10.1 Introduction

This final chapter gives participants the last word. I interviewed representatives from a range of local groups around the country to discuss their experiences of participation programmes, which include standard consultation exercises, lengthy co-design programmes, neighbourhood planning processes and small-scale collaborative projects. Excerpts from those discussions are grouped roughly under common themes, and are intended as anecdotal illustration of the range of experiences rather than a representative cross-section. Participants are quoted verbatim as far as possible, and are intentionally anonymised.

10.2 Motivations

Why do people devote significant amounts of time and energy to engagement programmes? They want to hold developers to account and ensure that developments benefit local people without damaging local businesses or valued aspects of the local character. All the individuals and groups I spoke to were noticeably motivated by a sense of ‘the greater good’ rather than their own personal interests.

‘Most residents aren’t nimbys, objecting to everything. They just want appropriate development to go ahead. We need housing, but let’s not destroy all the unique reasons why people are attracted to living here in the first place.’

‘We don’t claim to be experts in planning but we want to see that things are done properly. We check whether the developer is presenting a clear picture of what they’re doing, because it’s important to have clarity about new developments and their potential impacts, but that’s not always the case. Most developers will give as much information as they’re required to but no more, and they won’t highlight aspects that are problematic if they don’t have to.’

‘We focus mainly on conservation and preserving the historic character of the town, but without stifling economic activity. Places change and continue to change, and we have to keep the best parts but move with the times. We’re not trying to preserve the town in aspic.’

10.3 Communications and Collaboration

The comments in this section suggest that while local groups are willing and able to collaborate, there’s often a reticence on the part of designers and developers to bring them more fully into the process – or sometimes not invite them at all. The groups I spoke to all had an impressive range of valuable knowledge within their memberships, from professional planning and design expertise to local politics and community mobilisation. There was a sense of frustration, however, at the lack of opportunities to offer these skills and expert knowledge of local issues. There was also a strong feeling that more could be done to publicise engagement programmes and that closer working with local groups would improve this.

‘We aren’t paid employees or elected representatives and therefore don’t have a place in the system. So if you’re trying to do anything constructive in the community, but you’re not part of that formal process, you don’t fit.’

‘Planning is set up as an adversarial process. What we’ve got is a development system that’s not geared to collaborating, it’s a system that’s forever having to defend itself and react.’

‘We need a recognition that there’s a huge amount of valuable stuff in the community and it can be brought into the system. We need a shift in the top-down system to understand and interact with the community information system that is evolving with great potential.’

‘It’s a major flaw in consultation that there are all these community organisations which bring all this knowledge together but the process prevents them from communicating with each other. It only allows this vertical hierarchical communication, so the architects are just getting information out of you. You need a process that allows and encourages people to share ideas with each other. People can make a much more useful contribution in getting their views across if they’ve had a chance to check them out with other local people who know the place they’re talking about.’

‘To really involve local people, you need to go to where they will be, the everyday places that people use, like supermarkets, for instance. You have to use local know-how to identify the best ways to reach the public, and for that you need to talk to local people because they know what works and what doesn’t.’

‘It’s a good idea for the architects to talk to the public groups from the outset, and see who can help in different areas. For public projects, they need to do more to spread the word and ask for volunteers from the community – would anyone like to help the architects reach out and connect and come up with ideas? It’s good to have people on board who are involved with the community and have a heart for the community, and can help get people involved. I don’t know if they just don’t realise how much it would help, or if they’re just wary that some groups will have too much control, but it means the architects have a lot more legwork to do.’

‘There should have been publicity around the site itself, like big posters about the proposals, with a link to the planning website, so that everyone, whether visitors, residents, shoppers or shop-owners, could comment, instead of just getting the views of the few people that went to the workshops.’

‘We ask architects, “What are you going to do to interest the public in the consultation?” to get them publicise it properly, because there’s no point doing it if people don’t know about it. And it helps them, because then there’s less chance of lots of objections.’

‘Some developers and their architects are quite good and will hire a hall and put boards up showing the plans, and have people there to answer questions, and that seems suitable for most developments. But it’s no good hiring a hall and not telling anyone about the exhibition, and I think sometimes they then might try to pull the wool over the local authority’s eyes and say, “Well we’ve had an exhibition, we’ve done our consultation.”’

‘The lead architect made a very telling comment at one meeting. Someone said something about the absence of local traders taking part in the process, and he said, “Well, we did invite them.” But something special needed to be done for them. Many of the traders who operate the shops on the site don’t have English as their first language, and work from morning till night.’

‘Architects can’t know everything about what the local situation is when they’re planning a new development, but local people do, they know about site conditions and the locality and how things are there. Architects don’t always look at the site in the wider context but local groups can, they have that experience of the area as a whole. It’s a no-brainer, getting local people on your side, isn’t it?’

