InSITU held its end-of-project symposium – Spaces, Places and Faces: Tools for Successful Community Involvement - on Wednesday 14th February 2007 at the Graduate Centre, London Metropolitan University.

InSITU Final Event Symposium Poster Download:

InSITU Final Event Symposium Poster (pdf, 1645kb)


InSITU Final Event Presentations:
Please note the large file sizes.

Symposium Introduction (pdf, 11MB)

Engaging Hard to Reach Communities (pdf, 25MB)

Tapping User Insights and Local Knowledge (pdf, 15MB)

Contributing to Urban Design on an Equal Footing (pdf, 6.5MB)


Panels displayed at the Symposium

Panel Displays (pdf, 9.2MB)



Please find below the symposium introduction by Steve Shaw:

The purpose of this symposium is to demonstrate and reflect upon the outcomes of our fifteen-month project, completed this month. We’d very much appreciate your thoughts on how this pilot study might connect with your own areas of interest and your own projects. So thanks for coming along to participate.

Purpose of InSITU:

The purpose of InSITU is to develop tools for effective community participation to support those who are working to improve historic public spaces and walking routes. These we have piloted on public realm improvement schemes initiated by our Project Partners in York, Salford and Hackney: the host Local Authorities and Regional Development Agencies, together with schemes initiated by third sector organisations, especially the Groundwork Trust in Salford and National Trust in Hackney.

The pilot initiatives have included the following five schemes to:

• Accommodate markets, concerts and other events in historic public squares so that local users as well as visitors benefit (City of York); • Refurbish and convert the former Terry's chocolate factory site, including new paths for walking and cycling (City of York); • Establish a riverside health walk, including interpretation of local histories (City of Salford); • Upgrade a pedestrian link between a hospital and local railway station (LB Hackney); • Create a family trail around a historic house owned by the National Trust (LB Hackney).

To put these into the broader context of public policy in the UK, these are all schemes to extend the so-called Urban Renaissance to reach the parts and the people that have not experienced much benefit hitherto.

Looking back over the past decade, I think it’s fair to say that for many, New Labour and the new millennium brought new hope, following two previous decades characterised in the main by the private affluence of developments such as gated communities, juxtaposed with a great deal of public squalor.

In Towards an Urban Renaissance, the Urban Task Force chaired by Lord Rogers (1999) argued the imperative of good design to secure a network of accessible, safe and attractive public spaces. The Urban White Paper incorporated most of the UTF’s recommendations, and the Commission for Architecture and Built Environment was established to help raise the quality of urban design and hence the quality of people’s lives.

Five years on from the White Paper, State of the English Cities reported early signs that the Government’s recent focus on liveability is beginning to reverse the long-term deterioration in the quality of urban public spaces (ODPM 2006: 27).

The chair of the Urban Task Force has, nevertheless, expressed disappointment with the lack of progress, especially compared with our counterparts in mainland Europe. Many of our urban streets are over-engineered to maximise traffic flow, pedestrians and cyclists are still treated as second- or third-class citizens (UTF 2005: 6). A fundamental failing is that so few schemes involve local communities:

Too often, design is imposed on communities rather than involving them. Community groups and local representatives are still excluded from the decision-making process and are not adequately supported by professional facilitators (op cit: 7).

In our own case study areas, depressingly poor urban environments persist, often a short walk away from flagship city centre and waterfront schemes.

Despite the rather damning commentary from Lord Rogers, our project has confirmed that many UK Local Authorities and third sector organisations have a deep commitment to doing something about it, and to widening community involvement in processes that Sir Michael Lyons (2006: 39) calls place-shaping: maintaining the cohesiveness of the community and supporting debate within it, ensuring smaller voices are heard.

How to put democratic place-shaping into practice remains a significant challenge. The louder voices often seem to prevail – interest groups that are well connected and know the system. Those who do not may be considered hard-to-reach: people who tend not to respond to established techniques, such as questionnaire surveys, exhibitions and public meetings.

We also believe there are sound pragmatic as well as social equity arguments for broadening civic engagement. As Tim Kitchen, former Chief Planner, City of Manchester (2007: 72) comments:

Local people often have a great knowledge about, and feel for an area, much more so than an individual planner could develop other than through protracted study, and thus quite apart from arguments about people’s rights in a democratic society there is a clear pragmatic argument for planning services to try to find ways of tapping into this base of knowledge and concern.

GIS-P includes the following features:

(i) Workshop discussion through local panels is expressed by the participants on paper maps (points, lines, areas); participants’ views, preferences and suggested solutions are then digitised with speech bubbles (GIS-P mapping)

(ii) The plans produced by different panels (e.g. age groups) can be superimposed so the points of consensus or conflict can be identified, views of particular groups made transparent, e.g. teenagers in York city centre.

(iii) The results can be presented in a format that can be readily interpreted by practitioners as a preliminary to the generation of solutions, e.g. designing a family trail around Sutton House informed by the child’s-eye view.

Summary and Conclusion:

To summarise, the aim of InSITU has been to allow all participants - regardless of their expertise - to frame the issues, problems and suggested solutions in their own terms. Valuable local insights, opinions and preferences have been articulated through panels that include people who might be regarded as hard to reach.

The InSITU project team has tried to avoid the top down approach. However, we do not advocate one that is completely bottom up. Presenting members of local communities with a blank map might stimulate the imagination, but it will soon lose credibility if there’s no realistic chance that their wish-lists will materialise.

Our approach is to try and meet the users and would-be users of public spaces somewhere in the middle. We selected initiatives that had the potential to deliver significant improvements to the historic public realm, and where we felt there was sufficient willpower and resources to implement.

The ability to deliver local benefits for diverse communities will depend, not only on the vision and skills of outsiders with specialist expertise (such as urban designers, planners and conservation officers), but on the ability of the latter to tap the expertise of insiders who have the necessary insights and knowledge of how public spaces work for them. We'd like to convince you this afternoon that this is not as instrumental or manipulative as it may first appear!

A key feature of InSITU is that it enables real people – of various ages - to contribute to the design of schemes on an equal footing - with each other - and with practitioners such as urban designers who can deliver significant improvements to the public realm.

Explain that we shall be discussing outcomes of the project in relation to three key themes:

• Engaging so-called hard to reach communities • Tapping user insights and local knowledge • Enabling people to contribute to urban design in an equal footing

And that - with the kind participation of the delegates - we shall be involving you in a live demonstration to illustrate the basic idea of mapping and tapping people’s experiences of the public realm around this university.

References:

Kitchen, T. (2007) Skills for Planning Practice, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan;

Lyons, M. (2006) The Lyons Inquiry into Local Government, National prosperity, local choice and civic engagement, London: ODPM;

Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (2006) State of the English Cities, Volume 1, London: ODPM;

Urban Task Force (1999) Towards an Urban Renaissance, Final Report of the Urban Task Force, Chaired by Lord Rivers of Riverside, Urban Task Force, London: E and FN Spon;

Urban Task Force (2005) Towards a Strong Urban Renaissance, London: Urban Task Force;