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Long-term engagement of actors in municipality-citizens collaboration towards sustainable neighbourhood development

Created on 14-11-2024

Design, planning and building Community participation
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A variety of initiatives delve into collaborative knowledge building and innovation within urban development, with Urban Living Labs (ULL) emerging as prominent platforms for co-creation. However, ensuring sustained engagement of stakeholders proves challenging. Existing literature highlights commitment as a key challenge in collaborative arrangements between local authorities and community stakeholders.  Pre-existing institutional frameworks significantly shape the perspectives of both municipal and community actors regarding the benefits and expected outcomes of collaboration. These arrangements, which have historically hindered collaboration, undermine trust between actors and perpetuate power imbalances. Establishing ongoing relationships with municipalities is seen as a potential solution to foster long-term engagement of community representatives and improve local authority accountability for housing and social infrastructure.

Systems knowledge

Actors

Housing authorities

A government agency, usually at the municipal, county, or state level, provides and oversees various housing-related programmes and services.

Local communities

Civil society organisations

Civil society organizations, often abbreviated as CSOs, are non-governmental, non-profit entities formed by citizens to address various social, political, or humanitarian issues. They operate independently from the government and business sectors and play a vital role in advocating for public interests, promoting civic engagement, and providing services or support to underserved communities.

Local authorities

Local authorities, also known as local governments or municipal governments, are administrative bodies responsible for governing and providing services to specific geographic areas, such as cities, towns, or counties. They manage local public affairs, infrastructure, and policies, and are accountable to the residents within their jurisdiction.

Method

Interdisciplinary collaboration

Teams from different disciplines or fields work together to tackle complex problems, find innovative solutions and develop a broader understanding of a particular issue. This approach recognises that many real-world challenges cannot be adequately addressed within the confines of a single discipline or field.

Tools

Focus group

A qualitative technique involving a selected group of individuals assembled to provide insights, opinions, and feedback on specific topics, products, or policies, facilitating in-depth understanding and informed decision-making.

Target knowledge

Topic

Sustainability perception

How individuals or groups perceive and understand the concept of sustainability. This includes their beliefs, attitudes, values and environmental, social and economic sustainability awareness. These perceptions can vary significantly from person to person, culture to culture and society to society.

Social housing perception

Social housing is a term for housing provided or subsidised by government or non-profit organisations to meet the housing needs of individuals or families with low incomes or special needs. Perceptions of social housing can vary widely among different groups and are influenced by several factors, including cultural, economic and political contexts.

Community engagement

Dimension

Institutional

The structure of government institutions that have the responsibility and power to create building regulation and monitor compliance with them

Level

Neighborhood

Transformation Knowledge

Policy

Manual for decision-making processes

Project

Design new forms of democratic practices in planning

Fomenting the application of new technologies to support decision making

Related cases

Related vocabulary

Co-creation

Area: Community participation

In a broader sense, co-creation means the joint effort of bringing something new to fruition through acts of collective creativity (Sanders & Stappers, 2008) which can be manifested in both tangible (making something together) or intangible (learning something together) outcomes (Puerari et al., 2018). Recently, the concepts of co-creation or co- production have been applied to describe the processes of participation in urban planning and design. Both terms place particular emphasis on the partnerships formed between citizens and the public sector, in which a high level of citizen involvement is pivotal. Participation has been defined through its different levels of citizen involvement, ranging from non-participation to greater degrees of citizen control (Arnstein, 1969) indicating the different levels of influence a participant can have on a participatory process. From the perspective of urban planning, citizen participation is beginning to be described as co-creation when citizens’ roles become more prominent, presenting aspects of self-organisation, increased commitment and a sense of ownership of the process (Puerari et al., 2018). Recent research is exploring new methods of urban planning in which citizens, the municipality and private organisations co-create new planning rules (Bisschops & Beunen, 2019). However, co-creation along with co-production and participation, often used interchangeably, have become popular catchphrases and are considered as processes which are of virtue in themselves. Furthermore, while there is substantial research on these processes, the research conducted on the outcomes of enhanced participation remains rather limited (Voorberg et al., 2015). This highlights the ambiguity in terms of interpretation; is co-creation a methodology, a set of tools to enhance and drive a process, or a goal in itself? (Puerari et al., 2018). There have often been cases where participation, co-creation and co-production have been used decoratively, as a form of justification and validation of decisions already made (Armeni, 2016). In the provision of public spaces, co-creation/co-production may specifically involve housing (Brandsen & Helderman, 2012; Chatterton, 2016) and placemaking: “placemaking in public space implies engaging in the practice of urban planning and design beyond an expert culture. Such collaboration can be described as co-creation.” (Eggertsen Teder, 2019, p.290). As in participation, co-creation requires the sharing of decision-making powers, the creation of  joint knowledge and the assignation of abilities between communities, while urban professionals and local authorities should draw attention to the active involvement of community members. Furthermore, co-creation does not take place in a vacuum, but always occurs within socio- spatial contexts. This points to the objective of co-creation as a tool to influence locally relevant policy through innovation that is “place-based”. To conclude, co-creation can be perceived as a process that is both transdisciplinary in its application, and as a tool for achieving transdisciplinarity on a broader scale through a systematic integration in existing standard practices in urban planning, housing design and architecture. Despite the persisting ambiguity in its definition, co-creation processes can provide more inclusive platforms for revisiting and informing formal and informal knowledge on sustainable and affordable housing.