‘Developers are asked to talk to the planning groups here first before engaging with the public. We have people who can read drawings and who understand the development process and all the factors, and can talk to developers and architects on a more equal level. We can look at the plans together and work on them to produce something suitable together, and then we draw up a programme for community involvement, because we know how people will engage and how to approach it.’

10.4 Methods and Events

What consultation methods and participation activities work? They all do, used at the right time in the right way. The comments in this section tend to focus on the things that could have been done better: making programmes less onerous; having knowledgeable staff available to answer questions; getting a good cross-section of the community involved; having a clear purpose to activities; providing meaningful information to enable people to make informed choices; using a mix of digital and in-person approaches and facilitating discussion amongst participants. Again there’s a clear message that starting engagement early when options are open is seen as essential.

‘There was a public exhibition, and the architects put their boards up to check out what people thought about the preferred option. The place was packed because it had stimulated people’s interest. But then that was it, there was no process for further discussion together.’

‘We discourage exhibitions at an early stage because showing plans then says that developers and designers have already made a lot of decisions. That’s why we say there have to be discussions on the concept first, looking at the site and how the space could work. So go and talk to people about these things first, before deciding what it’s going to look like.’

‘Exhibitions are often held just before the planning application goes in and are done more as a courtesy than anything. It lets local groups get their act together before the consultation period, but that’s not engagement.’

‘Showing us some plans is not the same as asking us what we want.’

‘The architects finally displayed a model of the proposals, which was sadly in an obscure location for just a couple of days, in a disused shop. There was nothing to inform people about it. And then that was it, it went in for planning.’

‘The space on the site that was used to publicise the process was a good noticeable location and the architects put tables out and invited people in with tea and cake and that did attract interest.’

‘There was a website where you could go in and put a flag with a comment on, but there was no way of having an exchange with anyone, or a conversation, and I think the reliance on that website spoiled the chances during that consultation period of us really airing the issues. We had no means for anyone who wanted to talk about these wider issues or share their views to do so.’

‘We wanted something like a web forum, or a weekly drop-in, or a monthly meeting, something like that, for people to discuss with each other, to share thoughts and ideas.’

‘There are some parts of the community that don’t engage by coming to meetings and so on, but they want to be involved and have their say. Local groups on the ground know how best to engage with them, who to contact and what sort of approaches work best. But you do have to go to them, and this takes time. It’s about early involvement again, you need to find out who to engage with early on, and identify the best ways of communicating with those groups.’

‘Some groups definitely prefer interacting online and really get involved. But it doesn’t work for all groups, and there are areas where a lot of people just aren’t online and don’t have computers at home, so engagement has to be face to face, and you have to attend meetings and listen to what people have to say.’

‘There have been some Enquiry by Design programmes, which seem to work for big schemes and get better numbers involved. For individual buildings, we recommend talking to smaller numbers of people earlier rather than running these kinds of workshops. The reason is, we advocate making the process a conversation but it’s more difficult to continue a conversation after those kinds of events. So when the design’s been worked up a bit more after some discussion, the architects can come back and say which points have been incorporated and which haven’t and the reasons, and we can continue a dialogue and work on the design until it reaches a stage when it can go in an exhibition for the public.’

‘There were these indigestible workshops, where the architect would give lengthy Powerpoint presentations in enormous detail. There was no way that most of the people who weren’t professionals in that world could digest it usefully. And then we’d have just half an hour for interaction with each other.’

‘The workshops were basically presentations with too much technical detail and hardly any time for questions. Actually, we felt that was deliberate. The workshops weren’t properly managed, we were just talked at, with no time for any interaction, no discussion of design options.’

‘There were no models at the workshops, no sketches, nothing for us to interact with. It’s like they didn’t want interference in their design. They could have just had a whiteboard and done some quick sketch ideas so people could give their reactions, and then work up the agreed ideas using models and drawings that people could engage with, incorporating a consensus of community vision into a coherent design. But they gave us no options to discuss.’

‘The people that came along to the workshops, well let’s say it could have been more diverse. So I volunteered to set up a little stall at the leisure centre. I know loads of different people from going there every week, but it was just one kind of demographic getting involved in the consultation and loads of residents had no clue about the project.’

‘The city decided to run a tenants’ participation project about an extension to an estate that was something of a problem area. They appointed two architects who were rather inexperienced in participatory projects to work with the tenants’ group, and it was hopeless because the architects just didn’t know how to deal with these kinds of groups. It really needed a facilitator, so they brought one in and that made the project work. He could deal with tensions in the group, direct the discussion, and get things moving.’

‘Participative events are more likely to be effective when efforts are made to ensure that all sorts of people can get involved. If you have a meeting, it’s difficult for people with young children to come, or people who are at work will miss it and so on, and people get left out.’

