Engagement is dirty work

Involving people who are traditionally excluded from society is hard, especially when attitudes towards them are truly appalling. We took the lessons from our first engagement exercise, and applied them to the hardest possible use case.

If you haven’t read Part One and Part Two of the story behind Mobility Lab, then I recommend that you do so before proceeding on.

“Why should I give you my view? You don’t care. You just want to tick a box.”
“Ok, here’s my view. The Council are useless and you should all be sacked. I’ve reported the pikeys 5 times and nothing has been done about them.”
“Look, we just don’t want the gyppos around here. Just blow up their caravans and be done with it.”

How do you overcome that level of vitriol in a public engagement exercise? Can you? When there is an out-group that is so hated, any form of public dialogue exposes some of the very worst in people.

Not long after the disaster of my local transport plan consultation, I had the opportunity to observe a consultation exercise being run by Mid Bedfordshire District Council. This was the first of two such exercises on planning for Gypsy and…