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Public participation in architecture: the political agenda

Public participation in architecture :

Definition

 Tool

Villas & Homes

Public buildings & private buildings

Landscape architecture

development landscape and urban space

urban design projects

Political agenda

References

Public participation was coined with the introduction of the American ladder of Arnstein in 1969 which explains the level of public participation in political governmental work. Before going into detail about public participation in architecture, we need to define the term. Nabatchi 1  ( See references below) introduces a broad and general definition that does not comprise government: Public participation is an umbrella term that describes the activities by which people’s concerns, needs, interests, and values are incorporated into decisions and actions on public matters and issues.

So what is public participation in architecture? Jones 2 defines architectural participation as the involvement of the user in some stages of the design process. Loures 3 introduces the World Bank definition of public participation as the process that “enables the public to influence the quality or Volume of a service through some form of articulation of preferences or demand”

What is the importance of public participation is it people, organizations, community, or government?

Public participation comes on many scales depending on the architectural development project. In recent years, architectural practices and organizations developed a tool to gather information and data. Certain people’s views on the use of certain buildings whether it is commercial or residential through survey questionnaires. This tool is the post-occupancy evaluation commenting on the most critical problems the people witness in building daily use. Developers and some consultants replace this tool with a market research report at the beginning of the project design process. In 2008, I worked on development in Legends where the developer through the market research company identified many aspects that serve the development project design process. Moreover, it serves in the selection process of the international firm to design the development. I asked the market research company to define what is in demand in the market in terms of types of apartments and preferred layouts. Lets watch what George RR Martin say about the architect and the Gardner when he is asked about novel writing similarities.

the architect and the gardener – what people say

Since architecture is a multidisciplinary field that includes engineering services and here the people as end users are concerned with the building services such as the air conditioning and plumbing work in baths and kitchens. These services introduce various problems like noise and bad smell from baths and kitchens. So involving end users is essential to enhance the final product (Villa) design. This scenario applies to individual projects like houses and villas. In this method, the consultant gets the required end-user involvement and participation with fewer efforts and time.

For this scale and larger like, building design public participation involves various activities. For example for public buildings like the town hall and similar buildings, public involvement is from two categories the users (employees) and the public. The general public is concerned about issues of access to the building in terms of security and safety, the car park located concerning building layout, simplified routes to reach the building department when a public is visiting for submitting an application or similar activities, and services like toilets inside the building and its convenience. For users of the building issues concerning them is the location of vertical circulation like stairs and elevators, horizontal circulation spaces convenience like corridors and foyers, rooms and working spaces and working comforts in terms of movement and sitting location and light and views, location of internal services like cafés and restraints that services in break time, and finally external services like car parks and medium vehicles parks relation to internal storage areas and other services.

For private sector buildings like residential buildings, many issues arise, and the public can provide their views and opinions. Vertical circulation like elevators, staircases and their location, public corridors and their relation to movement and transfer of solid goods, ease of external escape routes in fire cases, internal spaces sizes concerning its function and comforts as well as related to other internal spaces, the internal services problems in kitchens and baths, external spaces uses like car parks and landscape (I will come to that later). This is public participation in the scale of individual projects.    

Architecture is always linked and integrated part of landscape architecture. Public participation in small projects of landscape is rarely conducted specifically in EU, USA, and similar countries. The reason behind that is the homes are provided by the public sector where homes come in a form of groups (terrace homes) that merely have a small garden not exceeding 3Sqm. Public involvement in landscape architecture is active when there are medium to large-scale projects. For medium-scale, projects like community homes landscape issues are many. Pollution comes from improper waste disposal in community landscape areas as Larisa et Al 4 illustrates in their article about public participation in developing landscape in Mons city. Developing community skills and teaching them in maintaining landscape furniture is another issue in this particular city. Louris 5  indicates in his paper about public participation in landscape projects that to develop landscape a study of people’s behavior in outdoor activities should be conducted by the design team. This study will disclose the people existing and future preferences, desires, and expectations, and meets their lifestyle requirements.

Larger scale projects like developments landscape and urban space public involvement come in a different way rather than direct involvement. Recent research on the effect of the perception theory on the architecture of development landscape and urban space indicates that professionals from this field may benefit from this theory application in understanding what type of features in urban space is more attractive for users, what type of landscape design and arrangement may contribute to human comfort and wellbeing, color and texture that is mostly having a positive effect on human behavior in attracting them to a certain environment or nearby activity, to understand the type of building arrangement the positively attract people for social external activity. For more details about this subject read my paper review on perception theory.

Large-scale development like a complex of residential blocks buildings or complex mixed-use development may benefit from public participation. This type of public participation is different from other types of projects because these projects require the involvement of high-level professional skilled architects, engineers, planners, policymakers, and environmentalists. The general public may participate in general issues related to the use of the urban space created by the designers, the urban features that attract residents and are mostly used, environmental destruction that occurs in external landscape and water surfaces, building design issues related to occupance security and safety like the number of stories, building surface design such as features like balconies and color and external materials.