‘Sometimes planning authorities will use a shop for information about a proposal and people come and stare at models, which may or may not make sense to them. If there’s nobody on hand to discuss it with or to answer questions it’s a bit meaningless.’

‘People felt enthusiastic about getting involved at the beginning but a year later they started to lose interest and there was less attendance at meetings and a loss of momentum. If the meetings and workshops had been better managed, people wouldn’t have become disinterested, and if some of the architects hadn’t bored the audience with superfluous technical material.’

10.5 Decision-Making and Outcomes

What influence do local people have on final decisions about space and design? To what extent are their wishes and needs reflected in the final proposal? It’s clear that proposals that don’t incorporate the public views expressed during an engagement programme leave lingering disillusionment.

‘The final proposal involved totally redeveloping the whole site, even though we’d been told this was definitely not what was planned. We were baffled by the contradiction.’

‘I think the only nod to the response from the public was lowering the heights of the buildings. They listened to public opinion in that we didn’t want high-rise.’

‘It was very much the architects’ design in the end, and very corporate. It was imposed on us and doesn’t reflect the community at all. It’s a Corten steel theme park. There were a lot more objections to the planning application than support, but the council said it will go ahead anyway, so you’re left wondering “What on earth was the point of all that?” After all this time, it was all just a big lip-service exercise, ticking the boxes. A complete waste of time and effort, and resources.’

‘We were under the impression that the co-design process would gather information and then use that to start producing options for people to comment on, and work together towards a design. And that then there would still be a public consultation on the proposals as usual so that everyone could comment. What we didn’t realise was that co-design was being used as a substitute for a consultation process. We weren’t told it would go straight to planning.’

‘Discussion about the public realm needs to involve a wide community of interests. The quality of public realm has such a wide impact, not just for the people in the immediate vicinity but on public space generally. We need to improve the quality of life in the public realm. If we lose the public realm, we lose a lot of the fundamental qualities of living in a particular place.’

‘I assumed that designing a community space would involve the community. To most people a community space should be something that reflects its context and local community, not some narcissistic imposition. And something that could change with the community, not cast in stone and in steel, but something that could evolve. It should have been about expressing individuality and diversity.’

‘Advice to designers: bear in mind the wider environment, the public realm and the streetscape. Look at where the development will sit, and how that has developed, and how the proposal will integrate. Developers need to recognise how the town has got to where it is now and go along with that.’

‘The architects just went and did their own thing. They totally ignored all the feedback on what people wanted, which was a simple flexible space, a true community scheme with local artists’, schools’, residents’ and shopkeepers’ input, some trees, good lighting, cycle racks, places to sit, space for pop-ups, better transport interchange, public space. And to have a say in the choice of appropriate elements and materials, which was denied.’

‘One problem I had with the workshops was that there was no discussion of the practicalities of anything, so for instance was the space going to be closed at night, or how the space would be managed, or security or protection, or whether the features were really practical.’

‘Being clear about what all the options are from the start makes a difference, for instance making sure people understand that keeping X will mean losing Y, and budget factors, etc. But if this is explained, people will be quite reasonable usually.’

‘We’ve had some cases that involved identifying problematic issues early on and working with the architects to design them out, which meant that local groups then actually supported those proposals and they’ve sailed through planning committee which might not have been the case otherwise. It shows how important early involvement is, and being flexible about the options. And it seems a better way than just chucking in a planning application and waiting to see what happens.’

10.6 Perceptions of Professionals

There’s a recognition that the role of the designer in satisfying the client, the public and the planning committee, within time, budget and site constraints, isn’t an easy one. Some of the architects involved clearly wanted to do the best they could in design and engagement terms. The theme of professional aloofness recurs, however, indicating a perceived failure to appreciate the worth of what the community can bring to a project.

‘I don’t think architects see the value of community involvement, of bringing in people who aren’t architects or other specialists. The first duty is to satisfy the employer and their contracts. Where does the public fit into that? There’s no space at all.’ ‘Architects are more interested in buildings than people. That’s what they’re really focused on.’

‘They were very patronising. Of course we know there are technical constraints – actually several residents were architects and designers themselves so were totally prepared to be flexible, but we felt the architects were being incredibly opaque.’

‘Real engagement has to be done in a real way. Designers have to come out and talk to people.’

‘If architects want to understand what the general public think, they have to get involved to find out. And there are so many life issues bound up with it all. There are architects with the best intentions, but they have to get people involved.’

‘I think some architects try their best, in a very defective system. But unfortunately some don’t have a clue.’

‘The architects didn’t seem to want to collaborate, I think because they felt it was taking away their design powers. It was obvious they didn’t want local community design input from the way they held us at arm’s length.’

