Participatory Design - From Community Consultation To Community Design

From Community Consultation To Community Design

Many local governments particularly in Melbourne, Australia require community consultation in any major changes to the built environment. Community involvement in the planning process is almost a standard requirement in most strategic changes. The City of Melbourne Swanton Street redevelopment project received over 5000 responses from the public allowing them to participate in the design process by commenting on seven different design options. While the City of Yarra recently held a ‘Stories in the Street’ consultation, to record peoples ideas about future of Smith Street. It offered participants a variety of mediums to explore their opinions such as mapping, photo surveys and storytelling. Although local councils are taking positive steps towards participatory design as opposed to traditional top down approaches to planning, many communities are moving to take design into their own hands.

Portland, Oregon city repair project is a form of participatory design, which involves the community co-designing problem areas together to make positive changes to their environment. It involves collaborative decision-making and design without traditional involvement from local government or professionals but instead runs on volunteers from the community. The process has created successful projects such as intersection repair, which saw a misused intersection develop into a successful community square.

Peer-to-peer urbanism is a form of decentralized, participatory design for urban environments and individual buildings. It borrows organizational ideas from the open-source software movement, so that knowledge about construction methods and urban design schemes is freely exchanged.