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Sharing Place: Think Pieces invite external contributors to explore the theme of sharing place from diverse perspectives, and offering a broad range of reflections, ideas and provocations.
In this edition of our Sharing Place: Think Pieces, Stephen Hill positions collaborative placemaking in the realm of direct political action, enabling citizens to shape how they live with each other.
Citizens…Collaborative Placemakers…Your Country Needs You!
By the time you read this, the first feelings of shock and awe at the results of the US presidential election may have faded, possibly replaced with other anxieties as the Trump administration gets into gear. This time ten years ago, I was just finishing the report of my 2014 Churchill Fellowship visit to the USA to meet elected politicians, public officials and community organisations and their support agencies. The purpose of over 60 interviews was to discover how politicians and citizens worked together, even when they had deeply conflicting political perspectives.
What connects these two moments? Democracy…understanding how democracy can work better, and what we can do to make sure it is not undermined, not just by deliberate actions, but also by neglect and lack of practice. But what has democracy got to do with collaborative placemaking?
First, let’s just frame collaborative placemaking as all or some of the continuum of experiences from the planning of new or regenerated places and communities by and with citizens, through self-building, community led housing, through partnerships with councils, housing associations and developers, to the ownership and management of assets that will underpin the well-being of places and communities, long after developers have moved on.
Second, let’s recognise what all these activities and structures represent and have in common. I have always seen them as small and unique experiments in democracy. ‘Small’ does not mean insignificant. ‘Unique’ does mean particular to the place and the people involved.
Collaborative placemaking is one of very few arenas of political action in which citizens can shape decisions that have a critical impact on their quality of life and life chances. The decisions required are trying to answer the question ‘How shall we live… together?’ In an increasingly unsettled and unpredictable world, the need to work out how we will live resiliently together, keep ourselves healthy, warm, cool, dry, fed and with an affordable roof over our head is greater than it has ever been. That’s also a question that citizens and the state must realise cannot be answered by the state alone, however intelligent, well-intentioned or resourced. Our expectations of politicians, if not our trust in them, remains unrealistically high.
Recent political analysis suggests that citizens’ sense of powerlessness or lack of agency to shape their futures lies at the root of the rise in populist politics, the Brexit vote and the election of Trump. But what I have observed over decades as unique to collaborative placemaking is that when citizens can engage directly with each other about the challenges affecting them, the opportunity to make a difference can transcend the fault lines that we see in mainstream politics. Not everyone agrees all the time, of course, but in a setting in which citizens understand that they also have to take responsibility for the outcome of their involvement, then agreeing to disagree is part of learning how to collaborate. That is how we hope that democracy can work.
One of the key messages from my Churchill research was how the state, mostly at a local level, and citizens and communities had found ways of collaborating even when they did not share each other’s political ideas. They understood that they could achieve together what neither could achieve on their own. They each recognised the need for both parties to have a story about why they were collaborating, but accepted that the stories didn’t have to be the same.
But how can we learn those lessons in democracy here? So, skipping lightly back a further fifteen years to 2000, for the completion of an overly long report for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on the current state and future prospects of community self-build. The work was overseen jointly by the Foundation and the four national self-build agencies.
A critical research question was about the effectiveness of the agencies themselves. The answers from central and local government, policy think-tanks and housing associations did not make comfortable reading. As organisations promoting collaboration on the projects they supported, the agencies had not understood the need to explicitly learn how to collaborate with each other. Instead, a kind of learned helplessness stopped them from learning how to work more effectively together, how to avoid duplication, how to optimise their chances for securing the support needed from officials and politicians, and how to maximise their support to their communities.
Critically, they were not looking forward to see how information technology would dissolve their role as gatekeepers of specialist knowledge and expertise. Rather than foregrounding the importance of their own organisations and ‘special relationship’ with government, they perhaps needed to reimagine themselves as community organisers, and working with their communities to expose their lived experiences and life ambitions in ways that politicians could not ignore. Not one of these organisations still exists.
Citizens…Collaborative Placemakers…Your Country Needs You! And you must ensure that your enabling organisations will also collaborate; otherwise you will fail and we may lose our grip on democracy.
Training in the techniques of Planning for Real for the Placemaking Programme that would be at the heart of their New Deal for Communities Delivery Plan, and prefiguring the Prime Minister’s speech in April 2001 on the importance to communities of place and environment.
About the Author
Stephen Hill
Stephen Hill is an independent public interest practitioner, working as a planning and development surveyor in urban regeneration, strategic housing development and community-led housing. He has been an advocate and practitioner of active community participation in the regeneration and making of new places since the 1970s. An extended version of this essay develops ideas about the relationship between citizens, their professional advisors and the state, and the mutual action learning required to make those relationships work.
Further Reading
Stephen’s ideas about the political significance of communities in placemaking are reflected in “Planning and Inclusion”, an extended think piece to help the RTPI respond to the planning reforms in 2004, and “Taking self- build out of its ‘small and special box’ : citizens as agents for the political and the social of self-build”, in a collection of practitioners’ essays, edited for the UCL Press in 2017 (pp 247-266).
About the WEdesign 2024/25 Series: Sharing Place
WEdesign is The Glass-House’s annual series of free interactive public events, held online and in-person in cities across the UK, where we explore collaborative design in placemaking through discussion, debate and playful co-design activities.
Sharing Place brings people together to propose more equitable ways of sharing our places and spaces, as well as creating places to share experiences, skills and other things we value, through thoughtful placemaking.
Our online events create provocative spaces for conversation and are open to participants across the UK and further afield. Our Think Pieces bring together a series of blogs from a range of voices to explore the WEdesign series theme.
WEdesign in-person events are safe spaces for diverse audiences to come together to explore challenging issues and to work collaboratively to generate ideas and solutions, co-designing propositions for changes to culture, policy and practice through hands-on making activities, discussion and debate. These events are co-facilitated by students from our WEdesign Student Programme, in collaboration with our partner universities in cities across the UK.
WEdesign is supported by the Ove Arup Foundation.
Find out more and book a place at one of our WEdesign Sharing Place events here.
Visit our WEdesign page to find out more about the WEdesign Programme and how we work with partner universities, students and external contributors here.
