Good Places Through Community-Led Design

Abstract

By making the community a genuine part of the design process, we can create a more sustainable urban future. This can be achieved through a community agency, as urban structures exist by the virtue of rituals and interaction. However, as communities become more transient with fewer geographical boundaries, society’s impetus to act collectively has become weakened by a diluted community spirit, reducing its ‘social capital’. This chapter seeks to identify renewed praxes of sustainable community participation in the realm of urban developments. By evaluating the importance of community involvement and exploring past and present modes of interaction between built environment projects and its neighbourhood, we can establish the levels of participation and empowerment that are required to enable ‘Good Places’. It will also investigate how to generate a more inclusive and representative process of urban regeneration, by examining how ‘social capital’, the collective memory or a sense of place, can be regenerated and captured to assist in developing systems for participatory action. This will allow the creation of more sustainable spaces and places for an increasingly fluid contemporary society.

Good places are never bought off the shelf, but arise in an inclusive process built on local ideas, imagination and aspiration (00:/ 2011).