Chapter 2 - Engaging communities
Matthew Goulcher, Levitt Bernstein
Best practice approach to resident engagement
Regeneration will not succeed without broad support from local people. This chapter is based on four decades of experience in engagement, working with communities to achieve a consensus for change.
Treating residents with the respect you would afford any client underpins the approach. Providing the right conditions that will facilitate an exchange of ideas is key. Invariably, local people have indepth knowledge of their neighbourhood, both factual and anecdotal, which will help build the bigger picture of what is needed. Just as important is clear articulation of what is possible. For a project to be a long-term success a wide variety of stakeholders - local residents and businesses, the local council and its development partners - must come together to form a consensus across a range of issues including the key regeneration objectives and how best to achieve them.
Regeneration rarely affects just the occupants of the particular estate; its influence reaches much further, both geographically and socio- economically, into the wider neighbourhood, and any consultation exercise must find a way of reaching the wider audience.
To read the full Chapter please download the report.
Regeneration will not succeed without broad support from local people. This chapter is based on four decades of experience in engagement, working with communities to achieve a consensus for change.
Treating residents with the respect you would afford any client underpins the approach. Providing the right conditions that will facilitate an exchange of ideas is key. Invariably, local people have indepth knowledge of their neighbourhood, both factual and anecdotal, which will help build the bigger picture of what is needed. Just as important is clear articulation of what is possible. For a project to be a long-term success a wide variety of stakeholders - local residents and businesses, the local council and its development partners - must come together to form a consensus across a range of issues including the key regeneration objectives and how best to achieve them.
Regeneration rarely affects just the occupants of the particular estate; its influence reaches much further, both geographically and socio- economically, into the wider neighbourhood, and any consultation exercise must find a way of reaching the wider audience.
To read the full Chapter please download the report.
At the beginning
Estate regeneration normally derives from a combination of factors that come together as a ‘critical mass’ and indicate that physical change needs to be considered. Typically these issues would include: generally poor quality housing and public realm, community safety issues, poor security, inherent defects and housing maintenance and management problems. Increasingly another criteria is that redevelopment represents a good opportunity to provide additional new dwellings for the area through intensification, or with little grant available this is the only way to fund replacement housing. Community engagement should start as soon as the need and the potential for some form of regeneration has been identified. The previous chapter explains how an initial desk study can establish the range of possible options and the realistic prospect of viability. Such a study should also focus the attention of local authority members and officers and ensure that there is political support to move forward. Without these prerequisites it is pointless - and potentially damaging - to start an engagement process. There needs to be an embryonic, but realistic, idea of what is deliverable and what the residents ‘offer’ might be before consultation starts. Residents will not engage effectively on other issues, such as design, until their future security is addressed. The programming of the engagement also needs to be paced so residents see continuous progress without feeling bulldozed or overwhelmed. Above all, transparency of both the process and the agenda is the foundation of a productive exchange. At the Eastfields Estate in Merton early development of an attractive freeholder and leaseholder offer unlocked the engagement process, thereby allowing consultation on design development and wider issues to progress with residents feeling more secure about their future. A classic mistake is to present a community with a beautifully presented design concept - a masterplan or a series of seductive marketing images to sell the scheme. Estate regeneration is not like that: the majority of the issues are not about design in isolation. Early stages are about confidence building, understanding the problems and opportunities, and establishing the wider regeneration context. For this reason, it is very important to test the overall appetite for regeneration first, before trying to discuss design. To begin with, simply establishing what is good and what is bad, no matter how obvious or obscure they may seem, draws residents into the process. As with any brief, good information-gathering forms a sound basis for design, and the early consultation stages should be concerned with flushing out any issues - the factual and the anecdotal. Building capacity Before meaningful engagement can commence, people may need help to participate knowledgeably in the consultation process, especially on large or complex projects. Few residents have ever had to read a masterplan, a house plan or an elevation and many are far from understanding complex issues such as financial viability. At the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark enabling workshops were held with resident groups that explored drawing conventions, space standards, tenure distribution, public realm and landscape design and the principles of development viability. Sometimes a ‘residents’ friend’ is appointed to assist with training and capacity building, and will support residents throughout the whole development process. These are normally independently appointed consultants paid for by the local authority or the developer client. At the Maiden Lane Estate in Camden an Independent Tenants’ Advisor (ITA) was employed by the council to help residents understand the process and to ensure that complex issues were adequately explained. The ITA provided support and guidance to residents and gave them the information they needed to make informed decisions on all issues affecting their homes and lives. Much of the early work is dedicated to building residents’ capacity to participate. The regeneration team must use tangible and easily understood means to illustrate design choices: visiting built schemes that demonstrate particular aspects of best practice (and sometimes things that do not work so well) and using three-dimensional illustrations wherever possible, such as perspective sketches, physical models, mock-ups or computer-generated walk-throughs. At the Eastfields Estate a computer-generated walkthrough was combined with hand-drawn perspective views to better explain to residents the qualities of the streets and parks that were being proposed. At the Aylesbury Estate, where several thousand new homes were proposed, the council commissioned a fully furnished, full-size mock-up of one of the flats to ensure residents understood the size and quality of their new homes. Simple graphic tools should also be used to explain non-design issues about the development process and timescales, through to viability, phasing and construction. Often this stage of the process concludes with residents stating their priorities and the basis on which they are willing to participate in the regeneration process. This is commonly called a ‘residents’ charter’ and should form part of the brief for the development. Lefevre Walk is one of three post-war estates in Bow redeveloped under the Housing Action Trust