Greg Jones, Child Graddon Lewis, reports from our recent Community Programme Think Tank, exploring community engagement in areas of significant change.

NLA gathered together a team of property developers, consultants and community groups to explore issues with engagement of existing communities within and around areas of significant change, asking how barriers can be overcome and what approaches work best to ensure local people have the opportunities to take advantage of investment, development and growth.

There was recognition in the room of the fear and distrust attached towards the very idea of regeneration: a toxic mixture of broken promises, gentrification tearing up communities and the unease of things being done not for or with the community. This perception of developers being ‘others’ and not members of the same community is a very difficult mind-set to overcome. 

The most successful examples of engagement are therefore at the earliest stages, where the community can genuinely have a hand in determining whether work is wanted, and if so what general form that will take. Often the ground work for this has to be led years in advance by local authority and community groups themselves: if the first time someone is asked whether they are happy with a significant development is by an architect or developer then it is likely that that opportunity has been missed. By the time an architect is involved it is inescapably evident to members of the public that ‘this is going to happen’ whether they like it or not, so why bother engaging? 

Local leaders are best placed to facilitate those initial conversations, but councils themselves are often seen by the community to be others, and perhaps not benevolent others in all cases.  Representatives of the council clearly arriving from outside of the area along with people’s poor experience of interactions with other council departments has led to a widespread distrust of both a borough’s motivation and its ability to deliver successful change.  Local leaders are best placed to facilitate those initial conversations, but frequently changing council personnel does not help form a perception of a council that has the long term commitment to community benefit as its foundation stone.  Most council representatives genuinely are committed, and this should be the fundamental foundations of such conversations, but there is work to be done in establishing trust and then maintaining it for the duration of the project and beyond.

If handled well, with the community engaged early by the local authority, with broad support for change and investment, then the conversation with architects and developers can take on a very different tone: as enablers, testers of ideas and solvers of problems.  

Even with the time invested into building trust, there remains an uphill battle in convincing the community that these benefits of regeneration will genuinely be realised.  Are they wrong? Not really: development takes time, a long time, and significant change takes even longer.  The prospect of five, ten or twenty years of disruption for a benefit that will accrue to someone else is bound to engender apathy.  Development at any scale is a risky business prone to cancellation or long term hiatus caused by fluctuations in financial markets, regulatory change, interminable planning battles, fluid property valuations and material costs: projects routinely get put on hold or sold without spades being put into the ground. Promises of immediate delivery of community benefits, never framed as being contingent on anything, are somehow diluted, delivered late or not at all.  This needs to be acknowledged and dealt with honestly with viable delivery timescales and honest explanation of the complexities of development and the possible changes over the lifetime of a masterplan being delivered.

We need a better vocabulary for describing the benefits of change: just talking about social value and wider economic uplift is very abstract. Meanwhile uses can show the development delivering real and tangible gains to all in the form of new shops, cafes, youth centres, public square etc... however, we lack a metric for wider social value that could be a briefing requirement and subsequently enforced in the same way we have for targets for sustainability, accessibility or biodiversity which are equally complex and interconnected subjects for which we have a variety of enforceable metrics.

Engagement on significant schemes must not stop at planning consent, but reaching out and encouraging engagement to a cross-section of the community for a number of years may take more incentives than tea and biscuits at the library. If we, as a development community, want the involvement of broad swathe of community groups, reaching out beyond the motivated and vociferous few, then finding ways to incentivise engagement and recompense the time commitment need to be found.  

Successful engagement at an early stage should aim to agree a set of principles, agreed metrics for success with flexibility. Material costs, house prices, dropping retail footfall, major infrastructure delays, regulatory changes, new technology: all of these and more affect design and delivery and none are openly acknowledged or successfully discussed in public engagement. 

A common perception is that all change is exclusively driven by a developer’s greed. Facilitated either through local authority’s complicity or incompetence.  Issues around development appraisals, viability and developer’s profit are genuine factors that are extremely difficult to discuss openly.  It is therefore important to engage people in deliberative conversations to discuss the difficult choice that external factors have forced.

Much good work is being done already to improve community engagement: the pandemic has forced us away from a reliance on passive approaches through exhibition boards on easels set up in the library foyer, where the interaction feels scripted and carefully managed; this is a presentation format rather than a conversation and both sides know it. Digital campaigns improve access that can work around working hours or care commitments, for people with wheelchairs or pushchairs; it adds a channel for responses which are easily tabulated, but it assumes a level of IT literacy and can still only really be a device for telling people things: responses are often limited to deliberately leading multiple-choice questions and a ‘anything else you’d like to tell us’ box.  This may qualify as engagement, but it isn’t a conversation.  

The last few years have seen a proliferation of different approaches which is welcome and no doubt more will emerge, particularly with the involvement of academic institutions investigating communication studies and testing the relative success of different approaches. 

More effort is needed by most councils and developers to reach outside the redline boundary to community groups to solicit genuine exchange of views at a stage where there is at least the possibility that they will be taken on board. Door knocking helps but is prohibitively time and resource intensive to undertake across a wide area.  Neighbourhood WhatsApp groups are the digital equivalent of door knocking, but care must be taken that these don’t exclude the quieter or offline members of communities.  Carefully analysing response data can reveal population segments that haven’t responded, and these can then be targeted specifically.  Reaching out to community leaders to arrange smaller sessions with specific groups can provide a more inclusive and a safer space for some.  Early-years engagement is one of the more optimistic themes: going into schools to explain what is happening in an area and why, hosting interactive design sessions can generate ideas and positivity around development proposals that is then taken home to the adults and into the wider community, and as a side benefit exposes children to the built environment professions in a tangible exercise.  Most beneficially it engages with a section of the populace that the significant change will directly affect. Training (and paying) young locals to be consultation practitioners has benefits in reaching out and bridging the perceived gap between councils, developers and communities.

If we are convinced of the benefits of investment, development and regeneration we, as a development community, must be happy to have our arguments examined, scrutinised and criticised by the broadest spectrum of the public if proposals are to have validity and change the long standing perception of ‘us’ doing regen to ‘them’.