wikiplanning: co-creation in urban planning and design
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WIKIPLANNING: CO-CREATION IN URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN
Diploma thesis Author: Peter TattersallSupervising professor: Kimmo Lapintie
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This thesis consists of three parts.
Part 1 examines a key set of problems relating to the expertise of the planner and the nature of planning as an activity. The purpose of part 1 is to explicate some of the important problems and questions relating to public participation in planning.
Part 2 consists of an exposition of co-creation and consideration of how co-creation might be applied to urban planning and design.
Part 3 presents experiments conducted with the “wikiplanning” participatory planning tool and discusses the implications of the method and the meaning of its results.
PART 1: THE PROBLEMS OF PLANNING
1.1 The problem with representative democracy1.� The problems with current participation methods: consultation vs. participation1.� The problem of the political nature of planning1.� The problem of the muddled nature of planning1.� The problem of tacit knowledge1.� The problem of taste vs. expertise1.� The problem of relevance systems
PART 2: CO-CREATION IN URBAN PLANNING AND DESIGN AND
�.1 What is co-creation?�.� Co-creation in practice: U.S. presidential elections�.� Co-creation in practice: Consensus-building in Wikipedia�.� The significance of co-creation to urban planning
PART 3: PRESENTATION AND CRITIQUE OF THE WIKIPLANNING METHOD
�.0 The wikiplanning method�.1 Case study 1: Alppila�.� Case study �: Roihuvuori�.� Case study �: Lasipalatsi �.� Case study �: WikiVermo�.� Observations and evaluation of the WikiVermo project�.� Future development�.� Conclusions�.8 Appendices
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Introduction
“In a society where tradition and custom are losing their hold, the only route to the establishing of authority is via democracy” Anthony Giddens 1998
“The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter”
Winston Churchill
Public participation in planning is a relatively new field. While in recent years it has been subject of much academic writing and debate, it is curious that the range of participatory methods that have actually been empirically tested remains quite small.
A positive development is the emergence of internet-based forums for interaction between planning professionals and lay stakeholders, which enable residents to give feedback regarding new planning proposals, or to evaluate the existing environment and share their own local knowledge through on-line discussion forums or maps.
Necessary as such forums are, there is a difference between the gathering and exchange of information and opinions on the one hand, and participation in the actual design process on the other. On the surface of it, it is ridiculous to propose that an activity demanding great professional skill should be even partially opened up to interference by amateurs. And yet due to the profound rise in education levels of the last few decades and the access to tools and information which the internet provides, a new form of production has emerged – co-creation – that questions the traditional role of the professions.
Co-creation refers to an emerging form of production in which the users of a product or service participate in its creation. Co-creation occurs when large numbers of people who have the means to communicate and collaborate regardless of their physical location form ad-hoc networks and begin to participate in common projects. The phenomena in question is linked to many names, such as commons-based peer production, web �.0, produsage; in this paper it will referred to as co-creation.
Co-creation is not a speculative scenario nor a theoretical construct, rather it is a phenomenon whose consequences in many fields are quite profound. For example, through co-creation the most extensive - and most used - encyclopedia in history has been created. Co-creation has enabled the election of the first black president in the USA, formed the most used server operating system in the world and at the time of writing, is causing much concern to the governments of Iran and China.
The purpose of this paper is to consider how co-creation might be applied to urban planning and design; not because of its appeal as a novel and trendy phenomena, but because co-
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creation may offer some partial solutions to some of the age-old problems of planning. Current participatory planning methods are becoming fast outdated, as rising education levels and steadily decreasing interest in representative democracy are leading to a situation where residents’ skills, articulacy and desire to influence their environment greatly outstrip the means of participation currently available to them. New, more profound means of participation will become increasingly necessary if the architectural and planning professions are to retain their legitimacy as overseers of the design of the built environment.
This thesis outlines a new participatory planning tool that attempts to apply some of the principles of co-creation to urban planning and design. The method, “wikiplanning”, has been empirically tested over �0 times in a wide variety of contexts, including real-life planning projects. In wikiplanning, lay people participate directly in the act of design of planning proposals – using miniature models - working alongside trained professionals. The resulting designs are subsequently interpreted into drawings which can be used to inform the planning process.
According to conventional wisdom, it is absurd to suggest that untrained lay residents can directly participate in the actual design of the built environment, for it takes years of training and work experience to be able act as a qualified planner. In spite of facile conventional wisdom, this paper aims to demonstrate that involving lay people in the urban design process can lead to meaningful results and a higher quality of feedback than is normally achieved through approaches where the public is allowed merely to comment on professionals’ designs. At best, approaches such as wikiplanning can help to prevent non-constructive conflict and dead-end opposition to planning projects.
This paper focuses on public participation in the design of urban spaces, i.e. the activity that traditionally occurs at the drawing board of the architect. Consideration of public participation in the wider planning process, including lay people’s opportunities for lobbying, the effects of purchase power and lifestyle choices, have been excluded from this paper for reasons of brevity and clarity. For the same reasons, this paper does not attempt to consider the roles of actors other than planning professionals in the formation of the built environment, such as developers, investors, politicians, lobby groups; significant as these are.
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PART 1
THE PROBLEMS OF PLANNING
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1.1 The problem with representative democracy
This thesis argues that a more democratic planning process can be potentially achieved through co-creation. It is therefore necessary to at least briefly explain why democracy is desirable in the field of urban planning and design.
Democratic government, both in theory and in practice, appears to offer the best quality of life for members of society compared with other forms of government (Dahl 1998). It ensures that the interests of any single group or individual gains are not given undue preference over the interest of others, and it protects the interests of minorities. Democracy is intertwined with a culture of negotiation, meaning democracies tend to use violence and suppression as a last resort. While violence is thankfully rare in the field of planning, the issue of the use of suppression is less clear-cut. The built environment has significant (albeit largely indeterminable) effects on the quality of life of its users, and to allow one group’s interests to disproportionately affect the design and regulation of our cities at the expense of other groups’ interests would be unethical.
In this thesis, particular attention is paid to a group of actors in the planning process that is often spuriously cast in the role of the neutral referee, rather than an interest group in its own right. The group in question is that of the planning and architectural profession, who exercise significant power in the built environment yet whose own interests and bias are rarely brought under examination.
Winston Churchill told us that democracy is the worst possible form of government, with the exception of all other forms of government tested so far. While we may agree with Churchill, it would be an error to assume that western representative democracy is the be-all, end-all solution to the question of governance. The term “democracy” has been used to describe many diverse forms of government through time, which in many cases scarcely resemble one another. Just as democracy has emerged and evolved into numerous different forms in different times and places, democracy will - and should - continue to evolve and develop in response to a changing social conditions. So where is democracy heading at the present time? And where should it be heading?
A notable trend in the development of modern democracies has been the increase in inclusiveness and a broadening of scope of protection. Short of lowering the minimun age of voting, representative democracy cannot become much more inclusive - the demands of Cromwellian parliamentarians, suffragettes and civil rights activists have been, in time, heeded. Yet while representative democracy may have reached its peak in terms of inclusiveness, it is is steady decline in terms of its popularity. Participation in elections has fallen steadily in Europe since the 19�0s. Political parties struggle to find candidates to stand for election. If the proportion of eligible voters that actually participate in elections is around �0%, the legitimacy of representative democracy a system and the legitimacy of the governments elected through it are questionable at the least. In Europe, there have been numerous state and EU-funded programs designed to counter the apparent “political apathy” of voters and to entice them back to the ballot boxes.
PART 1
THE PROBLEMS OF PLANNING
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However, even if election turnouts were to reach 100%, we might still argue that representative democracy is an inherently poor mode of participation. Representative democracy increases passivity: voting for a representative every four years is not an adequate way of expressing one’s views on, for example, the details of a planning proposal that may affect one’s life significantly. Representative democracy is inarticulate: politicians can guess as to the reasons why they are elected in or out of power, but there is never certainty on the matter. Representative democracy is slow to respond to societal changes: the reaction time of representative democracy is the same as the period of government, typically four years. Representative democracy is unintelligent and non-discursive as far as the voter is concerned; while debate and argumentation occur within administrative bodies, the voter role is non-argumentative: he or she has neither the opportunity nor obligation to justify his or views, or refine or withdraw them in light of new arguments.
Planning law has, in many western countries, recognised the need for direct participation (Kettunen �00�). However, the means and scope of direct participation are not explicitly defined by law. Does participation mean lobbying elected representatives or appointed professionals? Does it mean gathering and publishing data relating to planning projects? Or does it imply citizens’ direct power of decision over all aspects of planning? The demand for participatory measures in planning is new; the range of tried participatory planning methods is narrow and experiences gained from them often negative. This thesis attempts to identify a few of the key problems of participatory planning, and argues that participation based on co-creation may offer solutions - albeit partial and imperfect ones - to these problems.
Key points:
- Representative democracy is suffering from a crisis of legitimacy and efficacy
- Democracy has evolved through history; the current dominant form of representative
Election turnout in Finnish local elections since 1976
Education level of Finns aged 25 - 34
No further or higher educationAcheived further or higher education qualification
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democracy should be seen as an intermediate stage on the way to something better
- Planning law states a need for direct participation as an end; the means and scope are not defined by law. New methods should be explored through empirical experimentation
1.2 The problems with current participation methods: consultation vs. participation
Public participation in planning is no easy matter. The current situation was well summed up by a Helsinki planner, who, when asked about his views on participatory planning during a panel discussion said: “Participatory planning? We’ve tried it, and it doesn’t work. The public only ever gives criticism, never praise.”
The statement is interesting in two ways: firstly, the implication that participatory planning has been exhaustively “tried” is a fallacy. Even at a global scale, participatory planning is still a new phenomenon, and the number of participatory methods that have actually been tried is small. While participation in planning has been the subject of much theoretical debate in academic circles, there has been disproportionally little practical experimentation and development of new approaches to involving the lay public in the planning process. The means for participation in planning that are usually provided are based more on consultation (hearing) rather than participation (listening). In Finland, planning procedures typically make the smallest possible concession the participation requirement stipulated by law, by allowing stakeholders to submit their opinions at public meetings, on-line comment forums and lodge formal appeals against planning proposals through courts of law. Given that these existing procedures have been subjected to much criticism from many sides, and given the public and private sectors’ desire to avoid time consuming formal appeals, there is a clear need for experiments into new approaches to participation in planning.
