Katie Hill on the radio…
Last week Katie took part in a show on East Leeds FM http://www.elfm.co.uk about regeneration in East and South East Leeds, otherwise know as the EASEL project.
Drawing on her experiences of community consultation Katie joined a discussion with Adrian Sinclair of Heads Together http://www.headstogether.org/, Jonathan Lindh of LEDA http://www.leda.org.uk/, and Mike Dando of Yorkshire Planning Aid http://www.planningaid.rtpi.org.uk/ about consultation and some of the issues that people working in consultation for regeneration face.
Highlighting the difficulty of focussing consultation on the policy and planning stages of projects (when no tangible outcomes can be seen in the community), Katie made the point that consultation is much more meaningful when the impact can be seen, for example in the design of new buildings and services, and more importantly that it has to be engaging and accessible. Most consultation that happens around policy development is so abstract that the community can’t see any impact and they get frustrated and feel like they haven’t been listened to.
An example of a good consultation project was Erskine’s recent work for Leicester City Council on the New Parks Estate. Katie was out and about in New Parks over the winter, taking around the first stage of architects plans for a new community centre and library. She met many residents who had been involved a few months previously in defining what the plans should contain, and they were delighted to see that their comments had been responded to and that the things that they had asked for were there in the drawings. The impact of this round of consultation has led to radical redesign before the plans are submitted for planning permission shortly. This project has a strong foundation of community engagement which will continue over the next 18 months as the building goes up, and beyond with community involvement in the running of the new facility.
This is exactly the sort of engagement that Erskine would like to see more of.