News

Building Community at Eden's Core

Submitted by Louise Dredge

Earlier this month we joined our Building Community partners - Eden Project, Locality and communityplanning.net - at the awe-inspiring Eden Project in Cornwall for the Building Community Planning Camp, an event which aimed to help communities get their heads around neighbourhood planning.

Groups from all over the country came along to participate in three days of creativity, skills development and experience sharing.

The Glass-House ran a number of workshops and we were delighted to meet so many passionate, engaged and dynamic individuals working towards positive neighbourhood change!

Here's a sneak peek of what we got up to:

What a sight on arrival! The marvel of Eden..

Visual Minutes at work

Jargon busting session - with cake!

A site visit to a proposed Eco Town site near St. Austell in Cornwall

Dinnertime!

Developing a shared vision at The Glass-House 'Design by Consensus' workshop

Participants get some hot tips and tricks on architectural drawings from The Glass-House team

A quick look inside the Mediterranean biome before departure!

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The Value of Community Led Design - another success!

Submitted by Rebecca Maguire

Great news! The Glass-House and partners - the Open University and Architecture Centre Network - have been successful in gaining another grant of £40,000 from the Arts and Humanities Research Counci (AHRC) to carry out a piece of action research into The Value of Community Led Design.

This piece of research will use creative and collaborative methods to collect and share the many examples of good practice, aiming to articulate the benefits of community-led design for dissemination to the wider public. The research will also explore and assess ways to measure the impact of community-led design and understand the barriers to wider acceptability of community-led design, and how these can be overcome.

As supporters of the Glass-House will know - community led design goes beyond the one-dimensional process of consultation, helping involve people in decision-making throughout the design process, from visioning to implementation. We contend that there are many benefits from this approach, from improving civic participation and ensuring more democratic outcomes, to creating a strong sense of community and strengthening people’s attachment to their place and to each other, to producing more sustainable solutions.

However, 50 years after the first community-led design initiatives (and although the practice of professionals and organisations involved has matured and spread) community-led design is still far from being mainstream in design and planning practice.

Grappling with this problem is of special relevance at this particular time, with the emerging Localism agenda and the National Planning Policy Framework, which acknowledges an increased need for early and meaningful engagement and collaboration with communities.

Participants during our 'Design by Consensus' workshop at the recent Building Community Planning Camp

At the recent Building Community* Planning Camp at Eden Project in Cornwall, with a large group of neighbourhood groups from across England working on neighbourhood plans, a demand was expressed to be able to share and understand what was going on across the country and learn from one another – this piece of work should be a significant step towards achieving this request!

The project is funded under the Connected Communities strand connecting all research councils. We are thrilled to be part of this wider and holistic network of creative industries, communities and academics working alongside one another.


* Building Community is the 1-year Department of Communities and Local Government funded project that The Glass-House has been delivering on this year (with partners Eden Project, communityplanning.net and Locality) to support communities to take a more active role in place-shaping and the development of plans at a local level to ensure they reflect local needs and aspirations.

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