The success of humankind on Earth is to a large degree a function of our ability to socialise and to collaborate in performing tasks such as hunting and building shelter. The African proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ recognises the necessity of multiple inputs and collaboration in nurturing and raising children for the mutual benefit of all members of the community.

When telling the story of collaborative charrette processes, historians often refer back to the Amish tradition of barn raising – events in which community members cooperate to build a barn, or other structure, in a day. Typically, the eventual owner of the barn undertakes the advanced organisation, including site preparation and ordering of materials, to ensure the best and most effective outcomes from the cooperative barn-raising day.

Nineteenth-century thinkers contemplated ideal human environments in response to the industrialisation of the time, and its impact on population growth and creating cramped and unhealthy living conditions in cities. William Morris, Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard were all hugely influential in planning theory, and proposed models for balanced, communitarian living in harmony with nature and to facilitate food growing. Buildings, neighbourhoods and cities were viewed as being the product of many skills and many hands. It was seen that urban environments should be laid out to promote healthy living, rewarding work and access to green space and the countryside for food and leisure. Governance was a crucial factor in realising and sustaining such visions, with a key element being the active involvement of citizens in their neighbourhood communities.

The origin of the modern, multiday charrette process has been credited to the Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) ‘Squatters’. In 1948 CRS, an architectural practice based in Austin, Texas, was working on a school project in Blackwell, Oklahoma. To avoid time-consuming and energy-sapping travel, the team established a temporary office on site and worked collaboratively with the school board over a few days to resolve the design. Bill Caudill of CRS was interviewed in 1971. He recalled that by the end of the week, they had unanimous and enthusiastic board approval for the project: ‘While we were trying to solve a communication problem we discovered something that we should have known all along – to involve the users in the planning process.’¹ This novel way of working proved so effective that CRS incorporated multiday Squatters into future projects as a way of involving clients, users and a multidisciplinary team to build consensus and support.

The 1960s was a seminal decade in American history, and marked a wave of civic engagement and service. In 1961 John F. Kennedy’s famous inauguration speech challenged Americans to renew their spirit of public service, famously stating: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’² Nothing was more influential on the emergence of mainstream collaborative planning than the collective impact of the civil rights movement. The groundswell of urban voices calling for equality and involvement in the decision-making processes surrounding cities was impossible to ignore. Experimentation with new ideas and practices grew and evolved in response to the tumultuous events of the era, and these included a key part of the charrette story, the R/UDAT.

At the time, the critique of the status quo and conventional thinking about cities was gaining momentum. Much of the criticism focused on the policies of the US urban renewal programme, which had a devastating impact on many urban communities. The construction of interstate highways increased white migration to the suburbs, while simultaneously creating physical barriers within cities. Highway projects frequently led to the demolition of inner-city neighbourhoods and the displacement of poor residents, and were used as a form of slum clearance. By the 1960s the impact of these policies was becoming clear, and between 1949 and 1973 more than 2,000 projects in cities had resulted in the demolition of over 600,000 homes and the displacement of over two million people.³

Jane Jacobs’s landmark work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, was highly critical of ‘orthodox’ city planning. The book articulated a series of principles for producing vibrant places, and it expressed and demonstrated the value of the ‘citizen expert’. She famously declared: ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.’⁴

The design and planning professions responded to these challenges by pioneering new approaches. In 1963, David Lewis and Ray Gindroz co-founded Urban Design Associates (UDA), a firm with high ideals. As Lewis described: ‘At UDA, we learned a basic lesson from the groundswell of courage that lay at the heart of the civil rights movement and its dedication to the principles of democracy. Our accountability as urban designers has always been to the voices of citizens and to their vision for the future of their communities.’⁵ This democratic concept of design was revolutionary in the 1960s, as it elevated citizens to a co-designing relationship with professionals, and empowered them in the creation of their communities.

In addition to the enduring inequalities of the 1960s, the lack of any form of consultation or involvement with the residents who were directly affected by slum clearance and highway projects led to a boiling point of civic frustration, culminating in a wave of unrest. In 1967, the US experienced what is commonly referred to as the ‘long hot summer’, a series of over 150 riots in cities across the country, as anger at inequality boiled over. That year also saw the birth of the R/UDAT.

The individual credited with the idea for the first R/UDAT was the architect Jules Gregory, then Vice President of the AIA. David Lewis described him as: ‘The great hero of modern American architecture. He stepped out and tried to lead a new idea, which was the idea of architects in service to society.’

The first R/UDAT project took place in June 1967, in response to a visit to the AIA by James Bell, the President of the Chamber of Commerce in Rapid City, South Dakota. The downtown area had suffered from serious flooding, and had also been in decline for years. James Bell was looking for help to produce a revitalisation strategy. After intense discussions about the reasons for the decline, the AIA agreed to send a team of four – two architects and two planners – to Rapid City to give assistance.

