Participatory Architecture: The Key to Equitable Sustainable Design
Intro
In this radical practice paper and through our institution Accord, I examine the workings and shortcomings of community engagement and collaborative practice in architecture.
I explore how and when community participation is generated and if it can be restructured, changing how architects work and revolutionise their approach to the built environment.
Participation can take many different forms and employ a variety of methodologies: consultations, collaborations, community-led design, and others. Architectural practice lags behind in being able to adapt, absorb and redistribute the benefits of engaging with the community. Community engagement is particularly relevant to the larger public, third-sector works, and housing development schemes; projects that actively seek engagement as part of their stated goals, be that from mandated pressure, civic interest or governmental recognition of its requirement. Practices specialising in these kinds of projects that want to publicly engage do not have a framework that effectively lends itself to working with community interests and large developers that are bounded to some level of engagement often practice participation solely on a superficial level, exhibiting work is displayed to communities without any real chance for the scheme to change. The design flow and power relationship is a one-way street. As Peter Blundell Jones describes it
“Recently government policy in Europe and the USA has had participation a necessary part of public work; it has thus effectively been institutionalised, another box among many to tick in order to get approval and funding. participation becomes an organised and potentially manipulated part of any regeneration project, in which users are meant to be given a voice but the process stifles the sounds coming out” ¹
Within our proposed institution Accord We seek to provide a platform to reshape the preplanning stages of design and therefore create a tighter bond between end-users, stakeholders and experts at an earlier stage. Accord aims to create continuous relationships between the designers and the community, framing it not as a methodology but as an approach. Participation has the ability to influence reform our shared built environment, creating better spaces that respond to the needs of its inhabitants, reestablishing a relationship between architecture and the public and generating communities through design.
[1] Blundell Jones, Peter, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till, Architecture & Participation (Abingdon: Spon Press, 2005), p.xiv.
The Development of Participatory Design
The history of architecture is one of the architect fighting for recognition in their role, seeking to dominate the building profession. Due to construction’s increasing commodification and specialisation of skills “The relationship between the architect, client, user of the building has become ever more attenuated.”² Currently, all skill, authority and ability to influence sits increasingly in the hands of clients and experts, like architects. Most people feel disconnected from their built environment, having no say in how it is shaped. Many architects often do not see the value in community engagement, wanting not to submit to local interests or tarnish their own supreme vision of the project.
Community architecture origins lie in the grassroots movements in the 1960s; of radicals, academics, students, squatters, resisting local residency groups and architects that used self build techniques, consultations and co-operations far outside the usual remit of design for that time.³ Practising architects like John Habraken and later Ralph Erskine (fig. 1) are particularly identifiable as early innovators. In Ralph Erskine’s lauded Royal Gold Medal-winning redevelopment of the Byker estate, Erskine’s “first step was to establish a site office in a disused funeral parlour, from which the scheme was designed with the involvement of inhabitants.”⁴
These movements were often founded to resist the “central and local government policy towards increasingly large scale, post-war urban slum clearance and renewal programmes.. and the replacement with what was seen as largely featureless system-built multi-storey flats.”⁵ and the authorities were viewed as “monolithic and unresponsive to social upheaval, dispersal and breakdown of traditional communities attributed to their redevelopment plan.”⁶ Eventually, these movements gained enough momentum to influence policy. There is a traceable route for this movement from radical to normal to mandated to banal.
The Skeffington Report was one of the earliest investigations into how the public should influence planning by a governmental body, set up in repose to this growing movement. Appointed in 1968 by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and led by Arthur Skeffington MP. The report advocated for a comprehensive increase in the involvement of the public in the shaping of the landscape and was one of the first impulses towards the mandating of public involvement in design and construction. The ideas presented in the report took a while to influence government policy on planning, but it shaped the narrative around participation for decades to come. The report was exceedingly progressive. The public was given a continuous, developing and significant role in the report’s proposed structure for planning. They would gather information beforehand, reconvene with the planners repeatedly and be one of the central sources of feedback. They were placing the public as a client and as a key element, who could take ownership of the process and thus the product of it. The Skeffington Report was followed by the Housing Act of 1969 and community aid scheme of 1972. The most recent act of this kind was the Localism act of 2011 enacted as part of the small government, big society ambition of David Cameron’s 2010 Conservative government manifesto.
“the Act introduces a new requirement for developers to consult local communities before submitting planning applications for certain developments. This gives local people a chance to comment when there is still genuine scope to make changes to proposals.”⁷
Before then it had still been best practice to engage in some measure of community engagement but this further cemented its role. All these acts all seek to empower the community in regards to their planning and shaping their built environment. The governmental framework is there but architects have yet to utilise it to its best degree.
