Another workshop to report….this time I went as a representative of Greenhill Community Resource Centre. The title refers to the Standards drawn up by the Scottish Community Development Centre on behalf of Communities Scotland. It’s a set of ten “rules” for engaging with community members, and both sides of people (public bodies and community groups) are expected to adhere to these rules and understand the roles each play in the process. They include involving, supporting involvement, planning, working together, sharing information, improving, feeding back and monitoring and evaluating the engagement process.
I suppose the Standards are a set of groundrules, a common foundation for encouraging consistency of engagement; but you also need to recognise which Standards are relevant to your community activity and apply them in practice.
You can view the Standards (Feb 2006) by going to:
National Standards for Community Engagement
You can also view a consultation document (Dec. 2006) on how the Standards have been working in practice by clicking on:
Evaluation of the Effective Engagement of Communities in Regeneration
I attended a one-day workshop on 1st March held by the Scottish Centre for Regeneration (part of Communities Scotland), the full title of which is, ‘How can successful placemaking help community regeneration?’ I’m not too knowledgeable about urban planning, architecture and ‘placemaking’ as such so it was fascinating to go along and learn from John Thompson, one of Europe’s leading urban designers and “placemakers”. A workshop in the afternoon with Rob Cowan from Urban Design Group was also useful, on how to carry out a placecheck.
Interesting “soundbytes” within such a short blog space (without you falling asleep), appropriate to my own work, are:
1. Good places make money.
2. Good places look after themselves.
3. Are housing companies building ‘places’?
4. A place can’t survive if it’s fragile; a place needs to support its inhabitants personally.
5. Placemaking is a mature process of knowledge-building; bring inhabitants up to the required knowledge set in order for them to participate fully.
6. Engagement occurs across different levels: doorstep, neighbourhood, town, council, region.
7. 84% of all planning applications are submitted by people with no training in design!
8. You are designing a place with a potential identity, an adaptable place.
9. How we move around the space we inhabit is important.
10. Ask, ask, ask: use social surveys with inhabitants. If you don’t involve inhabitants in decisions about their place then there is really no point.
Useful Further Reading
Carrying out a placecheck (in order to encourage community participation in their area), you can go to www.placecheck.info for a full set of potential questions.
Ebenezer Howard’s Three Magnets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebenezer_Howard (Town, Country or Town-Country) and population movement.
Le Corbusier’s ideas of urban planning: La Ville Radieuse, labelled as socially destructive. http://www.time.com/time/time100/artists/profile/lecorbusier.html – interesting article.