The team met key stakeholders such as the mayor and the city council, as well as local architects, the media and selected citizens. Meetings were informal, with the intention being to hear all sides of the various issues that were raised. The team then reviewed written information about Rapid City in the light of what they heard from their engagement with members of the community. They gave a verbal presentation of their findings, and a week or so later provided Rapid City with a brief written report and recommendations.

The process triggered unexpected changes. A planning commission was established, which included one of the local architects. The city hired a full-time planner and engaged a consultant to help. A wide variety of individuals, government officials, businesspeople and ordinary citizens were made aware of important local issues, and learned to debate them together. Everyone who was involved – including the visiting team – came to see that ‘in a few short and crowded days the community, with a modicum of stimulus and help from the outside, had resources within it that it could learn to harness in the public interest’.⁶

The R/UDAT team was struck by where the experience led them. It turned out that the most significant achievement of the Rapid City R/UDAT was not physical at all – at least not to begin with. It was the impact on public policy that made the greatest waves, through a process of democratic exchange. The value of the process was clear to the AIA Urban Planning and Design Committee, which decided to offer the idea to other communities – and so R/UDAT was born.

In 1969, enough early work and experimentation in participatory planning had occurred to enable development of a theory of public participation.

Sherry Arnstein published ‘A Ladder of Citizen Participation’ in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners,⁷ articulating a framework within which to consider contemporary approaches to engaging citizens in public work. The different levels of involvement on each rung, from Manipulation and Therapy on the bottom two rungs, to Delegated Power and Citizen Control at the top, made it possible to understand the increasing demands for participation from the have-nots, as well as the gamut of confusing responses from the holders of power. This framework would become a seminal work in understanding early mistakes in and the evolution of collaborative planning.

As its most important philosophical principle, R/UDAT elevated the citizen as co-designer through its emphasis on broad participation and a community-driven process.

By 1971, charrettes were being openly promoted as a successful tool through the AIA Journal. The AIA’s support for such practices also marked a significant development for the field of urban design. Ray Gindroz from UDA noted: ‘R/UDATs as an official AIA function meant that urban design was something that architects were actively engaged in. It gave tremendous visibility for the profession of urban design and it helped establish its credibility.’⁸ At the same time, participatory models began to be used in the international aid and development sector, which had become over-complex and was often not dealing with problems in a way that reflected local conditions.

Architect Nabeel Hamdi recognised that people receiving international aid were being treated as beneficiaries of charity; many aid programmes were wasteful and lacked dignity and social intelligence.⁹

Collaborative planning methodologies began to be employed to co-design and co-deliver appropriate solutions both in the built environment and in social provision and self-governance. As a consequence, development programmes became more focused on local problems and directed at local opportunities to deliver achievable actions.

In the 1980s, the R/UDAT process gained considerable traction with internationally adapted models. Events in the US were noticed in Canada, and the Committee for an Urban Study Effort (CAUSE) was established and went on to organise and conduct projects in over thirty communities during the following decade.

Charrettes were becoming known as a quick and efficient design team-working process. Developer Robert Davis suggested a charrette methodology when developing the proposals for Seaside, Florida with Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (founders of DPZ) and Léon Krier because, in his words, ‘I didn’t want to spend a year developing a masterplan’. Speed and efficiency, two of the key benefits of charrette processes, were being increasingly appreciated by the development sector.

Meanwhile in the UK, following significant unrest in post-industrial cities in the early 1980s, a new community architecture movement emerged, which embraced community planning, community design, community development and community technical aid. It came from a growing realisation that, despite the best intentions of postwar planning, the poor design and mismanagement of the built environment was a major contributor to the nation’s social and economic ills.

This interest in co-design led to transatlantic conversations between the AIA and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), and the formation of the Community Urban Design Assistance Team (C/UDAT) programme. Although the C/UDAT programme was short-lived, the community architecture movement continued to gain momentum. In 1986, the movement held a seminal event, Building Communities, the First International Conference on Community Architecture, which was attended by more than 1,000 participants.

The ongoing transatlantic collaboration culminated in the Remaking Cities Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1988, which brought together 400 experts and citizens from both sides of the Atlantic. The event was jointly sponsored by the AIA and the RIBA, with HRH The Prince of Wales chairing the conference and delivering the keynote address. David Lewis served as co-chair, and in his opening remarks he left no doubt as to the focus of the event: ‘This will be a conference about democracy, a conference about how to make democracy work, how to improve our cities, how to improve our standards of life.’¹⁰

The event marked a historic moment not only in thinking about post-industrial cities, but also regarding the evolution of collaborative planning. Rod Hackney, then President of the RIBA, suggested a new way of doing business in the UK: ‘A partnership of enterprise is what I’m calling for, a partnership between builders, professionals and politicians – local, state and national. And most important of all, with ordinary people – the people who count, local people, who at the moment aren’t seen as part of any formula for success. But we must make sure they are.’

As a part of the conference, an R/UDAT was organised to focus on the lower Monongahela Valley in Pennsylvania to open up the subject of how post-industrial communities might best face their challenges. A bi-national team was formed to collaborate on the project, featuring eighteen professionals from the US and the UK. For the first time UK-based architects saw in action this methodology for working with communities to create plans and visions for their area.

