David Barrie

Designing public participation

There are two things that commissioners and designers of work that engages the public need to focus hard on just now:

People are leading increasingly static lives.

And to win their involvement, they need to be offered compelling, not compulsory experiences.

These two facts of life are at the centre of trends like sustainability and localism - but somehow the complexity of the words and what they refer to can get in the way.  

Me and several creative/professional teams I've pulled together are working on all sorts of projects just now - and the centre of operations is the office whiteboard:

We're helping 

• public and private organizations in the development sector engage with communities
• a major fashion retailer in the U.K. promote the idea of collective creativity
• people living in a low-income neighborhood share experience and knowledge using online media
• an entrepreneur to start a new food co-operative that will be the subject of a series of primetime TV shows in the U.K.
• and an international cultural relations agency support an elite "flight-school" of urban entrepreneurs

And these all involve designing programmes of user-friendly, interactive experiences that trigger collaboration and help people achieve whatever they want to achieve more effectively.

A key to success is to structure a sequence of experiences that take people on a journey that has a larger cumulative meaning - much like a director writes a screenplay or time-lapse photographer frames motion:

What's exciting is to see this turned in to real life - and it doesn't come much better than a project that I came across on a visit to the USA late last year.

City Harvest is a public project in Philadelphia in which inmates of the city prison system start vegetable seedlings in prison gardens and greenhouses:

The seedlings are then taken to maturity at dozens of community gardens across the city:

Then SHARE, a nonprofit network that provides food to area food cupboards across the city, facilitates distribution of the grown produce to low-income neighborhoods, often to the very areas in which the families of the prison-growers live.

City Harvest is an inspiration. Why?

Because it is a project that expresses all of the warmness of sustainability and localism but also speaks to their cold reality - we lead increasingly static lives and to overcome this for the public good, there's value in creating a connected sequence of industrious, easy, participatory steps.

The initiative also respects a magic ingredient that is a key to all entertainment and largely missing from talk about "top/down", "bottom-up", "grassroots/non-grassroots" activity led by public and private organizations: we like things that are compelling, rather than compulsory.

Things that are compelling rather than compulsory make life worth living - and that goes for X-Factor, Celebrity Big Brother, even fierce fashion worn by Daphne Guinness, not just stuff that's useful and worthwhile. 

It's also a value at the centre of the most successful platform for human interaction and empowerment of our age: the internet. 

Images of City Harvest courtesy of PHS (The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society). Source lost for Happy Balls and skateboarder time-lapse (sorry!) 

A New Deal for urban regeneration

 

Service designers, social entrepreneurs, social architects, 'cultural brokers', community organizers, facilitators and 'liaison officers'...there's a cast of thousands who work in the development sector who are tasked with making 'transformational change'.

But none of that stops big projects falling fast in to a politics of adversity, of hostility between promoter and resident, allegations of gentrification, claim and counter-claim of conspiracy and Nimbyism.

And big projects matter just now.

In April 2010, the new Infrastructure Planning Commission in the U.K. will receive its first applications for development consent for nationally significant infrastructure projects. Decisions on applications will be framed by National Policy Statements. Statements for Energy Infrastructure and Ports are currently out for public consultation.

Towards the end of last year, it was revealed by Regeneration & Renewal magazine that no less than 82 areas in the U.K. had submitted a total of 124 bids to pilot a new scheme for financing crucial infrastructure, such as roads and bridges, on the back of new developments, such as business parks. The average size of bid was just £15.5m but the scale of integrated, area-based development looked massive.

In an age of stimulus - of massive investments in controversial new power stations, ports and roads - and tighter bank lending - lending that can ill-afford the risk premium of external uncertainties - it would seem a no-brainer that there needs to be ways and means by which the taxpayer can be involved with and directly see benefit from development.

What's more, the political heat is turning up on the issue of public accountability.

Investment in failing banks in the U.K. and U.S.A. has made the public more aware than ever of the concept of 'public value recapture' - of recouping a portion of the public money granted to support private interests.

The gentle version of community empowerment that's prevailed over the last few years in the U.K. is slowly but surely turning in to a harder political programme of the transfer of local assets to local people.

Economic productivity today is increasingly linked with social welfare - and there's an ever-increasing recognition of a feedback loop between welfare, natural resources and economic development.

In other words, sustainability is slowly but surely coming to mean not just environmental justice and intergenerational value but intra-generational value and equity (see more on this in environmentalist Jonathan Porritt's excellent paper here).

How to bridge the gap of trust in development? Combat the adversarial nature of the current planning system? Mitigate the cost of involving the public in development decisions? And do all of this in such a way that the public knows that it has a genuine stake in the claim on public resources associated with redevelopment?

If we want to avoid the 2010s turning in to an era of debilitating dispute over infrastructure and continue to improve and make money from renewing our towns and cities, we need to have an answer to this.

Here are three things I've noticed that might inform the discussion.

First, in the United States, one route to resolving logjams on major infrastructure projects is Community Benefits Agreements. These are legally binding agreements between a private developer and a coalition of community-based organizations in which community members pledge support for a development in return for benefits such as living wage jobs, local hiring and affordable housing. These deals are only relevant to big projects. They negotiate out Nimbyism. They're controversial since they co-opt voters in to supporting projects by legal agreement. But they are innovative in their combination of citizens rights and localism. They create a prospective platform for a larger two-sided market in public involvement in local affairs and are a tantalizing new application of the principal of collective bargaining.

Second, in December 2009, U.K.-based development company Blueprint opened a new mixed-use development in Leicester, East Midlands. (Declaration of interest: a key investor in the company, the Igloo Regeneration Fund, is a client.)

Phoenix Square is the creation of a partnership between the public and private sectors, local universities and arts organizations.

What's exciting is the way in which the collaboration is framed by Blueprint. 

According to Development Director Peter Connolly, quoted in Regeneration & Renewal, the value of the partnership approach was an "interaction between the different elements of the scheme...a community was created, rather than it being an isolated development".

Finally, there's the comment of John Gummer, a former secretary of state for the environment in the U.K. in an article in real estate magazine Estates Gazette last summer.

In answer to the need for government to fertilise green shoots of recovery, Gummer said that  it might be effective to introduce a system of local compensatory payments to make it worthwhile for a community to support development.

All of these things point to a new form of interaction or contract between the promoter or developer of an urban scheme and their local communities.

They put a price on co-option, not just engagement of the public in the delivery of major projects.

They share equity and value it. 

In this world of deal-making around social, as well as economic 'wins', who are the new 'Equity Planners'?

Maybe it's the same crew who appeared at the start of this (inordinately long) post - but re-cast as merchants of shared value, rather than 'transformational change'.

But maybe the job description should be narrowed down, written in another way and feature:

Yes, those who understand the value and meaning of building communities around a project.

Yes, those who are prepared to think about shareholders and shareholdings early in the development process.

But also those whose first instinct is to address the issue of public interaction and benefit head-on and build it not just in to their pre-planning phase of work but put it at the very centre of their first business plan.

Want some inspiration?

Maybe look to another corner of culture: the very best design and production of popular, user-friendly social networking websites and mobile apps.

Thanks to Linda Carroli of Harbinger Consultants for tweeting Community Benefits Agreements (@lcarroli) and her great introductory paper here. Image of "Say no" courtesy of viewshot.

There is a lot going on just now in the U.K. on establishing a contract culture within social, economic and community development. More on community contracts at Kevin Harris' excellent blog here.

My next post will be the length of a haiku - promise!