The planner quoted at the start of this chapter also points out that the public’s reaction to planning proposals is usually negative; planning proposals are far more likely to be criticised and opposed than praised and embraced by lay stakeholders. Public consultation meetings are often tense affairs, where the planner has to deal with heated and blunt criticism from local residents, who often blankly oppose all changes to their environment, sometimes dealing out personal abuse and accusations to the planning authority’s staff for good measure. Planners, quite understandably, are reluctant to open up their work to inspection by people who seem to have little understanding of the matter in question and who seem inclined to resist - with minimal politeness - any changes to their own living environment.
Residents’ resistance to planning proposals is not necessarily due to the selfishness or ignorance of the lay public - although these play their part. Rather, resistance appears to be structural. The physical environment is taken as self-evident by the inhabitant: it forms a background and a context for everyday life. Any change to this context bears at the risk of an impairment in the quality of life itself (Lapintie �00�). The lay resident, if knowing nothing else about the design and production of the built environment, understands that planning is a slow, massive, complex and expert-dominated machine, against whose inertia the individual acting alone has little hope of exerting influence. Resistance is the natural choice of action for residents who know that there is little hope of negotiation with the massive and cumbersome
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machine that is the planning process.
Experience of public planning consultations affirms this: comments presented by a member of the public is typically met with downright rejection (on the grounds of “taking the wider view” or the “public interest”), or even worse, the comment or question is met with the planner’s killer phrase: “We will look into the matter”. With this reply, the resident’s concerns are sucked into the opaque depths of planning bureaucracy, like a sailor thrown into a stormy night sea: the resident’s issue may resurface several months later, but whether it will be alive or dead, will remain a mystery until that time. Stakeholders’ comments gathered during the planning process may “resurface” only in the final planning proposal, by which time the plan is often too refined and conclusive to be subjected to any changes, except if the plan breaches laws. Once a plan is in its later stages, it is easy to label any demands for alterations as “unreasonable”.
Not only is planning bureaucracy massive and non-responsive, it also works in mysterious ways. Planners’ and architects’ expertise is based to a significant extent of tacit knowledge, i.e. knowledge which cannot be easily verbally communicated or opened up to public scrutiny (Eraut �000). As will be discussed later, planners and architects employ both tacit and explicit knowledge in their work, and planning decisions based on even partly on tacit knowledge will tend to evade rational communication, which further makes genuine participation difficult. Rationality is perhaps the most important means to achieve influence available to the powerless (Flyvbjerg 1998), and the prominence of tacit knowledge in planning means the powerless are often stripped of their best weapon. Planners and laypeople do not have a common language with which to negotiate and reach understanding about the planning task in hand. Nor is there necessarily an understanding as to what the task in hand actually is, for different players have different frames of relevance for defining the problem. The issues of relevance systems and tacit knowledge will be examined in greater detail later.
Current modes of participation present the lay stakeholder with a choice: to resist the planning proposal outright and thus marginalise oneself from the process; or to remain in the process and thus accept the main features – and the agenda - of the planning proposal. A principle tenet of democracy is control of the agenda by the participants. The definition and framing of planning problems often determines their outcome; at its worst, participation can mean playing a game whose result has already been decided; the participant can merely hope to influence minor details.
The structural resistance to planning proposals might be reduced or changed if lay stakeholders are given a wider means of expressing their views and values than by mere opposition of predefined plans. A genuinely participative planning approach would allow citizens to make positive, constructive suggestions instead of only negative complaints; one approach to this aim is involving the the layperson in the creative design process itself.
Another tenet of democracy is the idea that participants should be given the opportunity to develop the insight necessary to make considered decisions that reflect his or her values. (Dahl 1998). This can mean providing general education or specific information on the issue being decided. Current forms of participation in planning do little to develop the insight of lay stakeholders to facilitate more enlightened negotiation of planning issues.
How can lay people develop meaningful insight into planning issues in a short period of time?
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How can they be helped to make constructive, normative contributions to the planning process? The second part of this thesis presents a planning tool which attempts to offer solutions to these problems.
Key points:
- Very few participatory planning methods have been actually tested
- Participation methods currently in use are based on consultation rather than actual participation
- Current planning procedures typically engender resistance and appeal
- Developing laypeople’s insight into planning problems is key to engendering enlightened negotiation and participation
- For participatory planning methods to be effective, they should allow the public make positive, constructive suggestions as well as complaints
1.3 The problem of the political nature of planning
In what way should the planning process be democratised? Modern democracies delegate significant amounts of power to experts, such as civil servants and professionals of various fields, who have the necessary knowledge and skill to solve problems related to their field: the experienced pilot flies us safely to our destination; the well-trained doctor helps to get better when we get ill. Why not then entrust the task of designing buildings or laying out cities to experts of that field, to architects and planners?
To compare the work of architects and planners to the work of doctors is to misunderstand the nature of planning. In any specific society, there often exists a reasonably wide - albeit neither perfect nor static - consensus as to what constitutes a healthy human body. The goal of medical practice in that society is to help the patient to keep their physique as close as possible to the commonly agreed ideal, taking into consideration the risks and costs of doing so. Unlike in the field of medicine, which in the West strives to be a scientific activity, there is no pre-existing consensus as to what the aim of planning is. The practice of science is a descriptive activity - it tells us how the world is now and how it has been in the past, and it can make good predictions as to how the world will probably work in the future. But science does not tell how the world should be; this is a moral matter, not a factual one. As Hume’s Law reminds us, no statement of value can be derived from a statement of fact. In other words, observation alone does cannot tell us how to conduct our business - to make decisions on how to live, we must qualify our choices with valuation systems. The production of a design proposal is a prescriptive activity. Each new building or urban plan is a statement by its designers about how the world should be, for each new building or urban plan will, for its part, determine how the world will be in the future. Planning is a matter of values as much as it is of expertise; if we are to accept democratic ideals, then planning tasks should be opened up to public scrutiny.
There are, historically speaking, numerous and often conflicting notions of what a “good society”
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entails. Because of this, modern democracies have parliaments where groups representing different ideologies strive to implement their notion of “good society” or “public interest”. At the heart of political debate is not dispute over empirical facts, but contention over values and their prioritization. To offer a stereotypical example, those on the political right believe that good society is one which the initiative and interests of individuals are allowed to flourish, while for those to the political left, a good society is one in which care and equality are emphasised. Parliamentary debate revolves around the realisation of these differing values in specific contexts.
The notion of the “good environment” is just as political a matter as the notion of “good society”. For in as far as we accept that the built environment influences the lives of its users (although determining causes and effects is difficult), the two concepts are inseparably intertwined. In questions of architecture and planning there exist ideological factions within the profession who endorse competing environmental ideologies; the ongoing attempts of modernists and post-modernists/historicists to discredit one another is perhaps the clearest instance of competing factions. In some cases, the factions manifest as formal associations such as the Congress for the New Urbanism and CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne). Such bodies resemble political parties, albeit lacking a formal “parliament” in which to debate.
The normative and political nature of planning means that, from a democratic point of view, it would be wrong to delegate planning decisions in their entirety to undemocratically chosen professionals. In state governments there is an attempt to delineate expertise form value judgements. Civil servants are supposed to represent expertise, by preparing the background material required for decision making and offering a narrowed-down set of options from which to choose. The role of elected politicians is to make value judgements based on the material presented to them. This division of roles is, however, highly theoretical, for in practice decisions are the result of negotiation and power struggles between politicians and officials, and in the framing and preparation of decisions officials exercise a significant amount of value judgement.
In political science, there is continual debate as to how power should be shared between politicians and civil servants. If we are to assume that the requirement for democracy should extend into the fields of architecture and planning, how should a balance be struck between expertise on the one hand and popular self-rule on the other?
Comprehensive-rationalism
A notable attempt to address the problem of the legitimacy of planning was the comprehensive-rationalism on the 19�0s, whose assumptions seem to persist in the attitudes of planners today, despite the fact that in academic circles such ideas appear to be very dated (Puustinen �00�). Comprehensive-rationalist planning was an attempt form a legitimate basis for land-use regulation by applying scientific methods to planning (Taylor 1998). Adherents to this ideology saw planning as a matter of finding solutions to problems. According to this view, the planning process would start by the planner identifying all of the problems relevant to the planning project in question. This would require the gathering of massive amounts of information, a feat that would be unrealistic in light of the limited resources of most planning agencies. Assuming this information has been collated, the planner would then proceed to generate a proposal that represents an optimal (i.e. the best possible) integration of all relevant viewpoints, be
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they technical and economical consideration or the private interests of stakeholders. The comprehensive-rationalist planner’s task was to generate a plan that was optimised for the “public interest”, usually defined on a utilitarian “greatest good for greatest number” basis.
This line of thought has been subsequently much criticised in theoretical circles (Nigel Taylor 1998), as it failed to properly take into account qualitative points of view such as residents’ subjective experiences and non-quantifiable concepts such as the “pleasantness” of a landscape or the “scariness” of a route. Comprehensive-rationalism attempted to ignore into non-existence the political nature of planning, an attempt that inevitably failed, just as many would say the socially dysfunctional housing areas built in the name of rationality have failed.
Habermasian communicative planning
The 1990s saw the emergence of a counter reaction to comprehensive-rationalist planning in the concept of collaborative planning (Richardson & Connelly �00�). Here, the Habermasian idea of communicative action is applied to urban planning with the intention of creating a planning process where consensus would be sought on planning issues through rational and considerate argumentation and listening. Collaborative planning was based on the presumption that stakeholders would enter discussions ready to forego their own private interests for the sake of reaching a consensus that reflects the best interests of all stakeholders collectively. This communicative approach places much emphasis on verbal communication as the means of reaching consensus, despite the fact that words are by themselves an inadequate means of negotiation about the qualities of physical space. Communicative planning has widely criticised on account of its idealism; Habermas’ notion of stakeholders entering discussions with an open and disinterested mind and genuine readiness to put group consensus before his or her own interests is an ideal to which real-life situations can rarely come close. The paradigm of communicative planning is nonetheless pertinent in that it aims to create forums for negotiation where stakeholders’ subjective interests and qualitative matters are brought into play as relevant and valid planning issues.
