Just a short observation, in the light of Matthew Taylor’s post about the RSA’s work in Chelmsford that is being launched today.
“….a vision for the town centre must be based on a rich understanding of how people see and use the area and how they might be willing to change that view if the centre itself changed. We need to explore what could the town centre’s identity could be, and from that answer to develop ideas for embedding this identity in the physical and social fabric.”
It’s interesting that democracy is often understood to mean an engagement in party / pressure-group politics, or the clash of ideas and opinions. Local authorities will shortly have a statutory obligation to ‘promote democracy’ – which we are expected to understand as voting in elections. It means a promotion of the work of councillors and our right to participate in their decisions (and sometimes, our ability to force things onto the agenda with petitions).
We are told that we have a right to be consulted more often in more creative and professional ways. In other spheres, we see decentralisation and even the very word ‘democracy‘ conflated with the promotion of local councils. The democratic innovations are often around ‘citizens juries’ or ‘participatory budgeting.’
Most of this is, of course, a good thing. But it seems to me that the most valuable expression of democracy is our ability to shape our immediate environment. Our streets, housing, hospitals, schools and so on. The one where every one of us has something valid to say, and has experiences of having done so. Where the process of shaping our surroundings has created conversational networks that we can return to in order to solve new problems. Where there is less of a legitimacy gap between the general public and the professional or the expert practitioner.
It’s the one area where we can be guaranteed to know things that the experts don’t. Where we can bring them great ideas that they would never dream of, and that we can add the caring dimension that – with the best will in the world – town planners and architects will never have.
There’s my argument in a nutshell: Town Planners. Architects. See what I mean?
The RSA are looking for a number of other local areas to work with them in this way – it’s a great idea, and one that I hope will shape the whole question of ‘democratic renewal’ more than it does currently.
A blog about representative democracy, social media and a conversational politics. How will peer-to-peer communications change local democracy? How is representation changing? 
Paul,
I am an architect and I think I’ still have a caring dimension in my make up. I wonder why you think I don’t?
Actually if you’d bothered to look beyond your own small political world you might have noticed that a lot of built environment professionals are spending a great deal of time instigating and facilitating planning for real and similar types of public engagement exercises to enable people to have their say in the future of their environment. Funnily enough if you’d read the programme, you’d have seen that a group of planners and architects are leading the Chelmsford forum. So, no I don’t see what you mean, unless it is the trite observation that people who live locally generally have the best ideas about how their locality works and where it could be better. Is that the most caring a local democracy practitioner can be, blaming it all on the architects and planners?
Adam,
You may have a caring dimension a mile wide. And the same may be said of a lot of your profession. But it’s not generally perceived to be the case, and like a lot of people, I can look out of my own window for evidence of this.
Like most people in this country, I have no experience of ever being involved in the design or planning of the environment that I live in.
I probably could have phrased that sentence better – plainly it’s not a moral failing of the entire architect / town planner profession, but I’d stick by the observation that people who have to live with a particular solution will care about it more than even the best-intentioned external supplier of that solution.
Paul,
Could it be that the reason you haven’t got involved in the design or planning of the environment you live in is actually because you don’t care about it? Can you honestly say that you haven’t engaged because the opportunity hasn’t been there? Have you ever considered checking out how you could contribute to local plan making in your area? Your local authority will be consulting now on a number of important statutory plans which will impact on how your local environment is developed in the future.
Perhaps you could show us how much you care and get engaged. All I can see at the moment is a self-confessed, non-engager, who can’t be arsed to actually do something. If you care why don’t you stop blaming “the professionals”, who clearly care enough to effect some change, and show everyone how much you care; tell the professionals what you want and why; and demand their help to deliver it. They won’t bite, I promise and they might respect you more for it.
I’ve been called plenty of things in my time, and generally they’re pretty well the opposite of ‘self-confessed non-engager’.
I spend a lot of time talking to people all over the UK about their participation in local issues and I’ve seen the way that local authorities ‘consult.’
When I said that ‘I have no experience of ever being involved in the design or planning of the environment that I live in’ it is not the same as saying that I have never been involved in processes that *purport* to involve me. I’ve been to the meetings, the ‘consultations’ and like pretty well everyone else who has engaged in these exercises, it was a frustrating and bewildering waste of time. It was generally a process to rubber-stamp a pre-determined outcome.
And if you really imagine that the professions that you are defending here are generally seen to be doing a good job in this respect, I would urge you to get out a bit more and see if this is a widely-shared viewpoint.
I can promise you that it isn’t.
I’m interested in finding examples of where a wide range of the public (including the ‘hard-to-reach’ as well as the ‘hard-to-avoids’) are involved at the v0.01 stage rather than the v0.99 point. I’m sure there are lots of examples of this, but they are the exception rather than the rule, aren’t they?
Paul,
As I suppose you can tell, you rather got my goat. I think we both agree it is crucial to involve at the earliest stage in any design process the very people who will have to live with and use the finished product and that is the real point. I’m just a bit fed up with being told it’s my fault that people aren’t engaged. My job is actually a hundredfold easier and more rewarding when end users are engaged properly and I know what you mean about some ‘consultations’, which aren’t done at all properly and which serve no identifiable purpose.
I choose to practice as an architect specifically because I do care about where I live and I want to participate in that debate. I also would love my neighbours to participate in that debate because quite simply they also live in my neighbourhood – it’s their neighbourhood too and I share it with them. I don’t think you have any evidence to support anything in the last three paragraphs but actually that’s not the point is it? A proper and inclusive debate about our environment is what we need, not one which excludes or blames one particular section of our community. Blaming a perceived “soft target” just seems a tad unhelpful in making that valid and useful point.