Engaging Local People to Improve Public Places
Key Outcomes:
- Engaging so-called ‘hard to reach’ communities
- Tapping user insights and local knowledge
- Enabling people to contribute to urban design on an equal footing
InSITU (Inclusive and Sustainable Infrastructure for Tourism and Urban regeneration) was a 15-month scoping study to support those who are working to improve public spaces and walking routes with the active participation of local communities, especially in areas of economic and social deprivation.
Funded as part of the EPSRC’s Sustainable Urban Environment’s programme, the cross-disciplinary research team developed and tested new approaches and tools to widen user participation and inform design solutions, in areas where leisure and tourism is being nurtured as a catalyst for regeneration. Through innovative application of Geographic Information Systems for Participation (GIS-P), lay participants with in-depth local knowledge contributed to the physical design of schemes on an equal footing with the regeneration practitioners.
A key aim of InSITU was to allow all participants - regardless of their expertise - to frame the issues, problems and suggested solutions in their own terms. In particular, it was designed to encourage involvement by disadvantaged social groups, people who tend not to respond to traditional forms of consultation, such as questionnaires, surveys, exhibitions and public meetings. Instead InSITU worked closely with the Project Partners to create local panels whose opinions and preferences provided valuable insights that were then represented on high quality digitised maps. This adaptation of GIS-P has allowed the annotated maps produced by local users to be interpreted with clarity and acted upon by key specialists, especially urban designers, planners, engineers, tourism and heritage attraction mangers and conservationists.
These new approaches for community engagement were put into practice in five live-case schemes, two in the City of York, two in Hackney, East London and one in the City of Salford. This selection of schemes was chosen to represent the different stages of the design process and to enable the emerging approaches and tools to be tested out in a variety of ways and contexts. In several of the live-case schemes, it was appropriate to compare different community viewpoints and ‘official’ data. In others, GIS-P also allowed the mapping of different kinds of time-specific information, including the ways in which spaces are used at different times of day, as well as place-histories and folk-memories of how spaces used to be used.
Particular emphasis was placed on eliciting valuable local knowledge and insights from so-called ‘hard-to-reach’ groups, and on developing novel ways of encouraging their participation in urban design, particularly improvements to pedestrian environments that would be made safer, more accessible and attractive. The InSITU Project employed a number of new methods to engage these groups including experimental ‘on-street ‘ and ‘on-site’ participation of local people in mapping public spaces and walking routes, as opposed to the more established approach of facilitating focus group panels. The InSITU researchers also sought the participation and opinions of young children and young adults. The GIS-P tool and on-street consultation were particularly effective in overcoming traditional barriers to the participation of hard-to-reach groups and the results have also proved useful to planners and developers, thereby joining two previously disparate and disconnected groups.
Funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), InSITU’s research was undertaken by a consortium of three leading research centres during 2006: London Metropolitan University (TRaC at the Cities Institute), the University of York (Stockholm Environment Institute) and the University of Salford (Salford Business School and Adelphi Research Institute). InSITU’s project partners included the City of York Council, City of Salford Council, London Borough of Hackney, Yorkshire Forward Regional Development Agency, Groundwork Trust, Institute of Field Archaeologists, Tourism Concern and the National Trust.
For additional information about the project go to: http://www.insitu.org.uk
return to top