Habermasian planning theory emphasises consensus as an important aim in participatory planning. This view has been criticised because of its potential to distort the ensuing negotiations; in many cases contradictory interests simply cannot be mutually accommodated, and seeking unanimous agreement may distort the deliberation process by ignoring or foreclosing viewpoints which threaten the achievement of consensus. Yet conflicts need not be seen as failures – by making conflicts visible, they become possible to address (although not necessarily solve) and thus stakeholders can develop a balanced, realistic understanding of the situation, which can enrich the ensuing decision-making process. Rather than trying to solve conflicts, participatory planning process should instead seek to make conflicts visible and understood by stakeholders and decision-making entities alike.
A good participatory planning process is one which leads to a shared understanding and acceptance of the final results; stakeholders need not necessarily agree on the end result and feel it to be just, but it is valuable that they understand both how it was arrived at and how their own interests are represented in relation to the interests of others; in some cases, the worst-served interests may be subsequently compensated in some way or another. If and when it happens to emerge, consensus is a pleasant bonus, but it should not be strictly set as an aim.
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The comprehensive-rationalist ideology is far from dead as far as planning practice is concerned, for many planners still see planning as being a question of problems and solutions, where the supposedly politically neutral planner has to optimise different considerations to achieve a plan that best reflects the “public interest”. While planning is undeniably a question of synthesizing numerous considerations into a coherent whole (Puustinen �00�), it does not automatically follow that problems, solutions and values exist are discreet entities; for in practice, planning is a far more muddled issue than rationalists dare to recognise. If we are to acknowledge the importance of lay people’s subjective experience of the environment, how can this be brought into the planning process while simultaneously making use of the expertise of trained professionals? To answer this question we must first examine in more detail the nature of the activity of planning.
Key points:
- Planning is a normative, not descriptive activity
- There are numerous and often conflicting views as to what constitutes the “good environment”
- The value-bound aspects of planning should, if we accept democratic ideals, be subjected to public scrutiny
- Aiming for consensus can undermine the quality of deliberation. Participatory planning processes should aim to make conflicts visible and understood
1.4 The problem of the muddled nature of planning
Muddling through
Rationalist planning attempted a leap over Hume’s guillotine, which tells us that in order to proceed from empirical observation to a design proposal, we must justify our prescriptive statements (or designs) with valuation systems. One might suggest that the spuriously depoliticised comprehensive-rationalism be amended by bringing laypeople’s values and subjective wishes into the planning process, for example by examining the subjective values of stakeholders alongside other information gathered at the outset of the planning process. The generated design proposal could then be evaluated in terms of how well it realises the pre-stated values.
The problem with such a view is that it assumes that values, problems and solutions can be meaningfully distinguished from one another. it may be possible to verbalise some value statements, it is often impossible to place conflicting values into a hierarchy. It is also not possible to identify (or indeed verbalize) all value statements that may be relevant to the design project in question, for we become aware of our values only when confronted with situations which require a trade-off between different values. For example, in the theoretical situation of having to decide how much funding to devote to cancer treatment in compared to the funding of opera performances, our relative values regarding physical well-being and cultural well-
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being would become visible. Making abstract proclamations of our values regarding physical well-being and cultural well-being without a context would have little meaning.
Therefore the idea that one should select the design proposal that best optimises one’s values (even if consensus were achieved on these) is false, for in practice the best we can do is is select the proposal with the best combination of values. As Charles Lindblom tells us in his “The Science of Muddling Through”, “We choose among values and among policies at one and the same time” (Lindblom 19�9).
A concrete example of this would be the task of designing a new park. Residents may predefine various values which they wish to be realised in the design for the new park, such as “closeness to nature” and “good lighting to give a sense of safety”. These values carry little substance in themselves, for the designer’s understanding of the physical consequences of these values may differ from that of the other stakeholders in the design project. By generating a design for the park, it becomes possible to evaluate whether or not the park is sufficiently “close to nature” and whether the lighting is adequate to engender a sense of security. The requirement for good lighting may be in conflict with the requirement for the “naturalness” of the park, and it is only be reviewing multiple alternative designs that one can form an opinion of what a suitable trade-off between the two might be. Unlike the simplified example of the park, real-life design situations require trade-offs and integrations of far more than just two considerations.
According to Lindblom, it is not necessary to justify our choices, because values (and choices regarding trade-offs between different values), are often beyond argumentative justification. Lindblom asserts that the only necessary justification for a policy is that it enjoys consensus; it is not necessary to demand that a policy (or design) is the optimal integration of predefined values. After all, the only justification for pre-stated values is that they enjoy consensus, according to Lindblom.
Wicked problems
This “muddling through” view of policy making was later echoed and elaborated both by Donald A. Schön in his “The Reflective Practitioner” (198�) and in the concept of Rittel and Webber’s (198�) concept of the “wicked problem”. The wicked problem is a concept used in used in social planning to describe a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. Because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems.
Challenging the long-persisting rationalist idea that problems may be identified at the outset of a planning project, the notion of the wicked problem entails that meaning that the problem is not understood until a provisional solution has been formulated. This reiterates Lindblom’s idea that values only become visible through being expressed in a context.
As Mäntysalo and Nyman (�00�) describe: “Designs are like searchlights in a dark, strange territory. While they elucidate the unknown territory, they also direct our gaze towards a particular direction. Without designing, we would see nothing, but even through designing we do not see the whole landscape; we see the landscape as the design presents it. For this reason, one should not be satisfied with one searchlight, but rather try to attain an understanding of the
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world in the light of several searchlights.”
Sub-decisions in the design process can often only be justified in terms of previous design decisions; a street is placed here because we have previously decided to place a square there; and yet the square might just as well have been located elsewhere. Attempts towards rational justification of a design will succeed only in making fragmentary “branches” of rationality, where decisions can be justified in terms of other previous decisions. While self-consistent and integral as far as the design is concerned, such branches of rationality will not necessarily be connected to the trunk or roots of the problem.
When a design proposal is presented to lay residents for appraisal, the planner can easily fend off criticism of individual details by claiming that the design as a whole demands the detail in question to be just so, even if the planner agrees that the detail in question is a comprised solution. The planners position is secure, for in light of the limited resources of any planning office, it would be unreasonable to have to redesign the whole proposal in response to criticism of an individual detail.
Both the notions of muddling through and wicked problems would appear to point to the need to generate multiple proposals for each planning project. The democratic implication of this would be to involve lay participants in the choosing of the option to be executed. However, to involve lay stakeholders into the planning process as merely as judges is problematic for two reasons: firstly, it ignores the democratic requirement for participants to develop insight into the matter being decided; secondly, it allows for an imbalance of power between those involved in the act of design and those acting as judges, for if excluded from the process of design itself, lay people are excluded from influencing some of the most important decisions.
The implications of muddling through and wicked problems for planning are perhaps best summed up by Nigel Taylor (1998): “The whole point of personal or social choice in many situations is not to implement a given set of values in the light of perceived facts, but rather to define, and sometimes deliberately reshape, values - and hence the identity - of the individual community that is engaged in the process of choosing.”
The consequence for public participation in planning is that laypeople should be involved in the actual act of design so as to have the opportunity to gain meaningful insight, develop considered value-positions and to influence the micro-level sub-decisions of the planning project. The more directly involved the stakeholders are in the design process, the greater their insight into the problem at hand will be and therefore a greater quality of democratic engagement will ensue. Yet involving lay stakeholders in the design process is difficult, due to the way in which planners and designers work, with much of their expertise being based on tacit knowledge. This are will be examined in the following section.
Key points: - The process of design is not simply a matter of executing predefined values and desires, but creating a balance between different values and desires. This is in itself a value-laden and political activity
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- Values cannot be defined without a context; public participation in planning should allow lay stakeholders to develop their own considered value-position through direct involvement in the design process
- Planning “problems” are never solved, they are merely addressed
- Planning problems are only understood through proposing solutions
1.5 The problem of tacit knowledge
Involving lay stakeholders in the design process is difficult because, for among other reasons, in producing the visual manifestation of the design, i.e. drawing as models, planning professionals have at their disposal rhetorical tools that are not immediately accessible to laypeople.
As long as value decisions are made through the selection of non-verbal, i.e. visually communicated proposals, there is an imbalance of power in the discourse between planners and stakeholders, because the lay participants are largely compelled to communicate on the terms of the planner. The area of expertise of architects and planners is not merely the design of built environments, but also (and arguably, primarily) the communication of ideas of the built environment through visual means, namely drawings and models. While Lindblom’s statement, “We choose among values and among policies at one and the same time” (Lindblom 19�9, �9�), is pertinent, we could perhaps more accurately say that: “we choose among values, among policies, and and among graphic presentation techniques at one and the same time”. We cannot reliably distinguish between the three.
It would therefore seem necessary to open up the representation of planning substance and decisions - the making of drawings, maps, and charts - to public participation. This is no easy task, as the skills required for the act of design are based on tacit knowledge. As discussed previously, part of architects’ and planners expertise partly “scientific”, in as much as there are aspects of their expertise that are explicit, and thus subjectable to verbal argumentation and negotiation. But architects’ and planners expertise is to a significant extent “artistic”, in that tacit knowledge or skill - that which is partly or wholly inexplicable to others - plays a major role in the design of the built environment (here we will use the definition of tacit knowledge used in the field of knowledge management, which should not be confused with the earlier - yet different - definition offered by Polyani).
Tacit knowledge is often considered more valuable than explicit knowledge, as it represents an ability to respond appropriately to real-life, contextual problems. Tacit knowledge is gained through contextual experience: it is an understanding of how to solve problems involving numerous variable factors that may appear, in real-life situations, in combinations never seen before. While tacit knowledge is often linked to empirical experience, it is by no means infallible. Tacit knowledge is tied up to intuition, personal convictions - notions of how things should be done, which may well be both unfounded and detrimental to the task in hand. Individuals’ tacit knowledge may be based on such deep-founded convictions that we never consider - or dare - to subject them to a reality test. Tacit knowledge may manifest as tacit wisdom or as tacit stupidity.
