Where we live affects us in ways we don’t always recognise. Whether it’s supporting a local football team or a unique nickname to talk about something, the places we live are an integral part of our lives and change who we are.
Recognising the importance of our locales, we worked with ECF on a competition asking to ‘Reimagine London’, proposing that we could use citizen engagement in placemaking the capital!
What was the ask?
The competition was run by New London Architecture (NLA) and the LDN Collective and was looking for ‘innovative and aspirational ideas about the capital’. It spoke about London facing changes and challenges in our working and living patterns, especially when addressing housing and infrastructure needs.
ECF wanted to bring the idea of public deliberation into placemaking. They had a theory: they felt there was an enormous democratic deficit being created in the area around local planning by not including all people in the process, and that exclusion had led to a culture of confrontation within the planning system. They wanted to look at how we could address this issue by getting people from different walks of life to learn together, engage in trade offs, and form shared recommendations for the future.
What is a Local Plan?
Local Plans are crucial to shaping the spaces we call home, but many aren’t aware they exist. They set out proposals and ideas for developments in a particular area, often guiding decisions on what may be built, hoping to address the needs and opportunities for all residents in an area.
However, as mentioned earlier, they don’t always include the residents it will impact. And, if they do, it’s not always done in a meaningful way.
So how did we work together to solve this?
We proposed democratising the Local Plan process with citizens’ assemblies; a demographically representative group of residents informing the future of their area, to create a London that truly reflects the diversity of its citizens.
Participants would hear from experts and discuss issues like housing or transport; producing recommendations to improve how they’re approached. These are taken on by the Council with an accountability mechanism to ensure they are incorporated into the Local Plan.
Citizens’ assemblies act as a promise to people that the future is made with them.
Illustration by Samantha Charles
But we weren’t done!
To buttress our idea of democratising the Local Plan process, we also reimagined the City Hall building in Southwark.
The building, which Sir Norman Foster designed with a glass shell to symbolise political transparency, would be renamed the ‘Office for London Democracy’.
The OfLD will serve as a HQ for all London borough’s local plans, and will include a Museum of Democracy where people can learn about the history of democracy, threats it faces, and how they can be more politically engaged, including registering to be part of a citizens’ assembly in their borough.
Illustration by Samantha Charles
The result?
While we were not shortlisted for the competition (you can see some of the wonderful ideas that did here), we still feel the idea is worth merit and would love to see it come to life.
We have seen in our extensive experience the type of impact that deliberation and discussion can have on the tricky issues we all face, be that the future of policing in our areas, to preparing for climate change. It’s only through discussion and deliberation that we can come up with solutions that will work.
And, how we form plans for how communities change is an area ripe for a greater, more effective role for the public.
While what we’ve presented may be an imaginary reimagining of London, we like to think that the truth behind the work will always win through. We would love to hear your thoughts, or even yet: work with you if this is something you’d like to make come alive.