20/20 Visions

Collaborative Planning and Placemaking

Charles Campion, Charles Campion

• Publisher: RIBA Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781000699166
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Community involvement in planning and placemaking through early, inclusive participatory methods can build consensus, speed up planning and add social, economic and environmental value to projects, leading to healthier, happier and more sustainable places. 20/20 Visions is an inspiring and visually stimulating introduction to the practice of participatory planning. 20 worldwide case studies, spanning 1960's projects in USA to present day UK, explore the context, implementation and follow up of the participative design process to illustrate its effectiveness in engaging all stakeholders/communities and tackling difficult regeneration issues.

Chapter|1
It’s not enough to Vote

‘The public is usually ahead of the political system.’

JOE BIDEN, FORMER US VICE PRESIDENT

The vote for Brexit in the UK in 2016, the rise of far-right leader Marine Le Pen in 2017 in France and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 in the US are signs of significant dissatisfaction with and disconnection from the political order in old, established democracies. This distrust of political institutions has arisen in parallel with a dissatisfaction with and disconnection from place-planning processes. All too often the planning system excludes meaningful input from communities, and is out of step with what these communities actually need and want. It is time to change the way things are done and to bring communities genuinely to the heart of planning and placemaking.

Cities, towns and villages were historically the product of many local hands, as places evolved to suit the economic, social and cultural needs of the community they served. However, the past few decades have seen planning theory and practice move away from creating locally distinctive and responsive places, in favour of delivering an agenda often imposed from outside the community. Planning has become dominated by professionals and politicians, and frequently it becomes adversarial as communities feel alienated, believing they have no real power to influence outcomes. The creativity of communities is a huge but largely untapped resource.

There is, however, a tried-and-tested collaborative planning methodology – the ‘charrette’ – which involves people in shaping the places in which they live. But charrettes are not universally known, and have even been described by some who have experienced them as ‘the best kept secret’.

The charrette approach to planning involves members of the community working alongside local authorities and developers to co-create design-led, visual plans and strategies. It is an inspirational and energising activity where the results of collaboration are seen immediately, with the knowledge that each individual’s input is listened to and actually matters. It also has the potential to speed up the formal design and planning process overall.

The word charrette is French for ‘little cart’. In Paris in the nineteenth century, carts were sent around to collect the final drawings from students for display at École des Beaux-Arts. Students would jump on the carts to complete the presentations right up to the deadline. Today the word has been taken to describe an intensive, collaborative planning process in which designers, the community and others work together to create a vision for a place or development. The concept of placemaking is used as a lens through which to assess issues and propose actions – not just for physical plans, but for social and economic solutions too.

This book explores and promotes the benefits of participatory and democratic planning and placemaking through charrettes. Its timing was inspired by the fiftieth anniversary in 2017 of the first American Institute of Architects (AIA) Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT). In 1967, in response to a request from the business community in Rapid City, South Dakota, the AIA dispatched a group of architects and planners to work with the local community over a weekend to produce a revitalisation strategy in an early charrette process. Over the last fifty years charrettes have gone on to make a global impact by involving people in a form of participatory democracy – not relying on elected representatives to make decisions on their behalf, but having a direct creative input into and influence on the decisions themselves.

As well as the use of words and numbers, often the sole tools of public debate and decision making, charrettes add the medium of drawing, so vital when discussing and formulating proposals for ‘place’. People are empowered to get on with designing and delivering solutions that are right for their own particular area. Charrettes encourage joined-up thinking and holistic visioning, which in turn can lead to appropriate short-, medium- and long-term actions.

A Charrette is:

• An interactive, intensive dialogue and design process
• A place-based exploration of change
• A way to engage people’s knowledge of their area
• A participatory and collaborative creation of a shared vision for the future

From a professional perspective, charrettes provide an efficient working process that enables design teams to set up their studio in the location of the charrette and focus solely on the project at hand, covering a great deal of ground over a few days. Contact with the community brings local knowledge and creativity into the process, and helps develop plans and solutions that have wide support.

One of the key characteristics of charrettes is flexibility. The case studies in Chapter 5 illustrate the variety of scenarios a charrette can serve, from co-designing flood-protection measures, to masterplanning previously developed, historically sensitive sites, and creating the early vision for a Local Development Plan.

The book begins with a historical overview of the development and use of charrette methodologies, which began in the US and then spread internationally.

The next chapter is an exploration of why charrettes are important, how they achieve holistic outcomes through intensive multiday processes facilitated by a multidisciplinary team, and suggested ways forward for promoting collaborative planning processes.

Charrette processes are given different names and have subtly different methodologies, depending on the practitioners involved and the countries in which they take place. Chapter 3 describes a charrette methodology in order to make clear its fundamental simplicity, but also the need for careful and inclusive organisation. There is information about pre-charrette preparation, and a generic example of a charrette illustrated with images from a real-life charrette. The chapter concludes with a selection of post-charrette follow-on scenarios, all-important in maintaining momentum and continuing community involvement in actually delivering and managing the project. A question John Thompson, a pioneer of Community Planning in the UK, frequently poses is: ‘Who decides, who delivers and who maintains?’

The core of the book focuses on twenty diverse international case studies, which include UK and international examples of charrettes, with some involving JTP and others led by practices from around the world. The case studies explain the historical, social and cultural milieu of the places, the charrette process and the outcomes, with comments from participants interspersed throughout. There is discussion of key themes, and a description of the consensual visions that have resulted from each process.

The book ends with an overview of the key lessons learned from the case studies.

I have had the privilege of meeting and speaking with many people while researching this book. In writing the case studies I have only been able to mention a small number of those involved. People I approached have been unfailingly generous with their time, and in offering useful material. I would like to thank everyone.