programme from the mid-1990s. This represents a high point both for grant-funding and resident representation. Although unthinkable in today’s political climate, it is an important example of what can be achieved through government investment in rented social housing: a forthcoming post-occupancy evaluation will assess the long-term outcomes in detail. There was strong resident representation on the HAT board, and influential steering groups. The objective was to provide new homes and improved economic prospects for the existing community - there was no requirement to diversify tenure or to expand the housing stock. What’s in it for the existing community? For physical regeneration to be successful it needs to have real, tangible benefits for existing residents and the wider community, and for proposals to be endorsed they need to be clearly explained and communicated. The message also needs to be tuned for different audiences. Leaseholders and freeholders Often the single most controversial issue, with the most potential to cause delay, relates to the status of leaseholders and freeholders. The Right to Buy has meant that all local authority estates contain a significant proportion of homeowners who need to participate in the process - which might ultimately involve the upgrading, remodelling or replacement of their home, or at minimum, changes to the shared public realm. We commonly find that most home owners will not engage in wider discussions unless the security of their future home is known. Who can blame them? They will have major concerns over how their property is valued and how they are compensated. Will the value of their ex-local authority property, if based on current market value, be sufficient to buy a new property either in the development or the surrounding neighbourhood? Where homes are to be demolished, there is a variety of solutions that all form part of the viability of the project - shared ownership or shared equity in a new property or like-for-like replacement - and the appeal of each will depend on each individual’s circumstances. Within an estate, an offer that appeals to one agegroup or demographic of leaseholder or freeholder may not appeal to a different group, so it is important to understand the leaseholder’s position in order to develop a tailored offer. The offer to leaseholders and freeholders will have a significant effect on the viability of a scheme, so it is important to address this issue early and build in the associated costs. There must be a well thought-out, financially equitable and transparent strategy. If uncertainty persists too late in the process then trust can break down and momentum is lost. Tenants Tenants will be concerned that they have a right to be rehoused in the new development in a similar property. Any divergence from this will need to be explained and justified. For tenants, it will be about the level of rent, service charge and energy bills - guidance on all of these must be offered early in the consultation process, alongside discussion on the type, location and design of new homes. The wider community Successful regeneration will also deliver wider neighbourhood benefits - both physical improvements and positive socio-economic impacts. Not only do these need highlighting to estate residents on the estate, but the consultation needs to go further afield to neighbouring residents, businesses and other stakeholders, such as local schools. This is commonly achieved through public exhibition and a variety of neighbourhood publicity and engagement tools. This is an important opportunity to explain how the benefits of change will outweigh the perceived drawbacks, including temporary disruption: additional and improved housing, new amenities, open spaces, safer streets, more customers to support local businesses and community facilities. Explaining the delivery processes Regeneration involves a complicated set of delivery processes such as planning permission, procurement of development partners and contractors, ownership issues, phased decanting, construction and occupation - all of these need to be explained and justified. Individuals will want to know about the impact on them and will demand timescales, which are often difficult to predict with accuracy - the regeneration team needs to explain any caveats or qualifications to the programme. Community engagement by the regeneration team needs to be aligned with formal statutory planning consultation, which will follow the planning submission - and the difference between these processes needs to be made clear to the community. If the pre-application consultation is full and effective, then the planning process is potentially so much smoother. At Lefevre Walk in Bow the resident steering group members were named as part of the applicant on the planning application and attended the planning committee as active advocates for change. Resident choice Further down the line, residents may be invited to make individual choices about their new home and neighbourhood. It must not be assumed that all residents want the same thing: most people have preferences based on their lifestyle, income and age. Residents should be consulted on every aspect of estate regeneration, from the macro (the masterplan) to the micro, with very specific individual choices to be made about their new homes. Some of these are consensus issues and some are individual. Best practice is to keep them as separate as possible, discussing one without the distraction of the other. The key to the micro scale choices is timing - too early and residents may simply not engage as it all seems too far away, too late and the contractor may not be able to deliver the choices requested. Inclusive engagement It is critical that the consultation strategy is inclusive and representative, and that support for regeneration is widespread. The process needs to be designed to reach as wide a sample as possible. This means being flexible and innovative with regards to timetabling, location, groupings and style of consultation. Hard-to-reach groups such as pensioners, younger people and minority groups all need their own special strategies if the process is to be inclusive and comprehensive. Few people respond well to large group meetings: smaller surgeries and one to one engagement tends to be more productive and reach a wider audience. In this context, beware of small, politicised vocal groupings exerting a disproportionate influence on the process. Make particular efforts to reach the less vocal majority, so they can be heard and express an opinion. For some proposed estate regeneration projects, an approval by community ballot is a prerequisite and represents the culmination of a long process. Organising this is a substantial piece of work involving many different stakeholders. It needs good preparation and planning with excellent quality material that explains in simple terms the regeneration vision and practical impacts. It also has to be demonstrably open and transparent. At the Winstanley and York Road estates in Wandsworth a series of option studies were developed in workshops over a two-month period exploring a range of interventions from minimal change to significant redevelopment with larger gains in terms of new facilities and housing. Laying the ground in this way provides a good trail of evidence that the consultation was meaningful and open and the options process collaborative. |
Recommendations
The key is to be honest about the drivers for change and what this means for residents. If one of the objectives is to provide additional new homes through intensification then be clear about it from the outset and explain why. For most residents it is a balance of potential gains and losses, and they will be looking for things which affect them adversely as well as positively.
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