Cultivating a Participatory Design Practice in Architecture

2015

Community participation in urban design and planning is slowly emerging in Hong Kong as the Government increasingly adopts and recognizes the importance of bottom-up community values in the practice of informing, consulting and involving the community. This paper provides a framework that emphasizes the importance of collaboration and community-based initiatives to reconcile different interests and achieve a balanced vision for the design of the city. The fundamental objective is to ensure foster an increased sense of community, responsibility and civic pride in order to improve the overall quality of life. The Lam Tin Estate case study not only demonstrates how the Government is becoming more responsive to the need to consult with the public and relevant stakeholders to build consensus prior to implementation, but also illustrates how community participation empowers key stakeholders to take ownership in designing and planning their built environment.

In_Bo, 2013

This contribution reflects on first experiences made with a newly launched Master of Science in Urban Design program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. As an important part of this program, students have to develop their design proposal in response to feedback of different stakeholders and community members. Thus the program responds to the growing aspiration of Hong Kong’s citizens to shape the urban development of their city and a lack of a meaningful participation process in the region. With its high density, protected country parks, efficient public transport and large scale housing program, generally, Hong Kong offers important lessons for contemporary urbanism. However, since the end of the British colonial rule and in face of increasing property prices, pollution and the disappearance of local heritage, intensive debates started about the regions future. Another central point of the recent discussion in Hong Kong – and key theme of the new urban design program - is the d...

US-China Education Review B, 2018

As the discipline of architecture and urban design develop renewed interests in social responsibility associated with participatory design and collaborative place-making, it becomes more critical to review the potential and limitations in current collaboration process. The intrinsic proposition of bottom-up planning implies new approaches on how architecture operates in the context of modernity to manifest itself in the discourse of urban crisis. By examining case studies in the Asian context, we observe an emerging design pedagogy in Hong Kong which involves interdisciplinary coalition of professionals and local stakeholders in community development as an architectural rubric when confronted with social and urban crisis.

2014

ABSTRACT: This papers aims to illustrate the working and community participatory process as well as the role of architects and urban designers in urban poor housing design through some upgraded low-income housing projects in Bangkok. Two cases is comparatively similar and different context which finally directs to each particular housing development guideline. The paper argues that other dimensions apart from physical significantly influence substantive outcomes. The learning experience among different involved parties can become one of the effective tools to conduct strong sense of belonging as well as community building. There are several concerns in practice, which architects and urban planners/designers have not to neglect and for low-income community those are always economic, political and sociological considerations.

Recently, there is a rise of civic participation across the world that enable the communities to participate more directly and actively in need-defining and decision-making processes, thereby improve their lives and living environment. The roles of design and designers have also started to shift from " design for community " to " design with community " or " design by community ". This research strives to understand and explore the participatory community design process in the Phu Xuan Commune, a suburban district in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Having undergone rapid development in the past few years, Phu Xuan now faces multi-faceted urban and community issues, such as inadequate amenities, lack of waste management system and shortage of housing. Participatory community design approach is new and emerging in many Asian developing countries like Vietnam; Phu Xuan as a choice site of investigation has allowed for unique opportunities to work closely with local activists and universities. Our research framework and methodology consists of three phases. The first phase, Community, focuses on preliminary site and community analysis. A series of techniques, including community asset mapping, data and system analysis and a community workshop with the locals, was used to understand and identify Phu Xuan's strengths, challenges, threats and opportunities. The second phase, Co-Creation, is focused on deeper examination of issues and potential design approaches, leading to collaborative design with community to solicit stories, feedbacks, ideas and designs. Fieldwork encompasses innovative and participatory data collection methods, including interviews with important stakeholders and documentation of the community through multiple lens such as time-lapse of public spaces, geo-tagging sounds and photos, and setting up photo booths to reveal the community's social network. The third phase, Continuity, is concerned with reframing of design into sustainable model achievable by the community, while refining the design continually through multiple iterations of Community and Co-Creation processes. A participatory exhibition and a post-PARTICIPATORY COMMUNITY DESIGN ACTION RESEARCH: The Case of Phu Xuan Commune, Ho Chi Minh City exhibition community dinner will be held in Phu Xuan in September 2014 to bring together the community to proactively envision and pursue self-sustaining ideas that would in turn empower them to overcome their challenges in the long run. The research ultimately aims to break ground in participatory community planning in Vietnam and examines how it can be carried out in the specific context of Phu Xuan Commune. It is a proponent for active community participation in the planning process, and studies how to empower the people of Phu Xuan to take ownership of the community development process toward a better future.