[2] Jenkins, Paul, and Leslie Forsyth, Architecture Participation and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) pg.18,
[3] see Nick Wates and Charles Knevitt’s Community architecture for an in-depth analysis of the emergence of the movement.
[4] Knevitt, Charles, and Nick Wates, Community Architecture How People Are Creating Their Own Environment (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1987), p.77.
[5] Jenkins and Forsyth, Architecture Participation and Society p. 25.
[6] Ibid
[7] Department for Communities and Local Government, A Plain English Guide to the Localism Act (London: DCLG, 2011), p.13.
The Current Form of Community Engagement
Currently, there are different strata of community involvement. Sherry Arnstein an American sociologist compared it to a ladder with eight rungs.⁸ (fig.2) Those rungs in descending order of participation being Citizen control, delegated power, partnership, placation, consultation, informing, therapy and manipulation. Most projects do not get past consultation. “There is also a threshold of involvement below which the exercise is likely to be counterproductive.”⁹
In terms of work done collaboratively between architect and stakeholders, this ladder climbs up from updating the local stakeholders of the design to consultation with the local community, to taking on direct considerations from community feedback, to making collective decisions, to designers working with locals to get work done and further to the point where the architect or expert takes a step back and the role of the architect becomes a nuanced one, closer to that of a community organiser. The corresponding typical tools of engagement are printed or digital media, meetings, exhibitions and workshops. (fig.3) It is through these tools, spaces and relationships that engagement with the stakeholders can be formed. These are the familiar tools that architecture practices use, most firms utilise some or more of these tools but the extent that these devices are successful and meaningfully employed is questionable. The stage above that of concerted co-operation that few architects employ is that of forums, advisory boards and co-design.
Projects attempting to engage with stakeholders and involve the local community through a co-design process continually suffer from a cyclical briefing process with information fundamental to the development of the project coming too late. Project Orange’s briefing process for The Mooring Social Club in Thamesmead for the third sector client Peabody is a typical example. Peabody was happy to engage in a lengthy process of consultation in order to develop a community that would take ownership of the building. The process was a typical example of a confusing co-design process in which stakeholders are only brought into the briefing process at Stages 2 and 3 of the RIBA Plan of Works, when this information is crucial at Stage 0 and 1. This late introduction of stakeholders creates tension between an architect hoping to push ahead with the pressures of tight deadlines, and end-users rightfully informing the architect of requirements for the spaces they will use. This sent the project into a feedback loop of consultation and design at too late a stage in the design process. In this situation Project Orange had no set framework around which to gauge and construct their process of consultation with the stakeholders. It is clear that with a proper community design infrastructure they would be able to clearly define the stages of consultation in-line with their design work and not waste funding and effort with endless fruitless meetings and readjustments. (fig.4)
Since the aforementioned Localism Act large developments have been statutorily required to engage with the local community, subject to the building development. Whilst some companies are better than others at going through this process for many it is a tick-box obligatory exercise. As Jenkins claims this has nullified the effect of community participation, “the consolidation of the movement within the profession seems to have essentially undermined this and led to a dominant attitude of user participation being seen as a means to an end — whether to bring in further work and fees (as through the RIBA support) or to ensure less criticism of housing provision (as in local government support).”¹⁰ This is visible in the lack of continuous process, stakeholders are afforded certain moments to offload whatever feedback they have at each stage at the end of design there is an open house or just before planning. These moments come at the end of stages and do not give sufficient time to develop a working relationship. Rarely do these piecemeal moments of community input leave an impression of the building to come. This is pseudo-participation. (fig.5 )Jeremy Till makes the argument that this type of participation is just enough to placate people whilst not actually disrupting the working of the designers or builders. “Participation, as far as the majority is concerned, is participation in the choice fo the decision-makers. Thus the function of participation is solely a protective one.”¹¹ actually having participation push back and resist, for it to be forceful on the action of architects could “Lead to a more revitalised and relevant form of architectural practice.”¹²
Accessing and developing an engaged community is one of the largest barriers towards widespread adoption of participatory design. This is a hindrance even for those firms with experience in community-led design. Often only those members of the public with the luxury of time and the privilege of cultural capital engage with this process, meaning that a large proportion of those critiquing and preventing new projects are retired white people (informally referred to as pale and stale) and are unrepresentative of the local demographics. An additional obstruction to a wider communal involvement is “what many perceptive observers have noted the occurrence of ‘consultation fatigue’ and the possibility that the intended participants may very rationally consider the potential benefits of involvement not to be worth the effort. Exacerbated by the widespread lack of trust of state institutions and the associated sense that participation is unlikely to affect policy.”¹³ Construction and design are long arduous, often unrewarding, processes. The moments of input can feel very disconnected from the final outcome. Even dedicated contributors to the process might stop attending or paying attention during the years it takes to follow a project through. This is magnified further when we talk about minorities who can feel alienated in these very white and at times inaccessible environments. I spent a term working with a community land trust StART in Haringey. They are a community group seeking to construct large-scale community-led housing in Haringey in co-operation with the GLA. I saw them struggle in their attempts to outreach to minorities and younger people in the local area and those they did convince to attend did not stay for an extended amount of time. (fig.6) Sustained invested collaboration by a community is a rare thing to come by and has to be properly crafted and nurtured. What the Skeffington report divined in 1968 about widespread support is as true as ever. “Unless local planning authority members and the public are likewise committed to the principle and to use constructive implementation the practical recommendations that we make will be arid.”¹⁴ It also paired the potential lack of interest from locals with a need to generally educate people and cultivate civic responsibility.