Public participation in architecture as I have discussed here can affect architecture in defining functional preferences, internal functional problems, services problems and their effect on occupance health, and their opinion on building external design. Here the public defines and develops the design requirements at the beginning of the architectural design start for any project or development. As for its effect on the architectural design and process, the effect is limited. For landscape projects starting from a small scale, the public can enhance the landscape architecture in terms of people’s needs in their gardens property, but not the landscape architecture design itself. In larger-scale landscape projects, public participation may affect the design in terms of what they prefer in urban spaces like public art, location of external furniture, kids playgrounds, and general landscape layout see figure 1.

Public participation effect on architecture design of public urban space features- image media city Manchester
Figure 1: public art, external furniture – media city, Manchester

    Public participation in architecture as political agenda

Awareness: Governments in developed countries work on increasing public involvement not only in architecture but also in many other fields to increase their awareness. Public participation can serve two-way political agenda. First, the public need to understand the architecture discipline and work in terms of many aspects like how architecture is done when a project is assigned by the public sector and private sector, the process, and its complexity in presenting innovative work, and the efforts done to get a business an architecture job, the cost of conducting design and it’s relevant workshops, how architecture firms respond to clients needs, views and opinions. Second, the government needs the public to understand that they are concerned with their opinion because they are responsible for town planning and its relevant issues like employment, good environment, good design, and successful planning. In addition, this is essential for two things mayor and council’s electoral campaigns and the high-level political information on what the council is doing to serve the public and the duties and responsibilities applied.

Development: public participation in the views of government should focus on developing people and skills not only in a specific profession but also in the manners of democratic behavior. Involvement in workshops whether it’s for building projects, urban regeneration, or landscape project by people who are not having knowledge of the field may enhance their specific skills like enhancing their capabilities in the maintenance of external furniture and features. For specialists such as architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and urban planners are very essential to develop even experienced people in one field to another not only the new graduates in these fields. Public participation of professionals helps develop skills that solve many problems in professional work failures and work defects.

Risk: public participation in general and from a political perspectives about the government’s work to reduce risk coming from any threats to people’s interests. Workshops held by various bodies like professional, non-public, community, and organizations serve the political community to illustrate that they are committed to people’s engagement and to share their views and opinions as one of the democratic practices. Risk can come from not involving the public in delaying many development plans introduced by the various councils specifically in EU, and USA countries because the local development plans are subject to public consultation. Not only that but many councils receive many development plans every year that require public participation and these may be delayed if no participation is available in the development accordingly. Councilors, mayors, and professional planners working in the political routes may face certain failures in work due to several reasons like lack of sufficient expertise. Public participation is a good form of supply of innovative ideas that could be developed and these ideas may highlight when studied properly the cause of many failures in political work. Another important matter that these people may face is that they are not exposed to society and are not known by the public, which is very important in times of election. So public participation serves to introduce people to the political route for electoral purposes.

Research: public participation is one of the sources of data supply for research and analysis of problems happened and happening in society. For example one of the London councils researched a problem that happened among youth in the community because the homes they were living in are small. Most family members gather outside their homes or in public areas. The result was that the black community witnessed various assaults from the white and other ethnic groups that needed fast attention. The council invented a campaign for cancer patients gathering all residents every day to gather charity funds for the research center. Most of the residents become in harmony and the community did not witness more problems. Big developments fail after construction to meet the end-user requirements. For example, Hulme Crescents built in 1971 has witnessed various problems from the isolation of urban space, building safety issues because it was constructed fast, insulation problems, and finally increased crime between the development and the adjacent ones. Six hundred forty-three residents filed to move away from this social housing development to other areas. The data gathered from this disaster development like how many flats were subject to damage of poor insulation, unsafe flats, flats that were lacking proper service installations like gas lines, why residents are not using the public urban space in the development, the number of injuries and death and their cause, and finally several crimes whether it was form this development or other and its main causes.   

For more articles on architecture, you can visit my home page for more details.

References:

  1. Nabatchi, T. and Leighninger, M., n.d. Public participation for 21st Century democracy.
  2. Blundell Jones, P., Petrescu, D. and Till, J., 2013. Architecture and Participation. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.
  3. Rodrigues, Frederico & Loures, Luis. (2017). Public participation in project-based learning in landscape architecture. WSEAS Transactions on Environment and Development. 13. 441-451.
  4.  Romariz Peixoto, L.; Rectem, L.; Pouleur, J.-A. Citizen Participation in Architecture and Urban Planning Confronted with Arnstein’s Ladder: Four Experiments into Popular Neighbourhoods of Hainaut Demonstrate Another Hierarchy. Architecture 2022, 2,114–134.https://doi.org/10.3390/architecture2010007 Academic Editors: Catherine Elsen,
  5. Same as 3
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