a pitch, a field. Today you take one real change in your own area and ask a sharper question than “was it good or bad?” Good for whom? Costly to whom? You will need evidence you can point to, not a vague feeling.

Development is not only something that happens far away. In your lifetime, things have been built, closed, widened or moved where you live. Almost every change was good for somebody and costly to somebody else.

Three kinds of effect help you sort the evidence:

• Economic: money, jobs, prices, trade, the cost of getting about.
• Social: how people meet, who feels safe, who gets left out, what a street feels like.
• Environmental: land, air, water, noise, green space, wildlife.

Open the interactive activity. Choose one real change in your local area from the last few years. If you need a starting point, use the list on the board: a new supermarket or retail park; a bypass or widened road; a shop, bank or post office closing; a new housing estate; a playground or sports pitch; a green field built on; a new cycle lane; a local workplace opening or closing.

Look back at the change you chose.

Talk in pairs, then share:

• Who gained most from that change, and how do you know?
• Who paid for it, in money, time, quiet, space or something else?
• Where did the same development show up as both a gain and a cost?

You can now discuss, with evidence, the positive and negative effects of development in your own local area. You sorted one real change across economic, social and environmental effects, and you noticed that the same change can help one person and cost another. Next time somebody calls a local project “great” or “a disaster,” you have a way to ask: for whom, and what is the evidence?