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Explicit planning information, such as dimensional norms, environment health and safety norms, or requirements stated by landowners or politicians are rarely so extensive as to entirely determine the nature of the design in its entirety. By convention, those considerations that are beyond verbal argumentation, such as matters of aesthetics and the “atmosphere” of a place, are usually left to the designer to determine. Not only are some aspects of the built environment left to the tacit skill of the designer, but the synthesis of all various considerations - both tacit and explicit - into a coherent design proposal is in itself an act that defies verbal justification. Generating a synthesis requires the designer to make numerous subjective and non-explicable design decisions; for the trade-offs that must be made between multiple non-quantifiable values are difficult to subject to rational argumentation. So while the design problem incorporates explicit information, a design for an environment inevitably embodies values that are the result of the designer’s tacit skill. Tacit knowledge is by definition not explicable to outsiders; tacit knowledge is thus inherently non-democratic knowledge, as it is difficult, if not impossible to subject it to public and open scrutiny.
An important aspect of planners’ and architects’ tacit skill is the ability to understand the spatial qualities of a design represented in drawings. Few lay people are able to look at a urban plan and form a mental image of walking through that environment. This aspect of the planner’s skill is inaccessible to the layperson, but the problem can be partly addressed by providing laypeople with adequate depictions of the future environment (perspective drawings, ground-level walk-throughs etc.) rather than abstract representations (site plans, zoning maps) for the basis of evaluation.
The fact that planners’ and architects knowledge is based largely on tacit knowledge is problematic, for personal and subjective values are indistinguishably intertwined with widely accepted and validated professional skill. In other words, in planning, matters of personal taste are inseparable from matters of valid expertise. If planning expertise unavoidably incorporates taste judgements, can matters of taste be brought into democratic regulation? Is it possible to reach democratic consensus on matters of subjective preference? Or are some taste judgements more valid than others?
Key points:
- By controlling the means of representation of planning substance and decisions, planners have significant influence over the values to be realised through the plan
- In planning professionals’ expertise, inexplicable tacit skill is inseperably intertwined with explicit knowledge, thus making planning decisions difficult to subject to democratic scrutiny
- Tacit knowledge incorporates both personal taste judgements and validifiable expertise
- The planner’s tacit skill includes the ability to visualize environments based on abstract representations. By providing depictions, as opposed to abstract representations of planned environments, laypeople can better evaluate plans before they are built
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1.6 The problem of taste vs. expertise
There are differing views on what constitutes a “good environment”. Perhaps a more widely discussed issue is what constitutes “good art”. only has to visit an art gallery with any group of people to see that people’s reactions to works of art differ. Should we assume that the definition of the good environment is a purely subjective and personal matter - a question of taste, that is beyond dispute? Or is there is a plausible case for a universalist definition of the good environment? And if the evaluation of our environment is a matter of taste, are all tastes equal?
Arto Haapala (�009) offers three possible understandings of the term “taste”. The first is the essentialist view, wherein taste is an internal ability or sensitivity to observe the aesthetic qualities of aesthetically valuable objects. According to such a view, taste is a sense of beauty; and beauty is not in the eye of the beholder, rather it is an inherent quality that resides within certain objects. Haapala’s second understanding is of taste as a personal preference, which is beyond dispute: De gustibus non est disputandum. I might like chocolate but dislike licorice, but my taste judgements reflect my personal preferences, rather than the inherent qualities of the objects of my judgement.
The third understanding given by Haapala is that taste is a form of expertise that can be achieved through education in the history and theory of art and aesthetic phenomena. Taste is the ability to notice various subtle features in the artwork and to thus discern what time period and stylistic tendency, to highly specific a level, it belongs. Participation in critical discourse and in reflection of the various responses to a given work of art over time, common and universal evaluation criteria become established. When such criteria are established and stable, there is less room for statements of personal taste, for a canon of “classic” works of art acts a common benchmark for the evaluation of new works. In other words, there exists a social process by which a common set of trans-subjective criteria - a supposedly universal taste - arises, through which we can make evaluations that reach above and beyond personal taste.
Architecture and planning have their own canon of classics; there is little dispute as to who were the five most important architects of the �0th century, and if we want to know what a good building or good urban plan looks like, we need only to open an architectural history book to see which works have been elevated to the category of classics. The existence of canons of classics is the result of a process of selection that goes beyond the personal judgements of individuals, but this selection process is, however, far from representative or democratic. Relatively few of us have the resources to directly participate in debates of art or architecture criticism, leaving cultural critics and practitioners much power to determine what cultural works pass into the canon of classic works.
For a better understanding of the processes by which classics are selected for inclusion into the canon of “good” cultural works, it is useful to examine Pierre Bourdieu’s studies into the social function of taste.
Bourdieu and taste as a means for social arbitration
In his Distinction (Bourdieu 198�), sociologist Pierre Bourdieu asserts that judgements of taste
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are used as tools for the regulation and maintenance of social structures. Taste is used by social groups to delineate themselves from other groups, and as a means by which people can attempt to elevate themselves from one social group to another.
Bourdieu’s distinction theory is based on empirical research conducted in France during the 19�0s. The theory tells us that displaying one’s taste acts as a tool for the exertion of power; it is a means by which a group or individual can distinguish themselves from other groups, often with the aim of asserting their relative superiority. One of the fundamental ways of asserting superiority through taste - the mechanism of distinction - occurs by choosing one’s aesthetic values so as to show one’s distance from economic necessity. This does not necessarily occur in the literal economic terms described by Thorsten Veblen, but in terms of the commodification of objects of taste. Bourdieu shows how members of the upper classes (both in the economic and cultural senses) consume items that allow them to display the actualisation of Kant’s “disinterested gaze”, wherein an object is viewed without imposing on it expectations of functionality, moral virtue or meaning. In Bourdieu’s view, by employing the detached gaze, the viewer is able to display to his peers his lack of concern for material need.
This pure, detached gaze (whose objects Kant called “free beauties”) contrasts with the mode of viewing used by members of the lower classes, who, as Bourdieu’s interviews seem to prove, always seek meaning and functionality from artworks, and qualify their evaluation of a work of art with respect to a proposed purpose.
This definition of two contrasting modes of aesthetic experience are corroborated not only by statements made by Bourdieu’s interviewees, but is also visible in the differences between “high” and “low” art. “Low” art rejects all types of formal experimentation that distances the spectator from being able to identify with the world being represented in the artwork. In contrast, “high” art is defined by its refusal of facile involvement and vulgar enjoyment, and thus it relishes in formal experimentation. While the working class takes interest in the things signified by a work of art (e.g. a fruit bowl, a person) and seeks from the artwork a continuation of life through representation, and thus an affirmation of his or her sense of reality, the cultural elite concerns itself with the sign itself (e.g. the technique of the painter, the language used by the author) and is not concerned with whether or not the artwork offers a believable representation of real life. The relevance to architecture is clear, and is witnessed by questionnaires conducted regarding lay people’s architectural taste: the lower classes want easy, enjoyable architecture, where a house is recognizable as a house. The aesthetic elite does not seek such semiotic functionality from architecture, but instead it seeks opportunity for sublimation; a good house is one that evades or challenges conventional notions of what a house is.
Bourdieu takes pains to point out that Kant’s assertion of the sublime, non-conceptual aesthetic experience as superior to a commodifying one is a moral argument, not a factual one. Kant presents these two forms of aesthetic experience as a way to delineate social groups from one another; the civilised from the barbarian. Kant tells us that the capacity for sublimation (i.e. the ability to cease conceptualisation) is the “definition of the human man”, and that “Taste that requires and added amount of charm and emotion for its delight.. not to speak of of adopting this as the measure of its approval, has not yet emerged from barbarism” (cited in Bourdieu 198�). Kant’s aesthetics is a normative one. His Critique of Judgement is written in the imperative, and offers no justification for the delineation of the “civilised” from the
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“barbarian”. It would be spurious to accept Kant’s evaluation and classification of his fellow humans uncritically; the pursuit of sublimeness in art or architecture should seen in its context as being a attempt at social regulation.
Bourdieu would agree with Haapala third notion of taste in that there appears to exist a trans-subjective taste, which is widely regarded as objective. While our aesthetic judgements may be freely chosen in some aspects of life, we nonetheless tend to defer to and respect what we see as “official” or legitimate taste, that has been defined and then consecrated - in the form of “classics” or certain evaluation criteria - by a particular segment of society. The legitimacy of the consecrated taste is however questionable; it is defined by a relatively small segment of society, whose taste is formed through successive negation of the working classes’ taste.
In the absence of a convincing essentialist argument for a notion of good taste, and in the absence of a moral functionalist argument for the existence of a taste that serves the population better than others, any claim for an objectively good taste would have to base its authority on democracy. Democratic accommodation of the tastes of all sectors of society is difficult, as the very nature of taste is its opposition to and distinction from other group’s tastes; Bourdieu’s view seems to lead to a pessimistic conclusion: that consensus will not and cannot be found on matters of taste.
What are the consequences of Bourdieusian theory for architecture and planning? Firstly, it tells us that architectural and planning expertise are bound to social processes which inherently act to deny the mainstream populous of the realisation of their taste. This reminds us of the importance of seeking to build consensus on questions of the “good environment” through consultation that reaches beyond the boundaries of the architectural and planning professions. While Bourdieu is pessimistic about the possibility of ever reaching consensus, we may nonetheless consider how the built environment can be designed to simultaneously serve a plurality of tastes (as proposed by Rowe and Koetter (19�8) in their Collage City), and whether or not a utilitarian approach should be adopted with the hope of best serving the tastes of the largest part of the relevant population.
Key points:
- The essentialist approach to evaluating works of architecture and planning conflicts with empirical evidence - The strong social constructionist view is also difficult to maintain
- The valuation of architecture and planning is linked to both the objective physical qualities of the work and social processes surrounding it
- The tacit skill of the professional designer is not only value-bound, but it also tends to defy lay people’s values rather than affirm them
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1.7 The problem of relevance systems
A problem with any planning process involving more than one person is that of incongruence between different actors’ meaning systems or relevance systems. We earlier established that planning is a value-bound and political activity; planning disputes are usually disputes over values, not facts or information .
