F E AT U R E By Lesley Malone
Lesley Malone is the author of Desire lines: a guide to community participation in designing places (RIBA Publishing, 2018)
Places for people Community-led approaches to placemaking are creating new roles for landscape professionals, calling for more focus on people-centred design and new ways of working, says Lesley Malone.
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istorically, formal training for built environment designers tended to neglect community engagement and was unlikely to prepare practitioners for the role of running consultations or developing community participation programmes. A paternalistic top-down design culture prevailed, within which end-users’ views were presumed rather than canvassed. Placemaking is now considered to be about people as much as place and, at its heart, is meaningful community engagement. If peoplecentred design is to happen, people-centred consultation and participation programmes are essential. Practitioners are increasingly rejecting top-down approaches in favour of more socially-engaged practice that can offer effective responses to local needs and aspirations. And landscape professionals are now involved in community-facing roles as enablers and facilitators, which call for a strong set of people skills in addition to design ability. Public expectations are changing
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too. Residents with considerable knowledge and skills get involved in shaping local developments, and feel – quite reasonably – that professionals should view them as partners in planning and design processes. Groups like civic societies, heritage groups, community networks, and neighbourhood planning forums are also often significant players, who expect (and, in some Local Planning Authorities, are required) to be invited to participate in pre-application discussions. In fact it’s wise to ask local groups at the outset to help plan the engagement process itself; they know the kinds of approaches that are likely to work and those that aren’t. So how can landscape professionals become more effective in understanding what local people want and need, and working with them for the common good? Community engagement is an art and a science. It requires a yin and yang-like balance of complementary skillsets: interpersonal, and technical. Human skills of communication, collaboration and trust-building,
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