Consultation is crucial to creating the cities of the future. But how do we ensure that it is less about ticking boxes and more about what makes people tick?
There is a clever trick to finding out what a community wants for a new scheme. Are you ready? “Ask people!” bellows Adam Scott, the founder and global creative director of ‘experience masterplanner’ Free State.
For Scott, you start with a blank page and series of questions. You don’t start with an idea of what you think will sell well, or what you already believe people will want. Tech companies don’t come up with a product first and then try to find an audience for it. “They start by digging into people’s enthusiasms, their motivations their needs.”
Be more like Samsung or Apple, he says. “You start with investigation, you start by understanding that audience. And then you imagine the ideal programme, you think about it in terms of time, and only then do you start to think about it in terms of place, of what it means for the architecture, for the infrastructure.”
What makes people tick
But simply asking questions isn’t going to be enough, says Sarah Hayford, founder and development editor at The Land Collective. “You have to ask the right questions and you have to actually go where that audience might be.”
If you only want the opinions of the sort of people who routinely turn up to public consultations in town halls, then by all means continue to do that. But if you want the community to love your scheme, to invest themselves in its future, you have to engage with them on their terms and on their territory.
“It might just be a case of putting things online more,” Hayford says. That would at least reach a younger audience. “Most young people feel completely disenfranchised, they don’t know what’s going on in their towns until they see it being built.”
Most young people feel completely disenfranchised, they don’t know what’s going on in their towns until they see it being built.
– Sarah Hayford, The Land Collective
Asking the right questions is essential, agrees Josh Artus, co-founder of Centric Lab. “One of the blockages that happens in the engagement and consultation process is that the questions are always about themselves.” Communities are asked ‘do you like what we are going to do here? Or do you like what we are going to do there?’, he notes.
Instead, we should treat our conversations more like a first date, asking “can I learn a little bit about you?”.
“When you are looking at a regeneration project, your question shouldn’t be ‘do you want to see this or see that’, it should be ‘let me learn about your lived experience’,” Artus says. “It is more important to learn about the community, not by asking them questions about your project, but to try and understand them, about what makes them tick.”
Only that way will we stand a chance of building something that people actually love. “We are definitely encouraging investors and developers to get to the root what our communities want,” says Invest Newcastle director Jen Hartley. “So that we’re not just building islands in the middle. At the end of the day they are the ones who are going to be living with it.”
So why isn’t this the norm?
Time and space
“The problem is that real estate, in general, is focused on the concept of space and we need to be thinking about time,” says Artus. We are obsessed with asking questions about spaces, about architecture, when we should be asking about people.
And that means that, no matter how shiny and sexy the new development may be at the launch, over time it will become sad and unloved. “That is what makes for great places as brands, they get talked about, they are loved,” says Scott. “We see remarkably little of that within the real estate industry.”
For Hayford, the problem is too entrenched. “I think we need to start again, really,” she sighs. “The industry has gotten bogged down with the financial aspect being the most important in that process.”
“We’ve forgotten about people, what they need and what they need to thrive.”
Developers and managers need to be less scared of talking to communities and the answers they might get. Instead of setting up a channel through which people can complain, we need multiple opportunities for people to engage and contribute.
“You will build that brand and that reputation with each positive encounter,” says Scott. And that will ensure that the schemes created are loved and successful. “Being socially useful is being commercially astute.”
The three Cs
It all comes down to the three Cs, Scott proclaims. Collaboration, communication and celebration.
And a fourth, Artus adds. Care. “Just give a damn. Care about the places you are going into. Imagine they are your brother’s and sister’s communities. Care like they are your own. And that’s when you’ll change.”
And the more we engage people, the more they will love us for it. “I want these developers to step forward, I want them to be impresarios,” Scott exclaims. “They should be the PT Barnums of the built environment. I want to see what the moving parts are, I want it to be more fun, more engaging.
“That’s what we should ask of our developers. And we should help them,” Scott adds, with the boundless enthusiasm of Tigger. “Because it could be fun. And I think we need more fun.”