On returning from Pittsburgh, practitioners began organising charrette processes in the UK. In 1989, John Thompson facilitated the UK’s first charrette, the Vision for Bishopsgate Goods Yard Community Planning Weekend.

Other practitioners also developed collaborative planning processes, such as the Prince’s Foundation’s Enquiry by Design charrette methodology, and programmed their events using combinations of activities that they felt worked best for them, such as urban design community training sessions, open-space dialogue workshops, site walkabouts, facilitated design tables and plenary report back sessions.

Charrettes have come to be accepted for use at a range of project scales, in both the public and private sectors. The effectiveness of the process has also influenced professional practice, with design teams adopting charrette-style approaches for internal team working.

Working with communities is a natural and central part of the philosophy of New Urbanism, and charrettes have been adopted as a key tool by leading New Urbanist practitioners.

DPZ developed its own brand of charrette process and inspired a generation of practitioners, who spread out around the world. Chip Kaufman, who organised charrettes for DPZ in the late 1980s and early 1990s, describes the spread: ‘It was like spontaneous combustion; the need was there.’ Chip and his partner Wendy Morris went on to deliver scores of charrette processes around Australia and internationally from their base in Melbourne. Another former DPZ employee, Bill Lennertz, co-founded the National Charrette Institute in Portland, Oregon, dedicated to training and supporting professionals and communities.

In 1993, many US built environment professionals, concerned with prevailing anti-urban development patterns, in particular urban sprawl, formed the influential Congress for New Urbanism (CNU). The CNU advocates walkable, neighbourhood-based development and a commitment to ‘re-establishing the relationship between the art of building and the making of community, through citizen-based participatory planning and design’.¹¹

Charrette processes have focused not just on design outcomes but also on establishing governance mechanisms, such as Town Teams and Community Trusts. Alan Simpson, also a participant at the Remaking Cities Conference in 1988, went on to head up the Yorkshire Forward Urban Renaissance Programme, which was initiated in 2001. As well as working with communities to co-design placemaking visions for their towns and cities, the programme set up Town Teams, through which citizens were empowered to sign off public funds coming into their town.

Over the past fifty years, an entirely new orientation to public work in our cities has emerged. The context and realities of urban work today are in many ways wholly different from how it was. Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities is now the de facto urban planning bible. It has sold over 250,000 copies and has been translated into six languages. During the past half-century, R/UDATs and related collaborative planning practices have influenced millions of people internationally and helped contribute to how we think about cities, towns and villages today.

In England, the localism agenda has substantiated that the public can have statutory control, and encouraged communities to co-design Neighbourhood Plans to determine and promote development in their areas. Civic Voice, the national charity for civic societies, has promoted charrette methodologies through its publication ‘Collaborative Planning for All’.

In Scotland, the government has been promoting and funding charrette processes nationally since 2011, as part of the Sustainable Communities Initiative. Around the UK, promoters of large-scale developments are encouraged to undertake visioning processes with communities, including design workshops, to help shape proposals prior to the submission of planning applications.

However, collaborative planning is still not universally recognised as the most effective way to approach placemaking strategies. It remains an alternative to mainstream, conventional community consultation that is much more cursory in nature.

In recent years, there has been an attack on the use of collaborative planning that is largely motivated by poor experiences, which have resulted in controversy and conflict. Nimbyism (not in my back yard) has grown as a phenomenon, and many communities have developed well-organised campaigns against development proposals, making collaborative processes sometimes difficult to negotiate. As a result, some professionals have begun to advocate for a return to professionally driven placemaking, decrying the public opposition to their ideas as a stumbling block to achieving more sustainable communities.

Advocating the old ‘top down’ ways is a dangerous path, however, which will inevitably lead to more disconnect between built environment professionals and communities.

Others say that collaborative planning may no longer be necessary because of technological applications which gather user data so easily, and that this can define public opinion at a much larger scale than most participatory processes. However, much of the data accumulated is about an individual’s use of the urban environment, and cannot serve visioning or collaborative planning purposes. Not all matters can be reduced to a binary yes/no response. Creating plans requires an iterative process of collaborative discussion, clarification and learning, which a click on an internet survey will never manage to capture. In practice, it will downgrade citizens to mere consumers.

While collaborative planning is not always an easy or comfortable route to successful development, it exposes professionals to the rigours of debate and questioning, which is crucial for professional development and democratic process.

As the case studies in this book demonstrate, most charrette processes are run in an appreciative and positive environment. They should be properly resourced and carefully programmed, with a clear mission statement about aims and expectations and an acceptance of the value of robust debate. Clarity on how the process will continue after the charrette is also important.

Collaborative planning processes have as much or more currency and relevance today as they did fifty years ago. As David Lewis, the founder of much of the philosophy and experiments of the 1960s collaborative planning efforts maintains: ‘Perhaps the most important gift of those decades was to return to us our passion for democracy – a gift that today we need to refurbish once again.’¹²