Created on 16-02-2022

Author: E.Roussou (ESR9), A.Panagidis (ESR8)

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Icon community-outcry-in-public-housing-refurbishments

Community outcry in public housing refurbishments

Posted on 03-06-2023

Since its establishment, the Republic of Cyprus has enacted housing policy geared towards the enabling of individual homeownership. Important plans included the large state housing estates in many cities across the island, built for people internally displaced by the 1974 division of the island. The houses and apartments have since been transferred to the residents’ own private ownership. Programmes for their rehabilitation have been put forward ever since, but only recently has a comprehensive policy been put together for a national plan to either demolish and rebuild, or refurbish the aging government-built estates. The plan named "Grant Scheme for Existing Multifamily Housing in Government Housing Estates for Displaced Persons" was prepared on the basis of the findings of the structural/seismic evaluation study of a total of 358 existing apartment buildings, accounting for 3,128 apartments in total. On the basis of this study and the structural problems of the apartment buildings, a preliminary decision was made to demolish 43 of them, taking into account social, economic and legal aspects, in order to enable the Scheme's immediate implementation. The total cost of implementing the 10-year Grant Scheme is estimated at a maximum of €130 million and will be financed exclusively from national funds. The Scheme provides for the development of open space within the Government Housing Estates themselves for the construction of new apartment buildings which will replace the ones being demolished. The first stage of the Scheme requires the decision of the eligible residents to participate in the Scheme and to receive a new apartment (with appropriate sponsorship and contribution), or to withdraw from the Scheme and receive a lump sum of the existing apartment and land value attributable to them. However, there has been a very strong backlash by the residents who have been living in these buildings under worsening conditions of disrepair during the past decades.  The most contentious issues have been the provision of rental subsidies and the provision of the lump sum received by those wishing to not participate in the Scheme. For those participating, until the new buildings are constructed, they will have to evacuate the existing buildings and seek rent in the private sector or use the subsidies as they wish while finding accommodation at a friend or a relative, for a period of 24 months and a sum determined by their eligibility status. The largest subsidy amount goes to 1st generation displaced persons and original beneficiaries of the apartments, who are also holders of title deeds. However, the subsidies of a one bedroom apartment being €400 per month, a two bedroom €600 per month and a three bedroom €700 per month are lower than average market prices. For the lump sum recipients, a one-bedroom apartment is valued at €30,000, a two-bedroom apartment at €40,000, and a three-bedroom apartment at €50,000. An example of a plot valued at €180,000 as stated in the Scheme, is divided by 9 homeowners, adding a value of €20,000 for each apartment. During a recent public hearing in Nicosia, many residents voiced their indignation to such a low amount, stating that it will be impossible to find any one-bedroom apartments in the private market sold at €50,000. During the public hearing, strong disagreements were also heard by people in buildings aimed for refurbishment. As the residents of the apartment buildings most often have low or very low incomes, they were unable to repair serious issues such as water penetration, mould and deteriorating structural elements for years. They had to wait for state maintenance workers to come to do the work, and according to the residents, did few repairs, hastily and without much effort. For those residents who spent the little money that they had on essential repairs themselves, it seemed unfair and illogical that they will be receiving subsidies to refurbish the buildings again after the work had been already carried out. Due to such serious shortcomings in truly understanding the above practicalities and the large scope of needs of the Government Housing Estates residents, the policy has been widely discussed in the local media.  Arguably, the lack of consultation with the residents of the housing estates before the preparation of the strategy for their rebuilding and refurbishment has been the largest mistake that the state planners could have done. Confronting perhaps one of the most sensitive housing matters in Cyprus, the top-down strategy that the Planning Department followed in preparing the above Scheme points to the serious inadequacies in the planning system and the failures of hegemonic urban governance institutions in general. This case study  is aligned with the “Design, planning and building” and “Community Participation” of the Re-Dwell project research areas. The government of Cyprus is evidently administering planning system which restricts community participatory processes and offers little transparency in the ways that decisions are made. In general, a real lack of community planning is evident and new housing policies such as the one examined in this case study do little to ensure the affordability or social sustainability of new social housing.

Author: A.Panagidis (ESR8)

Reflections

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