Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) EPSRC and comprising three universities:

London Metropolitan University (Cities Institute)

University of York (Stockholm Environment Institute)

University of Salford (Salford Business School and Adelphi Research Institute)

InSITU was conducted as a 15-month scoping study to support those who are working to improve public spaces and walking routes with the active participation of local communities, especially in areas of economic and social deprivation. The cross-disciplinary research team developed and tested new approaches and tools to widen user participation and inform design solutions, in areas where leisure and tourism is being nurtured as a catalyst for regeneration. Through innovative application of Geographic Information Systems for Participation (GIS-P), lay participants with in-depth local knowledge have contributed to the physical design of schemes on an equal footing, with each other, and with the practitioners who can deliver significant improvements to public realm infrastructure.

A key aim of InSITU was to allow all participants - regardless of their expertise - to frame the issues, problems and suggested solutions in their own terms. In particular, it was designed to encourage involvement by disadvantaged social groups: people who tend not to respond to traditional forms of consultation, such as questionnaires, surveys, exhibitions and public meetings. Working closely with the Project Partners, valuable insights, opinions and preferences were articulated through local panels, and represented on high quality digitised maps. This adaptation of GIS-P has allowed the annotated maps produced by local users to be interpreted with clarity and acted upon by key specialists, especially urban designers, planners, engineers, leisure/tourism and heritage attraction mangers/conservationists.

The approaches and tools for community engagement were developed and validated in five live-case schemes, two in the City of York, two in Hackney, East London and one in the City of Salford. These were chosen to represent the different stages of the design process from conceptualisation, through detailed planning/negotiation to user satisfaction after completion, and to enable the emerging approaches and tools to be tested out in a variety of ways and contexts. In several of the live-case schemes, it was appropriate to compare different community viewpoints and ‘official’ data. In others, GIS-P also allowed the mapping of different kinds of time-specific information, including the ways in which spaces are used at different times of day, as well as place-histories and folk-memories of how spaces used to be used.

Particular emphasis was placed on eliciting valuable local knowledge and insights from so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ groups, and on developing novel ways of encouraging their participation in urban design, especially improvements to pedestrian environments that would be made safer, more accessible and attractive. The InSITU Project featured a number of methodological advances in GIS-P that were developed by the research team in collaboration with the Project Partners. These included experimental ‘on-street ‘ and ‘on-site’ participation of local people in mapping public spaces and walking routes, as opposed to the more established approach of facilitating focus group panels. It also included the mapping of interior spaces, and participation of young children as well as young adults.

Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), InSITU’s research was undertaken by a consortium of three leading research centres: London Metropolitan University (TRaC at the Cities Institute), the University of York (Stockholm Environment Institute) and the University of Salford (Salford Business School and Adelphi Research Institute). InSITU’s project partners included the City of York Council, City of Salford Council, London Borough of Hackney, Yorkshire Forward Regional Development Agency, Groundwork Trust, Institute of Field Archaeologists, Tourism Concern and the National Trust.