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.

Historically, 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 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.

Landscape practice: LUC. Project: Woodside, Firhill & Hamiltonhill Development Framework, Glasgow.

© Scottish Canals

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, and human qualities of care and empathy abound within the landscape profession. It is full of people who are good at being human, so that’s an excellent starting point. I perceive a shortfall on science and technical aspects, however.

Firstly, community engagement calls for a research mindset if a programme is to yield meaningful information. Secondly, it calls for technical proficiency in systematically analysing the data generated (all those Post-it notes, flipcharts and stickers on maps are actually research data). Designers can create better participation processes, and get more out of them, when they assume the role of social researcher: something like an anthropologist or social scientist, or a street-level observer like Jan Gehl, Jane Jacobs or William H. Whyte, for instance.

London Borough of Barking and Dagenham Parks

© Jon Sheaff and Associates

Thinking like a researcher means working to a clear research strategy and objectives, methodological rigour in collecting and analysing data, ethical practice and an awareness of the inevitability of bias. All of these would take most engagement programmes to another level in terms of data quality, insight, and design outcomes.

I know that ‘methodological rigour’ isn’t a phrase that will set many landscape pulses racing, but it is key to creating people-centred participation programmes that result in good community outcomes – which should have rather more appeal. It means, for instance, that strategies for engaging with local people will be more impartial in their conception and more thorough in gathering and interpreting information. It also means greater evidence-based design and more transparent decision making, authenticity, inclusion, and knowledge building. Greater methodological rigour doesn’t mean less creativity or empathy; it means getting maximum value from the exercise, and bringing maximum benefit to the design. Most of all, it means that the voices that need to be listened to can be heard more clearly.

Future skills in public space design: designing with people, not for them

My recent book Desire lines: a guide to community participation in designing places (RIBA Publishing, 2018) provides a toolbox of research methods and advice on thinking like a researcher, intended to help designers plan participation programmes that involve designing with local people, not for them.

It’s written with the modest aim of creating greater human happiness and health through better-designed spaces that reflect human needs. Sensory and social experiences in the streets and spaces that we navigate affect mood, stress levels, interactions and behaviour, for better or worse, both in the moment and cumulatively over time. There are serious mental health aspects too; the feelings of alienation, vulnerability and isolation that often arise in inhospitable urban environments are associated with depression and anxiety.

Fortunately, designers can readily access virtually all the knowledge they need to design for maximum user enjoyment and mental wellbeing, to create places where people feel more healthy, safer, more positive, more comfortable and more socially connected. So why not use it? And what better way to generate this knowledge than by offering meaningful participation in planning and designing those spaces?

Rotunda Community Campus, Liverpool.

© Derek Mackinnon

Designers of public realm who are keen to develop more user-centred approaches can find inspiration in fields such as digital and consumer product design, where user satisfaction is paramount and design is highly research-driven. It is worth considering how something as ephemeral as an app or website or manufactured product will be subjected to lengthy usability testing, in which the prototype is refined and retested to achieve optimum functionality and user appeal, and only then will it be released. Interestingly, these fields begin with working on functionality and ease of use, and only design the look and feel once these are finalised.

Contrast this with a public space: a highly costly product with a lifespan of decades, which can significantly affect the fortunes of a local area and its communities. Yet it can be designed and built with little input from its intended end-users, no prototyping or usability testing, and with no insight to its likely success. William H. Whyte’s words are highly pertinent in this context: “It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”

Lesley Malone is the author of Desire lines: a guide to community participation in designing places (RIBA Publishing, 2018), which aims to help designers achieve higher standards in consultations and community engagement. With a background in social research, communications and information, including seven years at the LI, she is now expanding her diverse consultancy and freelancing portfolio. She tweets at @tangentials.