Not only do different actors have different values and different notions of what constitute the “good environment”, but different people’s ways of understanding the environment and planning problems are based on different frames of reference. Our values, interests, previous experiences (including education) and social position form “lenses” which act as a framework for understanding and evaluating our environment.
For example, the taxi driver may perceive the city as a network of traffic lanes, the architect may see the city as a web of geometric spaces and spacial sequences; an old-age pensioner may perceive the urban environment as a set of experiences and past memories of friends, neighbours and park benches. These different frames of reference (or relevance systems) are not necessarily different points of view on the same matter (the city), but rather different points of view on different matters.
A concrete example is the study into the construction of a motorway bypass (Sewell 19��), in which the different agents involved with the project, ranging from various professionals to activists and local inhabitants, were asked to list the professions whose expertise they saw as relevant to the planning question in hand. The professional planners saw the planning task as a matter for planners, geographers and economists. Simultaneously, the activists saw the same matter as one to which the expertise of ecologists, biologists and landscape architects was most relevant. The incongruence between different relevance systems may lead to an actors’ comments and desires seeming absurd and irrelevant to other players (Lapintie �00�). While we have differing frames of relevance, they are not necessarily static, as Patsy Healey tells us: “We may shift our ideas, learn from each other, adapt to each other, ‘act in the world’ together. Systems of meaning or frames of reference shift and evolve in response to such encounters. But it can never be possible to construct a stable consensus around ‘how we see things’, merely a temporary accommodation of different, and differently adapting, perceptions” (Healey 199�).
What kinds of relevance systems are at play in planning and architecture? Each individual has his or her own very personal relevance system, but we might identify three main categories (building on Jauhiainen �00� and Bäcklund �00�): the concrete, physical space of the environment; the social world of the environment; and thirdly mental space, consisting of the mental conceptions and memories of the environment.
Concrete physical space is perhaps the domain of the planner and architect, whose plans, maps and depictions deal with the placing of physical matter into space. The social sphere is to a small extent taken into account in the planning process, insofar as the planner may consider how the physical environment affects the behaviour of its users. The mental dimension of the environment is hardly included in the planning process - if anything it is spurned by adherents
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to rationalist ideology, to whom this mental and symbolic sphere is absurd and irrational.
Planners and architects rely on abstract representations of the environment to communicate their work. While the simplification offered by maps, charts and drawings makes the design process possible, the same simplification affects the framing of planning matters. As Jauhiainen (�00�) tells us, “Through abstraction, the everyday, lived urban environment is squeezed into urban maps, coordinates in geographical information systems, and strategic development visions. It is often a question of the planner’s unfulfilled illusion of the mapping out of an objective situation.”
Incongruence between relevance systems is not necessarily a source of disagreement, and accommodating different frames of reference is not necessarily a matter of compromise - for as different player’s interests pertain to different things, it may be that interests do not clash as they do not even meet on the same “battleground”. Indeed, conflicts are perhaps more likely when two parties have a similar frame of reference but different values on the subject. By making differences in values and relevance systems visible, appropriate “compensation” can be administered for those interests that the planning proposal does not sufficiently serve.
How can the gap between the various life-worlds and the system world by bridged? According to Aija Staffans (�00�) “citizen-experts” act as interpreters between the lived, experienced environment and the the political-administrative environment of the planning agencies. Yet the scarcity and limited resources of such super-citizens does not make them a sustainable option. Can a system of planning be created that engages the life-world experiences of residents as well as with the abstractions of the system world? How can the lived experiences of lay stakeholders form the basis of the design process?
Key points:
- Different stakeholders have different values and different relevance systems; these are not different viewpoints on the same matter, but different viewpoints on different matters - For planning to be able to account for numerous interests, it should be able to work on several relevance systems. Abstract representation of the environment is not a way to achieve neutrality of relevance. - Participatory planning methods should allow for communication on the terms of as many relevance systems as possible
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PART �
CO-CREATION IN URBAN PLANNING
AND DESIGN
�9
PART �
CO-CREATION IN URBAN PLANNING
AND DESIGN
2.1 What is co-creation?
Co-creation refers to a mode of production where the users of a service or product participate in the creation of the content of that service or product. It has numerous synonyms, such as co-production, commons-based peer production, produsage, prosumerism etc. The phenomena of co-creation was initially associated primarily with open-source software production, most notably the Linux operating system. Linux gained fame as a serious competitor to the Windows and Mac operating systems, even though it was created by an ad-hoc network of private individuals, none of whom were paid (directly) for their work in creating the software. In the early �000s, the principles of open-source development were taken up in the creation of what came to be known as web �.0: websites whose content was at least partially provided by its users. Such applications include on-line services and products including social networking sites, citizen-journalist news sites, and most renownedly, the open encyclopedia, Wikpedia.
Web �.0 and co-creation have become a fashionable phenomenon, with its evangelists (such as Yochai Benkler (�00�), Charles Leadbeater (�008) and Clay Shirky (�008)) proclaiming that web �.0 will give rise to profoundly new social structures and processes. Improving access to information and creating new, more responsive forms of participation will lead, its exponents say, to the radical democratisation of not only knowledge formation and use but also potentially of decision making and administration.
Co-creation should be seen in its wider context of certain societal changes. Since the 19�0’s, levels of education in developed countries has risen significantly. In Finland in 19��, half of the population had a further education qualification (university or vocational high school degree). In �00�, the corresponding number was 8�%. This is reflected in a doubling in the average number of years of formal schooling in European countries since the 19�0s. The ever-better skilled population has access to ever better production and creation tools. The publication of a magazine �� years ago entailed laborious typewriting, cutting and pasting of images and texts; the question of distribution was a problem in its own right. Today, the means and skills necessary to create a website or write a blog entry are accessible to the majority of citizens of developed countries, not the minority. This means that professional-standard productions of various kinds can be easily created by non-professionals (what Leadbeater calls the professional-amateur, or pro-am revolution) in their spare time.
Co-creation can be seen as a response to these trends; an ever-better educated population is becoming ever-less interested with the means of participation open to them. Yet falling election turnouts should not be automatically interpreted as indicating that citizens are becoming more passive. The rise of web �.0 seems to indicate a rise in willingness to engage in communal and at least partly altruistic projects. For co-creation projects offer something that – as developed economies become ever-more service-centred - is increasingly rarely found in the world of work. As our jobs become increasingly removed from primary production by many layers of administration and bureaucracy, we long for activities that allow us to express ourselves, do something that we feel to be useful and meaningful, and to see the results of our work.
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2.2 Co-creation in practice: U.S. presidential elections
The �008 U.S.A. presidential elections provide an interesting case of successful engagement with a wide public, using a form of co-creation. Obama’s opponents, McCain and Clinton, looked for two things from the electorate: money and votes. Money was sought from a relatively small number of wealthy supporters through the candidates hosting fund-raising dinners and events for people that already supported the candidate in question. The money raised was then used for campaigning, organised by a central campaign office, in order to win more votes.
Obama’s campaign employed a different approach. Obama’s campaign sought something more than money and votes; the campaign offered opportunities for active involvement. The Obama campaign made use of social media to organise local support groups to organise campaigning activities and raise campaign funds. While McCain and Clinton received large sums of money from few donors, Obama’s campaign received small sums of money from a large number of donors. Of the $��0 million raised, 9�% consisted of donations under $100. The Obama campaign had 1 official website, 1� official social websites, and over �00 facebook groups; these sites formed the forums through which 1.� million active supporters independently organised their own decentralised, local campaigning activities. Obama’s campaign offered voters the opportunity to become active in the campaign, rather than contenting oneself with merely voting.
While the U.S. presidential elections are a different issue to urban planning, the question they raise is an interesting one: can planning be outsourced to some degree to the lay public, so that their contribution forms a valuable asset, not an obstacle?
2.3 Co-creation in practice: Consensus-building in Wikipedia
Wikipedia is an open, on-line encyclopedia. Wikipedia allows anybody to write new articles, edit existing ones, and cancel (revert) changes made by other people to articles. Wikis rely on “soft protection” to ensure the quality of their content; it is easy to commit vandalism on a wiki site, but it is also very easy to correct damage. The openness of wikis has raised suspicion as to the reliability of its content, yet several tests have shown that Wikipedia is virtually as trustworthy as a conventional encyclopedia (Bruns �008).
The true value of Wikipedia should not be evaluated in terms of the reliability of its articles, but more in that in the way it changes patterns of use and distribution of knowledge (Vadén �00�, Hintikka �00�). Wikipedia has over 1� million articles (�.� million in English), compared with the half million published in english in the Encyclopedia Britannica. While Encyclopedia Britannica is easily found in libraries around the world, the ease of access of Wikipedia makes it for many the starting point in any investigation. Wikipedia has, however, been criticised on account of its systematic bias in favour of popular culture and recent events, which for better or worse, is a reminder of how co-creation projects can closely reflect their contemporary discourse.
While the intention of Wikipedia’s founders was and is to create a high quality encyclopedia available to anybody in the world (albeit limited to those with an internet connection), the process
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After an article is started, it can be edited by any Wikipedia user. If no-one contests the last edit, this version of the article becomes the new consensus. If the edit is contested, the contesters can edit either edit the article further, revert it to an earlier form, or discuss the matter on the discussion page and try to reach a solution through argumentation. The process by which consensus is reached on Wikipedia articles is interesting in that verbal argumentation is the secondary, not primary mode by which a common view is reached.
The primary mode of negotiation in Wikipedia is the act of writing, editing and re-editing, which, when performed with a reasonable degree of frequency, emerges in a consensus - in kind - between those involved in the editing process. At it best, Wikipedia represents a non-partisan, non-confrontational way of reaching consensus. While in party politics and architectural competitions rely are based on selecting the best policy from numerous competing ones, Wikipedia is based on the integration of different views. If one disagrees with the content of a Wikipedia article and wishes to edit it into a better form, the act of editing an existing article requires one to understand the consensus achieved up to that point; one must integrate one’s own ideas with the ideas of others. For this reason, the wiki process would seem to ancourage a politics of empathy rather than one of opposition. At its worst, Wikipedia is a battleground for conflicting views, and in the cases if controversial themes (such as George W. Bush) the article is locked by Wikipedia staff and barred from further editing.
