From targeted participation to making it fun, the Urban Minded project shows what strategies and activities really work to involve people usually excluded from engagement processes.
“One of the pitfalls of citizen participation is that we tend to ask people what they want, and that is the wrong question,” says Yalda Pilehchian, an architect who has been leading citizen engagement activities for much of her career.
When questioned about what they’d like to change in their city, people tend to refer to features that they’re used to rather than imagine their dream scenario. It’s a form of self-censorship, crafted from a young age by the influence of social constructs and design of the urban environment.
For much of the history of formal city planning, this has shaped decisions and explains why we continue making the same design mistakes that fail to meet diverse needs.
By exposing the architects of cities to diverse perspectives, consultation can open doors to solutions that benefit varied and rarely heard demographic groups, such as migrants, the aging population, low-income earners, and women and girls. Enticing the information that we need from them is an artform, and even with the best will in the world, participation can go wrong.
Open meetings in municipal buildings are best avoided, for example. Yalda sees a lot of them on offer in Denmark, where architectural projects are obligated to undergo a public hearing. They tend to attract a default attendee – older, white, usually male, probably retired, affluent, educated, and confident. At no fault of their own, these crowds can be intimidating, preventing others from joining in. Obtaining only their input perpetuates a status quo. “It’s a good thing they participate, but it’s not representative.”
Changing Minds
The Urban Minded project ventured to present an alternative.
Specifically, it set out to define how public spaces could be designed in a way that teenage girls – one of the most invisible groups in our cities – would feel that they too belong in their city.
To succeed, the team behind the project – of which Yalda was a part – knew that they first had to learn about the girls’ experiences and perspectives of the city.
It’s about understanding how people use a space, what their needs are, and then as planners and designers it’s the art of curating all these into something that responds to that context.
They did so by consulting with 25 young women in Copenhagen and a further fifty 13-to-16-year-olds in Esbjerg, both cities in Denmark. Based on this, Urban Minded published a couple of helpful manuals and a design guide. The guide is permeated by the voices of young women in Esbjerg and suggests that spaces should be built to encourage movement, access, enjoyment, privacy, safety, and enable girls to participate in the range of activities that they love.
It is the result of seven months of consultation, during which Yalda and her colleagues led many successful participation activities. We have consolidated some of their strategies here to serve as a low-barrier access toolkit for innovative, empathetic, and effective engagement, even for practitioners who have never led participation exercises before. And best of all, they show that it can be easy and cheap to do well.
Know Your Audience
A facilitator’s work begins long before anyone steps into the room.
“I’ve been in situations where we thought that we have done well in communicating an event, and then you have it and there are just two people who show up – if you’re lucky!”
Yalda suggests that planners, architects, and relevant municipal departments must get better at reflecting on why people do not engage. It may be caused by confusing messages rather than a lack of effort.
“Sometimes we don’t have a clear idea of who we are asking and why,” she says. If the people posing the questions don’t fully understand the relevance of what they’re doing, engagement activities will miss opportunities at best and completely fail at worst. Step one is clarity – for project leaders and participants.
Targeted Participation
Next, to ensure the rage of voices we want are included, facilitators need to “be a little bit more targeted about who they want to talk to”.
Targeted participation is the practice of engaging a specific, closed group, giving room for unheard voices to speak up away from a crowd who they may find intimidating.
The more isolated, unheard, vulnerable, or unintegrated a group, the more necessary this can be.
In a respectful, non-judgemental session held in a safe space together with people who identify similarly, participants learn that they share experiences, helping to create a bond, building trust, and encouraging them to open up.
I usually try to create a very intimate space where they feel they can just speak and there are no wrong ideas.
Targeted participation has its critics: those who claim that “it is not democratic to involve a narrow user group”. Yalda’s response is straightforward: if targeted participation allows one more group to be involved than otherwise were, we’re already harvesting a better understanding of needs in the city.
That being said, “it is really not a universal law to do closed groups,” Yalda adds. Where possible, it can make sense to bring a range of people together, especially if it exposes dominant voices to other perspectives. “I think it is also important to mix different groups and facilitate conversations across these groups, as it creates empathy and broadens everyone’s world view and perspective.”
Good Timing
Public meetings are generally held in the early evening. Organisers assume that hosting activities after a typical workday enables most people to attend. It’s a flawed, gendered perspective.
“That’s when you have the highest burden of care work, so women end up not coming,” Yalda points out. And in case of any doubt, itdoes impact women disproportionately: the UN reports that, on average, women do more than two hours additional unpaid care work than men every day.
Gender mainstreaming goes a long way.
Diversifying the times of meetings may enable different audiences to attend – as can a change of location, or even format.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Yalda conducted citizen consultation exercises digitally to comply with isolation rules. “When we moved to an online space, we experienced that more women started participating.” Eliminating the need to travel reduces the demand on people’s time and finances, giving them more opportunities to balance attendance with their everyday responsibilities.
A Captive Audience
Where in-person meetings are the optimum, we can increase the likelihood of engagement by taking activities out of city hall and directly to those we want involved.
Urban Minded wanted to target school-aged girls, so that’s exactly where they went.
Involving people through institutions is one of the easiest ways, because you find them where they are.
Esbjerg municipality supported the project, so Urban Minded was met with cooperation by most of the public schools they approached. Although some busy teachers “could be gatekeepers” if they feared it would add to their already strained workloads – which is didn’t.
Such scenarios must be handled tactfully.
“I think that’s generally the thing about citizen participation,” Yalda explains. “You also need to develop a lot of personal skills, like how you talk to people, how you approach them, how you assure them that it’s not going to be more work for them.”
Be Playful
It was also important that the girls that Urban Minded wanted to speak to did not see participation as additional schoolwork.
“I think the headline is: make it fun.”
In facilitated workshops, the Urban Minded team got the girls to play games. “For example, they got given adjectives and different personalities, and they had to explain the city as this person.” Empathising the views of a tired old man or an energetic child enabled the girls to share observations they maybe didn’t want to own up to as themselves. “Every time they choose an adjective, we would start asking them to say a little bit more.”
On other days the participants were encouraged to create a collage of their dream city from images cut out of magazines and asked to explain what the colours they chose mean to them.
Or they were given a limited (fictional) budget and a catalogue of various items of different sizes and costs, like plants and statues, and asked what they’d “buy” for their ideal urban space. “That gave us an idea of what they prioritise,” Yalda explains.
A Little More Conversation
The activities are in some way a distraction, to get the girls thinking about their city without the influence of self-censorship. Each exercise teased out commonalities, pressures in the urban environment that impact the girls’ experiences and indicated what needed to change for them to feel welcome.
Even though the combination of methods is important, I still think the most important thing is the conversations you have with these young people.
From the beginning, Maya Shpiro, Henning Larsen’s Social Impact & Co-Creation Lead, would walk with the girls around Esbjerg and hold relaxed one-to-one interviews. As they strolled, Maya would ask their opinions on the urban spaces they saw, what they did and didn’t like, and why they may not make use of a location or facility. “You show that you are actually interested in them as a person. That creates a base relationship.”
That relationship is what the subsequent seven months was built upon.
Listen… Then Act
But the trust and conversation that citizens are willing to put in are only as good as what the recipient does with it.
“It was our task to translate that [information] into a physical space together with them,” Yalda explains. This physical act of co-creating a garden with 20 of the girls was an important step in showing local teenagers – those who participated, and others in Esbjerg – that they can influence their city and deserve spaces of their own.