[8] Arnstein, Sherry, ‘The Ladder of Citizen Participation’, Journal of the Institute of American Planners, 34.4 (1969), pp.216–24
[9] Knevitt and Wates, Community Architecture How People Are Creating Their Own Environment, p.116.
[10] Jenkins and Forsyth, Architecture Participation and Society, pg.37.
[11] Jones, Petrescu, and Jeremy Till, Architecture & Participation, p.38.
[12] Ibid p.41.
[13] Ibid, p.93.
[14] Committee on Public Participation in Planning, People and Planning Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning (London: H.M.S.O., 969), p.9.
Accord’s Model and Conclusion
Accord’s proposal seeks to follow the original aim of the Skeffington report and realign community participation to the report’s model of continuous, early and meaningful participation of local stakeholders and communities. The Accord platform allows clients to pair with stakeholders and communities together to make a brief before design begins and then creates a co-operative competition through which designers can group together, sharing ideas and labour. As Accord progresses at each stage there are several symposiums, these provide the client with the chance to see the early design stages unfold, choose what design features work and which schemes will continue forward. (fig.7) But at the same time, it also acts as a public forum where research and ideas from the community are equally weighted with other designers, clients and stakeholders. (fig.8) Designed into the structure of this competition, between the presentations, are stages where designers are instructed to co-operate with stakeholders for periods of intense co-operation. On public schemes, it is possible to have the panel of decision-makers feature representatives of local community bodies thus elevating the role of the public from informed agents to placate to key focal actors in the process.
In conclusion whilst community engagement is employed on a range of projects, the system requires reinvigoration. The benefits of significant, extended co-operation between designer and occupier are numerous for both architects and occupiers. When properly employed users become more than “passive recipients of an environment conceived, executed, managed and evaluated by others.”¹⁵ With consensus we all have a hand in the forms of our cities, towns and neighbourhoods.
Accord offers the opportunity and structure that is required for communities to invest time and energy into the design process and see their input alter the design. Architects will be accountable to public interests in the Accord framework. These measures seek to balance the currently unequal community engagement process prevalent across the UK and seed fruitful co-design processes in a range of public and large-scale projects.
Architects have to be reprogrammed to see the benefits in having those people whose spaces they are shaping to have a say and an influence on the form. “Rather than being a master, the architect should understand himself/herself as one of the participants.”¹⁶ It is through this approach that we can develop the equitable, appropriate and sustainable spaces that we deeply require.
[15] Knevitt and Wates, Community Architecture How People Are Creating Their Own Environment, p.24.
[16] Jones, Petrescu, and Jeremy Till, Architecture & Participation, p.55.
Bibliography
Blundell Jones, Peter, Doina Petrescu, and Jeremy Till, Architecture & Participation (Abingdon: Spon Press, 2005)
Committee on Public Participation in Planning, People and Planning Report of the Committee on Public Participation in Planning (London: H.M.S.O., 969)
Department for Communities and Local Government, A Plain English Guide to the Localism Act (London: DCLG, 2011)
Jenkins, Paul, and Leslie Forsyth, Architecture Participation and Society (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010)
Knevitt, Charles, and Nick Wates, Community Architecture How People Are Creating Their Own Environment (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1987)
Nicholson, Simon, and Barbara Schreiner, Community Participation in Decision Making (Milton Keynes: The Open University Press, 1973)
Price, Benjamin, Interview with Sophie De Souza, 2020