2.4 The significance of co-creation to urban planning
It will become untenable in coming years for planning authorities to continue with current processes of public consultation. As the public becomes ever more keen to influence their environment, and as they become ever better equipped to do so thanks to the strong rise in education levels, current forms of public consultation in planning will be seen to be inadequate. While the lay public will increasingly demand better argumentation and justification for planning
The consensus-building process of wikipedia; emphasis is on comprimise, and the emerging consensus is not static
by which Wikipedia is formed is in itself a new and intriguing way of amalgamating different views without the use of third-party referees. The process of formation and development of Wikipedia articles is encapsulated in the flow diagram below:
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projects, the capacity of planners to offer acceptable argumentation will not rise, because of the inherent difficulty in explicating planning problems. While on the one hand the public will require better argumentation, and on the other hand architects and planners will have difficulty in convincing the public that decisions made on the basis of tacit knowledge are valid.
The issue is troublesome, but is conflict inevitable? Conflict is hard to avoid if planners choose to adhere to current practices and attitudes despite the fact that the social context of planning is changing. Can planners make use of lay stakeholders’ abilities, so that residents can make a positive contribution to planning? Can co-creation be adopted in some form to planning to result in a higher quality of participation, where enthusiasm and constructive engagement are the dominant features of participation, as opposed to opposition?
If the potential benefit of applying co-creation to the design of the built environment is the meaningful participation of lay stakeholders and the emergence of a built environment that reflects their values and wishes as well as possible, what kind of contributions should lay people be allowed to make?
In his Wealth of Networks (�00�), Yochai Benkler introduces the concept of the ”micro-contribution” to describe the small contributions made by numerous agents in co-creation projects. Benkler suggests that in successful co-creation projects, tasks are ”granulised” into discreet and clearly defined tasks which can be taken up by any interested actor or group of actors; granulisation keeps the tasks and the project as a whole manageable. For example, Wikipedia articles are in themselves discreet ”grains”, which can be created by a single actor or through iterative edits by multiple actors. Other examples of granulated tasks include segments of software code or security patches; youtube videos; buildings or geographical areas in Second Life or other on-line virtual worlds.
The implication of Benkler’s granulisation is that the co-creation project should be have predetermined structure or format within whose constraints participants add content without necessarily interfering with content created by other participants. In the case of wikipedia, an article represents a granule which may be created through the micro-contribution of a single person or through micro-contributions and negotiation between numerous individuals. An important benefit of the limiting the impact of individual players is that it prevents the views and values of any one player from disproportionally influencing the end result, in favour of allowing the end result to emerge from roughly equal input from many different players.
If lay people are to be brought into the process of the design of the built environment, should tasks be granulised as Benkler suggests? One way to granulise the task of urban design might be to divide the area to be planned into small parcels of land, assembled around a pre-determined street network. Different actors would then be allowed to design or influence the design of one of these parcels. A precedent case for co-creation in the built environment are the virtual environments constructed in Second Life or other virtual worlds, as well as many real-life single-family house areas, where the builders of each individual plot is allowed some degree of freedom to determine the qualities of the house to be built.
While the geographical/physical granulisation of the task of urban design has been tested and its potential understood, it is problematic in that it denies micro-contributors the opportunity to influence the designation of granules itself, i.e. the way that the design task is broken down
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into parcels. In other words, the builder of their own house may choose the colour of their walls, but cannot influence the layout of the street network. In this respect, geographical-physical granulisation is plebiscitic, in that major decisions are made before the public involvement commences. In the case of Wikipedia this is not a problem, as it is natural that encyclopedia articles exist as discreet atomised entries, and Wikipedia contributors and editors can negotiate about the merging and splitting of articles – in other words, granules can be continuously re-delineated. But in order to allow a large number of lay people to influence an urban design, they should be given the opportunity to make design gestures that affect the design at all physical levels (e.g. street network, building density of the area in general) rather than being restricted to influencing the qualities of just a small area within the whole (e.g. building density and height of one plot or sub-area). As discussed later in this paper, the wikiplanning method granulises the design process temporally, i.e. by limiting the time that any one individual can spend on a design task.
The relevance of Wikipedia to urban design is limited in the respect that Wikipedia aims to collate pre-existing, descriptive knowledge into one place. Urban design is a matter of making normative proposals for development; while the reliability and accuracy of Wikipedia has been a matter of interest to its users (and opponents), reliability and accuracy are not relevant concepts as far as urban design is concerned, and the question of the ”quality” of urban designs is a highly ambiguous area which has been touched upon in the first part of this paper.
An important feature of co-creation projects is their largely non-hierarchical administration, meaning that decisions are often made through peer-to-peer negotiation between micro-contributors - for example Wikipedia contributors discussing entries between themselves - avoiding the need for a central coordinator who oversees the project, a role which would carry certain risks as far as democracy is concerned.
Key aspects of co-creation that may benefit urban planning and design:
- Direct stakeholder-to-stakeholder negotiation can reduce need for centralised adjudication - Co-creation can facilitate the amalgamation of different viewpoints and building of shared understandings, without necessarily requiring verbal communication - Limitation of each individual’s input into ”micro-contributions” helps avoid disproportionate influence by any one stakeholder
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PART 3
PRESENTATION ANDCRITIQUE OF THE
WIKIPLANNING METHOD
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PART 3
PRESENTATION ANDCRITIQUE OF THE
WIKIPLANNING METHOD
3.0 The wikiplanning method
This section is contains a simultaneous exposition and critique of a planning tool, ”wikiplanning”, that I have been developing since �00� in an attempt to address the issues and problems outlined in the first section of this thesis. Wikiplanning is a live workshop method, in which up to �0 lay participants are involved directly in the formulation of planning proposals through model-building. The method has been empirically tested over �0 times in a range of contexts. The wikiplanning method seeks solutions to the aforementioned problems by looking to co-creation.
Wikipedia, and the process by which is is built and maintained, offers an interesting model for urban design and planning. Applied to the design of environments, Wikipedia’s mode of production offers a way of integrating numerous different viewpoints and interests without necessarily having to recourse to verbal argumentation, which forecloses non-conceptual, non-explicable matters from the consensus-building process.
Wikiplanning is an attempt to apply the concepts and principles of co-creation to urban planning to result in a planning tool to lead to designs that represent the “public interest” without having to rely on refereeing by one of the interest groups – i.e. planning professionals - whose neutrality in planning issues is questionable.
The wikiplanning method has been developed as an off-line, live process, although the eventual intention is to consider how a similar process might be conducted on-line to allow for a larger number of participants. At the time of writing, the method has been over �0 times in various contexts and in numerous permutations. Participants have included residents’ associations, professional planners, local politicians and election candidates, festival-goers, NGOs, as well as school, undergraduate and doctoral students.
Through experimenting with different approaches, a “finalised” method has been arrived at which is outlined below, although the method presented will continue to evolve in future development. The development of the method has raised at least as many questions as it has answered, and more experimentation is necessary. Most wikiplanning sessions conducted were not conducted in the context of a “real” planning project, and more testing is needed in real-life contexts, as the high emotional intensity of real planning situations where much is at stake forms a useful acid test for the method.
Wikiplanning in action: the method has been tried over 30 times in a range of contexts
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Process
The method is simple; several “design stations”, typically numbering three to six, are placed around a room. Depending on the design tasks in hand, the design stations may consist of a site plan or partial site model to which changes are made by moving or adding components. The participants are divided into small groups of up to five persons, such that there are as many groups as there are design stations. The participants are then allowed approximately 10 minutes to make alterations to a model at one of the design stations by manipulating or adding wooden blocks, lego bricks, and a range of other materials. After that time has elapsed, each group in turn presents their work and explains the alterations they have made. Then, each groups moves on to the next design station, where they make further changes to the model, using the previous group’s finishing state as their starting point. This process of editing previous groups’ edits is repeated until every group has worked at each of the design stations. Discussion is kept to a minimum until the latter stages of the workshop, as too much discussion can lead to conversation (and disputes) about small details at the expense of consideration of the wider picture.
A plan for part of Helsinki’s Hernesaari was created by a group of 12 laypeople in less than two hours, with minimal help form professionals. Above: site plan. Below: central square.
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The process results in models, or design proposals, to which each group has made at least a small contribution. In theory, each individual will have had the opportunity to express a) his or her values and desires regarding the design task in question, and b) his or her values and desires regarding the integration of the values and desires of all participants into the design proposals. We will later consider to what extent this actually occurs.
After the workshop the models are photographed, and the photograph is then “drawn up” by an architect to result in a visual interpretation of the model in which the architect applies - to one extent or another – his or her own professional insight and personal preferences. The drawings can be used as the basis of further discussion between the lay participants and planning
This plan, also for Helsinki’s Hernesaari was designed by a mixed group of professionals from fields related to urban planning and land use regulation.
Improvements to an imaginary high-rise suburb: to what extent is the cred-ibility of a desgin due to the way it is presented?
�8
professionals; seeing their design represented using established professionals’ techniques and mannerisms, lay participants can develop an understanding of the consequences of their proposal, and thus learn more about their own preferences and dispositions and how to express them. Correspondingly, the architect can use the drawings to try develop an understanding and empathy for what the lay participants are driving at. The drawn-up representations should be seen as tools for communication, not as conclusive results in themselves.
3.1 Case study 1: Alppila
In the spring of �00�, I was approached by the residents’ association of the Alppila urban district of Helsinki. The active members of the association (numbering approximately six individuals) were dissatisfied with the safety and general pleasantness of Alppila’s main square, known to locals as, among other things, Kuuskulma (”Six Corners”). The traffic arrangement in the square have been widely criticised as unsafe and confusing by car-users, as the separation of trams lines from car lanes is not always clear. Also, pedestrians and inhabitants have bemoaned the speed with which cars drive through the square and the perceived run-down visual appearance of the square, at whose centre is a cluster of recycling bins. The residents’ association wanted to propose improvements to the square in cooperation with as wide a group of local inhabitants as possible, with the hope of gathering enough local support to be able to pressure the city authorities into implementing the changes.