‘Many architects don’t understand what people value in places. When people talk about what’s important to them, it tends to be stuff that most architects wouldn’t notice, about the life of the place, so you have to get designers to understand that sort of thing.’

‘Consultations should aim to improve on the original idea. I can understand designers being annoyed by having to make changes to their plans, so it would be better if they understood what people wanted from the outset, and then they could make changes to the proposal and not get upset.’

‘We’ve sometimes ended up working together with architects when we’ve said for instance that we’d like to see more green space or better flood protection or more sustainability or whatever in their proposal, and they’ve said, “Great, can you please put that in writing to the developer because that’s what we want too but they don’t think it matters.” So sometimes it’s difficult for designers too, we know that.’ ‘Architects are getting better at communication. They aren’t trained to think about it, or they certainly never used to be. It’s all about design and nothing about listening to people or looking at the wider picture. As an architect, you tend to look at the site and the buildings around it, but not the neighbourhood as such. But what architects do affects a neighbourhood, and they need to understand that neighbourhood. They need to look at the bigger picture.’

‘One architect said to me “I didn’t do seven years of training just to be told what to do by people who know nothing about design.”’

10.7 Process

What makes a good engagement process? There were views across the spectrum, from a radical re-think of development planning system and its relationship to the local community, to giving local people more say in deciding the process they want, and greater transparency by developers. Early involvement with the community was a recurring theme: there was a strong feeling that engaging as soon as possible would benefit everyone involved.

‘We should be thinking about a paradigm shift, a total break, not more-of-the-same-but-better, but something completely different. Real co-production needs to grasp that the community base that we’re trying to bring into the process is actually a very different kind of system, and unless very different things start to happen, it will unfortunately just have the same problems and consequences that we’ve always had. But it could be different and real, it could be transformative.’

‘Developers are getting more sympathetic to involving the public. It used to be a formal process so they would draw up their plans and present them and it was basically like it or lump it. But the environment is higher up peoples’ agendas now and developers want to be seen supporting that sort of cause. There’s more concern on the part of developers to provide something that’s appreciated.’

‘It’s essential that there’s an agreed process that the community decides for itself about how it shares its ideas and holds discussions throughout the whole thing.’

‘There has to be an advantage in doing things another way and creating real community involvement. The big advantage to developers is improving certainty, so they know what local conditions they’re facing, and understand what the local concerns are before the application goes in.’

‘The ramifications of a bad process are that things then have to be done to correct and mitigate the effects of previous errors. Which is costly and wasteful.’

‘Real co-design cannot happen unless there’s full collaboration on the remit before it gets set in stone. How can you have a co-design process if you don’t co-design the brief?’

‘They talk about managing public expectations but it should be about developing expectations together. Agreeing a process together, not damping down public enthusiasm.’

‘Even though the whole point is to build community trust and ensure a smooth ride through planning, some parties, including developers and architects, still seem to act as though they don’t want anyone to know about the proposal. They seem to patronise the public, and just pay lip service and tick their boxes, and involve as few people as possible.’

‘Our civic society encourages developers to talk to us long before they make an application, and we suggested that the local authority ask them to do this as well, which they do and this helps a lot. It’s much easier for them to make changes at the pre-application stage if we discuss it together rather than once it’s been formalised and is out for consultation.’

‘If the developer says, “We’re prepared to listen to your requirements and meet them when we can”, then it shows a willingness to listen. They realise that they need to get the public on side and market the consultation properly, and explain their intentions, with an attitude of “We want to work with you so the finished result is one we can all be proud of.”’

‘The community and the local authority worked together to produce a Statement of Community Involvement Ground Rules, which is a good practice guide for developers on planning proposals. One of the important ground rules is for developers to start discussions while options for the development are still open, and it requires being very open about the options and about what choices are available. The original reaction amongst developers and designers was horror, but it’s accepted now. They’ve seen that early involvement with the community brings greater certainty to projects, in terms of costs and how long they’ll take to complete, if there are fewer objections because things have been agreed from the start.’

‘By talking to local groups earlier, and in a negotiating way, developers can get support for a proposal if the local community gets something in return or the scheme creates other benefits. So there are positives for everyone if local people get something they want as well.’

‘Early involvement is the biggest thing that architects need to deal with. They seldom come in at the early stages, but they need to approach local communities right from the start. And they need to promote the opportunities and benefits the community can get from the development, and not just think about their own interests.’

10.8 Conclusion

I offer these words from participants in the hope that the easily avoidable issues they highlight – about early involvement, valuing local expertise, openness and listening – are taken on board, because they are so easily remedied, but can cause real problems if ignored. The theme of this book is gathering good information in order to make good decisions and develop good designs. I hope this chapter serves as reminder of the human context of development and the value of community participation.