A new era for housing? Why co-design is a critical tool for inclusive development

The way we design and build our cities has a profound impact on the lives of those who inhabit them. Yet, too often, the voices of local communities – those who will live, work and grow in these spaces – are sidelined in the decision-making process. Co-design offers a way to change that.

By giving communities real agency in shaping their neighbourhoods, it has the potential to create more inclusive, equitable and resilient places. But for co-design to move beyond rhetoric and into practice, architects, planners and policymakers need better tools, clearer guidance and a shared understanding of what meaningful participation looks like.

This month sees the launch of our Co-Design website, a repository of information, guidance, resources and tools, culminating from over two years of RIBA and UCL-funded research. The site is designed to help drive meaningful participation in co-design processes for participants across the sector – from architects to neighbourhood communities, and from local authorities to developers.

For us, engaging local people in the co-design of their neighbourhoods is critical in addressing the widespread inequalities that are compounded by the built environment. It is also a key factor in working towards ‘spatial justice’ – a term widely adopted to describe the intersection of health, gender, race and environmental injustices. In the context of Labour’s housing policy, and the associated discussion around planning reform, the value of co-design is even more critical if sustainable and healthy development is to be achieved.

With the government’s target to deliver 1.5 million new homes and a raft of new towns, councils face significant resourcing and skills challenges in strategic planning and design. The worst-case scenario, considering these targets, is that dense social housing will emerge with a lack of appropriate amenities and without the support of existing communities.

But what if a new era of housebuilding was accompanied by a commitment to placing communities at the centre of housing solutions?

As it stands, even with local authorities keen to improve how they carry out community engagement and private-sector commissioners looking to work with councils in more open and innovative ways, challenges remain. There is a gap to be bridged in the knowledge and guidance needed to turn these good intentions into genuinely inclusive and equitable outcomes.

Co-design has become an industry buzzword and, like many such terms in the ESG vocabulary, risks being corrupted

Crucially, co-design is more extensive than engagement in that it gives genuine agency to the user group being consulted at an informative point in the design process. Prior to the site launching, there were no formal guidelines or policies surrounding co-design, meaning the process was often misunderstood and under-resourced, with the mutual benefits lost on both sides.

When the terms of engagement with a user group are not made clear from the outset, several pitfalls can arise. Local people may feel gaslighted when agencies invite their input but then do not appear to take it on board. At the same time, local authorities may approach a project with the best intentions around community engagement but struggle to articulate the restrictions and barriers that prevent them from acting on the recommendations they have actively sought out.

This is one of the motivations that instigated our research and the development of the site. There was also the need to protect the term itself. Co-design has become an industry buzzword and, like many such terms in the ESG vocabulary, risks being corrupted through overinflated claims and its casual misuse in descriptions of more superficial public consultation and generic community engagement.

As well as offering constructive guidance and tools for co-design, we hope the new site can help local authorities, architects and commissioners better understand its value, objectives, challenges and responsibilities. Crucially, it also highlights the time commitment required for co-design to maximise its potential for empowering communities.

One ambition of the site is to create an accepted co-design benchmarking tool

Features of the site, such as the co-design checklist tool and assessment tool, ensure co-design processes are inclusive, rigorous and equitable, and go beyond the more common and ad-hoc local community engagement sessions. For usability, the research maps against the RIBA Plan of Work, conveying at what stage different co-design steps can be actioned.

The site also includes case studies, sharing examples of where communities have successfully been given real decision-making power, providing relevant learnings for others to apply to their own on-the-ground projects. This includes DSDHA’s collaboration with EDIT on the design of the youth space at Central Somers Town.

For sites like this to remain relevant to the industry, and a route to real change, we need others to utilise, provide feedback on and contribute to its content. The site already represents contributions from over 20 international collaborators but, as a resource that spans academia and practice, it is very much a live project that will, hopefully, evolve and expand with use.

One ambition of the site is to create an accepted co-design benchmarking tool. More important than this, however, is to get co-design into use more widely as a tangible way of creating a built environment that is more equitable and just – resulting in buildings that are better loved and more fit for purpose.

>> Also read: Is true co-creation even possible?

>> Also read: Community engagement and co-design: it’s our duty, not a luxury