In agreement with the residents’ association, I started the consultation process by delivering �00 questionnaires to households surrounding the central square. In addition to conventional questions, the questionnaire form included a map of the square in its current form, and inhabitants were encouraged to draw their own proposals for the development of the square During the course of 8 weeks, �0 questionnaires were returned, of which over �0 had either writing or drawing on the map indicating the inhabitants’ ideas. Contradicting conventional wisdom, the proposals drawn by the local residents exhibited not only an ability to read and understand the plan drawing of the square, but also to draw serious and viable proposals for alterations. Several of the drawn proposals suggested the closing of a stretch of road to through traffic and re-directing it to a widened tram lane. This would enable the formation of a large pedestrian square directly adjoining four local businesses which draw many people to
�9
Loca
l res
iden
ts’ d
raw
n an
d w
rit-
ten
resp
onse
s: m
any
sugg
este
d cl
osin
g pa
rt of
Por
voon
katu
stre
et
to c
ars,
som
ethi
ng th
e tra
ffic
plan
ner h
eld
feas
ible
�0
the square: a popular local bar-café, a kiosk, a grocers and a restaurant. The closing of this section of road would require the relocating of about 100m of tram tracks and would result in four fewer car parking spaces in the area – all of which could be relocated by changing the parking arrangements of a nearby street to allow diagonal parking.
As questionnaires were returned (to a box in the entrance to a local shop), I drew proposals for the development of Kuuskulma square. The proposals were published on a blog, and inhabitants were invited to comment on the proposals. During the eight weeks of the project, six proposals were drawn and published on the blog, where comments were received on the proposals. Many comments resisted changes to the square, citing the possibility of increased noise pollution from the square’s restaurant and bar if their terraces are extended during warmer months. Also, many comments indicated a fear of the number of car parking spaces being diminished. Notable in the blog was the aggressive tone adopted by people writing anonymous comments, who in venomous terms criticised ”green hippies” for threatening the rights of car users. One commenter even alleged that the whole project was initiated by the local bar who was seeking to expand their terrace into the square.
In addition to the questionnaires, an open wikiplanning workshop was held at a local festival during the time of the project, and a closed wikiplanning session was held for members of Helsinki’s planning committee and members of the public. The latter event was held in the bar adjoining the square, so that the place being designed was directly visible to the participants of the workshop. After briefing, the three local politicians (all members of Helsinki’s planning board) were given 10 minutes to make alterations to a model of the square as it currently exists. After this time, a group selected from the audience (of about �0 people) was allowed 10 minutes to make their own proposals and to alter the proposal generated by the politicians. Finally, the politicians had a further 10 minutes of modelling time. Although briefed as a model-making event and not a discussion, with the aim of giving the politicians to display and hone their group-working abilities, their interaction was nonetheless characterised by long speeches and interruptions.
The final design, in which the north-eastern part of the square was to be closed to though-traffic and the central area of the square would contain a number of raised planting beds, was presented to the relevant authorities While the authorities felt the proposed traffic arrangements
�1
1. 2.
3. 4.
5. 6.
Designs for the square were generated iteratively as feedback was received via the blog, paper ques-tionnaires and meetings
��
to be reasonable and desirable, the cost of re-surfacing the square and moving part of the tram tracks is beyond the financial means available for the following five years.
3.2 Case study 2: Roihuvuori
A wikiplanning workshop was organised as part of a larger set of consultation activities intended to involve local residents in the design of a park to be constructed on a piece of land in the centre of the Roihuvuori suburb of Helsinki.
A veteran of public participation in architecture, architect Heikki Kukkonen, was commissioned by the city authorities to organise a process of public involvement in the design of the park. Heikki Kukkonen organised a series of walks, discussions and workshops for inhabitants of various ages. In addition to these, I was asked to organise a wikiplanning workshop for the design of the park. In the workshop, in which participated slightly less than �0 local residents of various ages, there were four design stations. At two of the stations their were 1:100 models of the park in its current state. The other two design stations involved a story-telling exercise using images and text. At design stations three and four, a long strip of paper was placed on the table, with a time-line of a day in the year �01�, starting at �:00am and ending �� hours later. The task at station three was to use the provided images (cut from magazines) as well as text to tell a story of a good day in the park in the year �01�. The task at the fourth station was to use images and text to create a story of a bad day in the park in the year �01�. The collage exercise seemed to be a succesful way of provoking thought about the kind of use of the future park, as opposed to specific activities, which were the focus of the two models.
The task of designing the park involved, to a large extent, consideration of the types of activities and facilities that the future park should offer, rather than the placing on new large-scale physical objects on the site. Ideas proposed seemed to reflect the interests those participating in the workshop, with teenagers proposing such facilities as e.g. climbing frames and skate ramps, and older adults proposing ponds and benches.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this workshop was the introduction of lego figures which were used to represent demographic groups or viewpoints that were not necessarily represented by the workshop’s participants themselves. Each lego figure (at scale 1:�0) held a sign with their name, age, occupation/status and a short statement of their wishes regarding the development of the park. The figures were placed on a table in the middle of the space at the beginning of the workshop, and participants were asked to place the figures in the models to show which part or aspect of the future park the figure in question may most appreciate. The object of this exercise was two-fold – firstly, to help participants consider viewpoints and needs other than their own, and secondly, to make visible whose wishes the participants wanted to cater for and whose wishes were not deemed relevant or appropriate. The somewhat harrowing result was that the figures representing alcoholics (who in real life are currently the primary users of the park) were left on the central table, while a participant offered the explanation that ”alcoholics would be welcome in the future park if they were to behave well, but they never do”. While the lego figure does not solve any problems, it made participants choices starkly visible. It is possible that such use of fictional figures may make participants embarrassed by the one-sidedness of their own viewpoints and thus make concessions to others, but this was not so in the case in question.
��
Lego figures were used to represent groups whose interests were not represented by the participants present at the workshop
The proposals that emerged by the end of the workshop were notable for the feasibility of the transit routes within the park. The network of routes proposed by the lay participants were practicable to the extent that they were carried through to the proposal drawn by architect Heikki Kukkonen as a synthesis of all of the public consultation conducted relating to the park. As local residents know which places they typically move between, it is easy for them to propose routes that reflect their requirements well. When the required routes of a larger range of people are combined and synthesised (as happens in wikiplanning workshops) the result is a network of routes that is highly practical. In this sense, one could claim that some kind of collective intelligence occurs in wikiplanning regarding route design.
3.3 Case study 3: Lasipalatsi
I received a commission from Lasipalatsin Mediakeskus Oy to organise a way to gather ideas for the development of the square that lies between the Helsinki’s Lasipalatsi building and the former coach station. On the ”Night of the Arts” in Helsinki in august �009, two 1:�0 scale models of the Lasipalatsi square were placed in the square and the general public was invited to model their ideas using plasticine, lego, wooden blocks, cardboard and other modelling materials. One of the two models was used to gather positive ideas for the future of the square, while the other was used to gather negative ideas, i.e. the public’s vision of the the least desirable development of the square The models were open to the public from � pm. to 9 pm.
Lasipalatsi’s square is currently administered by the properties department of the City of Helsinki. The current urban plan allows for over �000 m� of subterranean space to be constructed below the square. Lasipalatsi Mediakeskus Oy wanted to find ideas for both the long term development and use of the square as well as temporary and short term uses until possible building work on the subterranean spaces begins. Current rent agreements allow the two bar terraces in the square to remain in place until �01�. Aside from structures relating to the possible underground spaces to be possibly built, it is unlikely that significant and permanent spatial changes will be made to the square, and for this reason the scope of
��
Upp
er s
trip:
a g
ood
day
in th
e pa
rk in
the
year
201
5Lo
wer
stri
p: a
bad
day
in th
e pa
rk in
the
year
201
5
��
Above: one of the two models after the workshop. Right: The final design, drawn by architect Heikki Kuk-konen, in which the results of the whole consultation process were taken into account
��
public consultation was directed more towards ideation of functions rather than the design of physical space.
During the course of the evening, an estimated �00 people actively participated in the model-making, with countless others observing with various degrees of attention. The range of ideas gathered was broad (see insert) and while many of the ideas received are wild and often impracticable. However, through examination of the ideas as a whole, it is nonetheless possible to interpret certain underlying themes which may be said to represent the ”message” of the workshop. Identifying underlying themes is naturally a subjective matter, and a more rigorous approach would be to iteratively re-present these themes back to the participants (ideally in the form of a design) for evaluation.
An apparently recurring theme was the desire for varied cultural activities (as opposed to commercial ones). Another dominant theme was the call for activities that allow for the public to assume an ”active” role as opposed to a role as passive of observers of pre-determined, pre-created spectacles. This was exemplified by the ideas for a ”self-service barbecue area” and ”a climbing frame for adults and children”. In other words, there seemed to be a desire for activities that the conventional commerce-dominated town centre does not permit or encourage, where members of the public may assume a different role to that of the consumer of either commercial or cultural products and services.
Mixed-reality experiment
The workshop incorporated an experiment into using mixed reality in the design and ideation of the urban environment, wherein real-time images of the models were overlayed onto moving images of the actual square using bluescreen (or ”chrome-key”) technique. A video camera was placed on the roof of the Bio Rex cinema adjoining the square, and video cameras were positioned in the corresponding location in the two 1:�0 models. The models of the existing environment were painted blue, so that when the images of the models and the image of the actual square were overlayed, the blue base of the 1:�0 could be digitally edited out. The resulting image intends to show the elements placed into the models by the public as if they were life-sized elements in the actual square. A video of this can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_-VkmRVcnU. During the course of the evening it became clear that the post-it notes and signs placed in the square by the public cluttered the resulting image.
The courtyard of Lasipalatsi is centrally located and has much po-tential to offer a new type of public space in Helsinki
��
The original intention of the mixed-reality experiment was to project the overlaid image in real-time onto the large white wall of the cinema that borders the square, so that the public would be able to see themselves ”walking around” in the sqare as designed by themselves. However, for technical reasons it was not possible at that time to use real-time images of the square, and ambient light would have made the outdoor projection onto the wall difficult to see.
