Written by:
Sophia de Sousa
Last week, I went to a thought-provoking event, How Co-production Creates Better Places, organised by Future of London (FoL). The workshop explored how co-production practices lead to better placemaking and brought together representatives from communities, the public, private and third sectors to put their heads together on what good co-production looks like and to explore its potential impact at a personal, organisational and practice level. The event was part of a programme of research that FoL has been doing around Putting Co-production into Practice, and follows on from an interesting report they produced, Making the case for co-production.
So it was both an event and a conversation that was right up my/our street, and I thoroughly enjoyed the formal and informal spaces to share experiences and ideas.
The event revealed, and reiterated what we at The Glass-House have often found in the context of placemaking jargon, that there were many different interpretations in the room of what the term co-production actually means.
The starting point for this particular conversation was making the case for placing co-production in the community engagement toolbox. In conversation with others, and as the morning progressed, I found myself asking whether there is a risk in this, and whether over time, co-production might be seen as primarily an engagement technique in a participatory process, rather than as an alternative approach.
There’s a tension here for me, which stems from my understanding of co-design and co-production as a group of people and/or organisations coming together from the start around shared values and objectives, and then making a shared investment in working towards them through a process and brief that they shape together. It is based on democratic principles of collaboration, skills sharing and mutual respect, and above all, of shared agency and power in decision-making and of responsibility for the outcomes.
With that in mind, inviting people into a placemaking project with the very best intentions of using co-design and co-production as a tool for community engagement, might be promising something that is in its very essence flawed and contradictory if not done right.
Generally speaking, in large-scale regeneration and development led by the public and/or private sectors, from the community’s perspective there is an imbalance of power and resources from the outset that makes co-design and co-production challenging. So, if we are thinking about how to embed co-design and co-production into that process, it’s perhaps worth thinking about, and defining, key aspects or elements of the project where it is possible to do co-production in a meaningful and genuine way. Otherwise, we risk just applying a more appealing name to what is still a participatory process.
Indeed, in their Making the Case report, FoL cautioned against what they referred to as ‘co-production washing’, which they defined as engagement processes where the term ‘co-production’ is used but where in reality, power and knowledge are not shared, nor is the process truly inclusive.
This doesn’t mean that co-production is not possible within this context of public and private sector-led development, but perhaps that it needs to be done in a more targeted way. One could, for example, consider a co-designed and co-produced brief, engagement strategy, or a particular piece of a large-scale project. For any of these to work as genuine co-design and co-production, there needs to be a clear shared starting point, shared responsibility for the process and a shared understanding of what success looks like. This simply won’t work if members of the team are invited into the project halfway through the journey, for a limited time, with limited decision-making power. If that is the case, it might be an engaged participatory process, but only aspects of it can be truly co-designed and co-produced.
This is where thinking about community not as a population of individual local residents, but as a network of individuals, groups, organisations and networks who live, work, study and play in an area, can help shift the mindset from thinking of community as constituent consultees to seeing a landscape of potential collaborators and partners. It can also help project leaders consider how to develop relationships that strategically lay the foundations for collaboration, co-design and co-production and that share both power and responsibility from the outset. While different members of a co-designed and co-produced work may bring different resources to the project, co-designing projects across sectors and with diverse representation from the community can help unearth and activate resources that complement and help make better use of the traditional financial and political forces wielded by the public and private sector forces in placemaking.
I absolutely applaud the work so many are doing to bring co-design and co-production into the mainstream, and we at The Glass-House are also busy working in this space with various partners. However, perhaps we need to add a note of caution to those who wish to add it to their community engagement toolbox. We need to be very clear about how we use the terms and what we mean by them, and when inviting people into this space, be honest about whether they apply to a whole project, or to specific elements of it.
I am hugely appreciative of the serious and thoughtful work and research that the FoL team is doing to raise awareness and build capacity around co-production, and last week’s event was a heartening reminder that there are already a lot of people out there doing wonderful things to champion and enable co-design and co-production. We look forward to future conversations and collaborations with all of you.
A special thanks to the FoL team for their inspiring event. I have shared this piece with then before publishing it, and they have added this note regarding their work on co-production, which I encourage you to explore:
Through creating an evidence base for a more empathetic, democratic, and people-centred approach, the ambition of our ongoing co-creation work is to set the standard for co-production within the sector and prevent ‘co-washing’. Ultimately, we would like to see a real paradigm-shift: where the sector commits to sharing power, sharing knowledge and being inclusive – as we’ve outlined in our Co-production Principles.
Images courtesy of Future of London.