2011

Report for Public Policy Research Funding Scheme, Central Policy Unit, Hong Kong, 2018

This research project was funded by the Public Policy Research Funding Scheme of the Central Policy Unit of the HKSAR Government. With the welcome assistance of this generous grant, and without any external interference, the research team maintained the independence of its judgement throughout the development of thisstudy. In addition, we wish to express our gratitude to the Urban Research Group and the Department of Public Policy at the City University of Hong Kong (CityU), including the staff of the General Office and our academic colleagues, for their support and presence in our organised discussions. Moreover, the administrative assistance provided by the Research and Finance Offices of CityU was an essential factor in our investigative tasks. Our guest speakers (Iris Tam, Tobias Zuser, Melissa Cate, and Benjamin Chiu-hang) contributed their valuable insights to key discussions, which were crucial for the topics examined in this study. We extend our most indebted recognition to all the interviewees who shared their time and thorough reflections with us despite the persistence of our interrogations. The interviewees include the EKEO managers who were always willing to help by providing the data we demanded—another manifestation of their positive attitude towards collaborating with those beyond the planning desktops. Unfortunately, we were not able to reach all the significant stakeholders for this case owing to constraints on time (particularly the demanding overlap of research and teaching obligations) and resources; however, we are confident that we can expand this research in the future. A final word of recognition is due to the students of the POL2603 Social Science Research Methods (2015/16) course who collected news and documents related to Kowloon East and engaged with the challenges of qualitative discourse analysis. We hope that for them and for all the citizens of Hong Kong, the present report illustrates how productive qualitative policy research can be in enhancing and contributing to the quality of democracy, which remains under constant threat.

This research examines the role of community participation in urban design. It looks at developing more efficient methods of facilitating participation so that it can become more feasible for developers and designers. A literature review and analysis of case studies found that community participation in urban design, in the developed world, is almost non-existent. In impoverished countries, however, it is more common - recognising that the commercial and political pressures of Western societies make participation in urban design difficult to justify. The research then moves to its major case study - Shelly Bay. This area is facing a large development which has been highly protested by members of the local and wider community. One of the more significant reasons for the protest was the lack of transparency in the development planning stages. So why does the public not have a say on the future of Shelly Bay? This thesis researches ways which developers, architects and urban designe...

2016

Singapore’s reputation as a green city is largely achieved through political will, strong policies, and effective execution of policies. While greening Singapore for most of the past five decades can be generally described as a public-sector led approach, where citizen engagement was not necessarily the focus, in recent years the public sector is increasingly interested in engaging the community in the planning and design of public green spaces. As this is a nascent movement, there remain considerable gaps in the types, process, and efficacy of participatory design. In this paper, we describe a research project that aims to provide a sustainable landscape design framework—based on the concept of ecosystem services—through a participatory process. Our study focuses on public housing estates, locally referred to as “HDB” (Housing and Development Board) estates, which houses 80% of Singapore’s population in high-rise, high-density towns. We describe the research process, in which we include multiple stakeholders in the planning and design of HDB neighborhood landscapes. They include relevant public agencies, design professionals, residents, and NPOs/NGOs. We also discuss the lessons learned through such a process. Since a participatory approach to landscape design remains to be fully explored in Singapore, we anticipate that this research project could provide valuable insights into the adoption of participatory design in Singapore to promote a more bottom-up approach to the planning and design of public green and open spaces.

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2015

Both disciplines of Landscape architecture and Urban Planning prepare a development plan for public spaces in cities and towns. Much of the design and planning of the spaces are done by the landscape architect and urban planners without community participation. This practice results in incompatibility of the spaces for the communities; underutilizing or abandoning the spaces, and worse vandalizing the properties of the spaces. This paper argues that community participation in the design and planning of urban public spaces can draw residents to establish a sense of attachment that may lead to community maintaining the spaces. A plethora of studies in human geography, urban sociology, landscape architecture and urban planning were reviewing the themes of community participation in the planning of public spaces. It is found that community participation needs to be underpinned by a philosophy that emphasises empowerment, equity, trust and learning. The quality of decisions made through community participation is strongly reliable on the nature of the process leading to them.