The case studies show that charrettes in all their guises have been used as a valuable tool in a wide range of circumstances. The process has inspired and involved large numbers of people in many different countries; it has true global appeal. This book, and the stories within it, should provide a stimulus for collaborative placemaking events, which I believe should be promoted to have the widest possible use, in the greatest number of places.

Chapter|2
A History of Collaborative Planning and the Charrette Process

‘Cities are political ecologies.’

PETER CALTHORPE, CALTHORPE ASSOCIATES

The success of humankind on Earth is to a large degree a function of our ability to socialise and to collaborate in performing tasks such as hunting and building shelter. The African proverb ‘It takes a village to raise a child’ recognises the necessity of multiple inputs and collaboration in nurturing and raising children for the mutual benefit of all members of the community.

When telling the story of collaborative charrette processes, historians often refer back to the Amish tradition of barn raising – events in which community members cooperate to build a barn, or other structure, in a day. Typically, the eventual owner of the barn undertakes the advanced organisation, including site preparation and ordering of materials, to ensure the best and most effective outcomes from the cooperative barn-raising day.

Nineteenth-century thinkers contemplated ideal human environments in response to the industrialisation of the time, and its impact on population growth and creating cramped and unhealthy living conditions in cities. William Morris, Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard were all hugely influential in planning theory, and proposed models for balanced, communitarian living in harmony with nature and to facilitate food growing. Buildings, neighbourhoods and cities were viewed as being the product of many skills and many hands. It was seen that urban environments should be laid out to promote healthy living, rewarding work and access to green space and the countryside for food and leisure. Governance was a crucial factor in realising and sustaining such visions, with a key element being the active involvement of citizens in their neighbourhood communities.

The origin of the modern, multiday charrette process has been credited to the Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) ‘Squatters’. In 1948 CRS, an architectural practice based in Austin, Texas, was working on a school project in Blackwell, Oklahoma. To avoid time-consuming and energy-sapping travel, the team established a temporary office on site and worked collaboratively with the school board over a few days to resolve the design. Bill Caudill of CRS was interviewed in 1971. He recalled that by the end of the week, they had unanimous and enthusiastic board approval for the project: ‘While we were trying to solve a communication problem we discovered something that we should have known all along – to involve the users in the planning process.’¹ This novel way of working proved so effective that CRS incorporated multiday Squatters into future projects as a way of involving clients, users and a multidisciplinary team to build consensus and support.

The 1960s was a seminal decade in American history, and marked a wave of civic engagement and service. In 1961 John F. Kennedy’s famous inauguration speech challenged Americans to renew their spirit of public service, famously stating: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.’² Nothing was more influential on the emergence of mainstream collaborative planning than the collective impact of the civil rights movement. The groundswell of urban voices calling for equality and involvement in the decision-making processes surrounding cities was impossible to ignore. Experimentation with new ideas and practices grew and evolved in response to the tumultuous events of the era, and these included a key part of the charrette story, the R/UDAT.

At the time, the critique of the status quo and conventional thinking about cities was gaining momentum. Much of the criticism focused on the policies of the US urban renewal programme, which had a devastating impact on many urban communities. The construction of interstate highways increased white migration to the suburbs, while simultaneously creating physical barriers within cities. Highway projects frequently led to the demolition of inner-city neighbourhoods and the displacement of poor residents, and were used as a form of slum clearance. By the 1960s the impact of these policies was becoming clear, and between 1949 and 1973 more than 2,000 projects in cities had resulted in the demolition of over 600,000 homes and the displacement of over two million people.³

Jane Jacobs’s landmark work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, was highly critical of ‘orthodox’ city planning. The book articulated a series of principles for producing vibrant places, and it expressed and demonstrated the value of the ‘citizen expert’. She famously declared: ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.’⁴

The design and planning professions responded to these challenges by pioneering new approaches. In 1963, David Lewis and Ray Gindroz co-founded Urban Design Associates (UDA), a firm with high ideals. As Lewis described: ‘At UDA, we learned a basic lesson from the groundswell of courage that lay at the heart of the civil rights movement and its dedication to the principles of democracy. Our accountability as urban designers has always been to the voices of citizens and to their vision for the future of their communities.’⁵ This democratic concept of design was revolutionary in the 1960s, as it elevated citizens to a co-designing relationship with professionals, and empowered them in the creation of their communities.

In addition to the enduring inequalities of the 1960s, the lack of any form of consultation or involvement with the residents who were directly affected by slum clearance and highway projects led to a boiling point of civic frustration, culminating in a wave of unrest. In 1967, the US experienced what is commonly referred to as the ‘long hot summer’, a series of over 150 riots in cities across the country, as anger at inequality boiled over. That year also saw the birth of the R/UDAT.

The individual credited with the idea for the first R/UDAT was the architect Jules Gregory, then Vice President of the AIA. David Lewis described him as: ‘The great hero of modern American architecture. He stepped out and tried to lead a new idea, which was the idea of architects in service to society.’

The first R/UDAT project took place in June 1967, in response to a visit to the AIA by James Bell, the President of the Chamber of Commerce in Rapid City, South Dakota. The downtown area had suffered from serious flooding, and had also been in decline for years. James Bell was looking for help to produce a revitalisation strategy. After intense discussions about the reasons for the decline, the AIA agreed to send a team of four – two architects and two planners – to Rapid City to give assistance.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Dedication
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER 1: It’s not enough to vote
• CHAPTER 2: A history of collaborative planning and the charrette process
• CHAPTER 3: The importance of collaboration
• CHAPTER 4: What is collaborative planning and placemaking?
• CHAPTER 5: 20|20 Case Studies
• CHAPTER 6: Lessons from the Case Studies
• ENDNOTES
• IMAGE CREDITS
• INDEX