Video stills of the bluescreen experiment
�8
Laboratory online
In addition to the 1:�0 (which were on display for a week after the actual workshop), a web-based forum for ideation was set up (http://kaupunkilaboratorio.lasipalatsi.fi) with the aim of gathering ideas from a wider base of stakeholders. The forum was an experiment in using visual communication (alongside verbal communication) in giving a voice to lay stakeholders. In the on-line forum, the public was encouraged to upload or link photos which in one way or another convey something of their desires regarding the future of the Lasipalatsi square. Users of the forum had the opportunity to place the photos on a graph with a time-scale from the present moment to the year �01� along its horizontal axis, and the desirability – whether positive or negative – on the vertical axis. It was possible for users to write comments on their own photos to explain why they felt the photograph to be relevant to Lasipalatsi’s square, and it was also possible to add comments to other peoples’ photographs.
The original intention for the forum was to be a wiki, where any user could move other people’s images on the graph to a position which they feel to be more suitable, and through a ”revert” button subsequent users of the forum could return the graph to an earlier version in the case of inappropriate use or vandalism. Due to constraints on resources, the ”revert” function, that is essential to the functioning of Wikipedia, was not realised and thus any user was free to move the photographs around unrestrainedly. As feared, this led one particular user to dominate the forum by uploading large numbers of photos (many of his own artworks) and arranging all photographs on the graph to form visual patterns.
�9
The
“Urb
an L
abor
ator
y” w
as a
n on
-line
exp
erim
ent i
n ga
ther
ing
norm
ativ
e fe
edba
ck o
n th
e bu
ilt e
nviro
nmen
t usi
ng im
ages
�0
3.4 Case study: WikiVermo
In the autumn of �009, the planning department of the city of Espoo commissioned a series of three wikiplanning workshops with the aim of giving local inhabitants the opportunity to voice their views and wishes at the beginning of the planning of a green/brownfield area of land. The site, approximately �0 hectares in area, lies between one of Espoo’s urban centres, Leppävaara, and the municipal border with Helsinki. The site is owned by three separate landowners, of which one initially suggested organising wikiplanning workshops to the planning authority.
A reference group of 1� local residents was recruited through an article and advertisement in the local newspaper. During September and October �009, three wikiplanning workshops were held, at two week intervals, in a meeting room at the local library. As well as the facilitator (myself) the planner responsible for the area in question was present at each session. In addition, the head of the planning authority attended the first workshop.
The residents were given the task of forming their own proposal for the area’s development. Participants were asked to focus on the factors which most directly contribute to the “pleasantness” of the area, while technical considerations – including the locating of parking spaces – were to be left to the subsequent stages of the planning process. Participants were told that the underlying intention of the planning project in general was to design an urban area consisting primarily of housing, but comprising also some office space and a kindergarten. However, participants were not given any guidelines regarding the density of the future development. Participants were told from the outset that their design would not be implemented as such, but that ideas and features of the results of the workshops may be applied in the further planning work as and if appropriate.
A proposal had been drawn up by a Swedish architectural office in the previous year; this proposal had been criticised by various sources on account of its perceived rigidity, monotony and inadequate attention to light traffic routes. The Swedish office’s proposal formed a continual point of reference and comparison throughout the WikiVermo workshops.
Vermo is a currenlt disused area near one of Espoo’s main centres, Leppävaara. When built, the area will house over 2000 inhabitants.
�1
What happened?
Four design stations were used at each workshop, with four participants working on each design station at one time. At the start of the first workshop, the participants were introduced to the task and told about the planning process and the role of the WikiVermo workshops within it.
The facilitator (ath author of this paper) then conducted a “Three Minute Education in Urban Design” which is described later in this paper. Next, before dividing the participants into groups of four, the participants were given the following “warm up” task: Each participant was given a square of cardboard, measuring �0 x �0cm, on which they were asked to design an urban block using 1:�00 wooden blocks. The only criteria stipulated was that the urban block should be one where the participant would like to live themselves. The next stage was to form groups of two, whose task was then to present their designs to one another, explaining the reasons behind their choices, after which the pairs were asked to make alterations to the urban blocks so as to result in designs which were satisfactory in the eyes of both participants. Then, all urban block designs (numbering 1� in total) were brought to one of the four design stations, where they were later to be gradually assembled to form a proposal for the whole area.
After the warming exercise, the group was split up at random into sub-groups of four participants each. Each sub-group was assigned to one of the design stations.The ensuing process and results are displayed and explained on the following pages.
The architectural office Nyréns Arkitektkontor had designed a proposal for the area, of which this im-age shows an earlier but similar version.
��
1st workshop (17.9.2009, 5 - 7.30pm)
Each participant was given a �0 x�0cm square of cardboard on which to design an urban block in which they would like to live. Then, participants formed pairs and were asked to explain their work to their partner. The pair was then asked to work together to redesign both urban block to result in designs in which both participants would like to live. These urban blocks were then broght to design station 1, and were subsequently assembled into a pro-posal for the whole Vermo area.
The task of station � was to make improvements to a 1:�00 model of the design generated by the Swedish architects’ office.
At station #�, the task was to design a “good” perimeter block yard using a range of 1:100 blocks.
The task at station � was to make detrimental alterations to a second 1:�00 model of the design generated by the Swedish architects’ office. The aim of this station was to investigate the participants’ views of the least desirable outcome for the Vermo area.
After the the first workshop, the coordinator photographed the models and drew up parts of them, offering two possible interpretations of each view. These drawings were published on a blog, where the public were invited to comment of the drawings.
The models created during the workshops were on display at the local library for the
duration of the project. The workshops’ facilitator (the author of this paper), was
available for discussion for three after-noons per week.
Mak
e de
trim
enta
l al
tera
tions
to th
e S
wed
ish
offic
e’s
desi
gn (1
:�00
)
Gen
erat
e a
good
pe
rimet
er b
lock
and
ya
rd (1
:100
)
Mak
e im
prov
e-m
ents
to th
e S
wed
-is
h of
fice’
s de
sign
(1
:�00
)
Gen
erat
e a
good
de
sign
for t
he w
hole
ar
ea (1
:�00
)
��
Mak
e de
trim
enta
l al
tera
tions
to th
e S
wed
ish
offic
e’s
desi
gn (1
:�00
)
Gen
erat
e a
good
pe
rimet
er b
lock
and
ya
rd (1
:100
)
Mak
e im
prov
e-m
ents
to th
e S
wed
-is
h of
fice’
s de
sign
(1
:�00
)
Gen
erat
e a
good
de
sign
for t
he w
hole
ar
ea (1
:�00
)
1st w
orks
hop
��
“Pub
” “P
ub”
“Sho
p”
“Und
ergr
ound
sk
iing
track
”“C
ars”
“Stre
am
unde
rgro
und”
“Driv
e-th
roug
h st
reet
s”
“Car
s”
“Nig
ht-
club
”“S
choo
l”
“Poi
ntle
ss
no-m
ans-
land
(id
eal f
or b
oozi
ng)”
“Asp
halt”
“Illu
min
ated
sig
ns”
“Nee
dle
exch
ange
”“T
all w
all t
o th
e so
uth
that
cre
ates
sha
dow
s”
“Par
king
spa
ces”
“Kin
derg
arte
n”
Part
icip
ants
’ ide
as o
f wha
t the
y do
n’t w
ant
��
Sket
ches
dra
wn
on th
e ba
sis
of th
e fir
st w
orks
hop
��
Sket
ches
dra
wn
on th
e ba
sis
of th
e fir
st w
orks
hop
��
Sket
ches
dra
wn
on th
e ba
sis
of th
e fir
st w
orks
hop
�8
2nd workshop (6.10.2009, 5 - 7.30pm)
The task at stations 1 and � was to continue working on the 1:�00 models, starting from the state they were in at the end of the first workshop.
The task at station � was to continue working on the 1:100 perimeter block model, whose available building area was increased. The participants were charged with the additional new task of placing �0 car parking spaces in the yard at ground level.
A new model was introduced at station �, a 1:�00 design that the workshop facilitator had created after the first workshop. This design was a synthesis of aspects of the designs gen-erated during the first workshop.
After the �nd workshop the facilitator made some alterations to the model at station �. These alterations were partly minor, such as the tidying-up and straightening-out of urban blocks, although a more significant alteration was made in that three high-rise point-blocks were added to one urban block. The intention of the added towers was to provoke participants to take a position on the integration of high-rise buildings in the area to be built, as this theme has not been addressed in much depth after the first workshop.
Also, the facilitator made significant changes to the model at station �, adding high-rise point-blocks to several urban blocks.
After making these changes, the models were photographed and drawn up for the partici-pants to comment on at the thrid and final workshop.
�9
Mak
e im
prov
emen
ts
to th
e sy
nthe
sis
de-
sign
form
ed a
fter t
he
prev
ious
wor
ksho
p (1
:�00
)
Mak
e im
prov
emen
ts
to th
e pr
evio
us d
esig
n (u
sabl
e ar
ea e
xpan
d-ed
, car
par
king
spa
ces
adde
d) (1
:100
)
Mak
e im
prov
emen
ts
to th
e pr
evio
us d
e-si
gn (1
:�00
)
Mak
e im
prov
emen
ts
to th
e pr
evio
us d
e-si
gn (1
:�00
)
2nd
wor
ksho
p
�0
“Bor
ing/
Dul
l”“N
o ca
rs, p
leas
e”“M
ore
com
mon
re
crea
tion
area
s”
“Bor
ing/
Dul
l”
“Rem
ove
thes
e w
alls
[fr
om th
e so
uth
and
east
sid
es o
f the
are
a]”
“The
se w
alls
are
repe
llent
”
“Eig
ht s
imila
r ur
ban
bloc
ks:
unpl
easa
nt”
Prov
isio
nal p
ropo
sal A
, dra
wn
afte
r 2nd
wor
ksho
p
�1
“Loo
ks li
ke a
pr
ison
yar
d”“M
ore
com
mon
re
crea
tion
area
s”
“Rem
ove
thes
e w
alls
[fr
om th
e so
uth
and
east
sid
es o
f the
are
a]”
“[The
re s
houl
d be
] ped
estri
an
rout
es o
n al
l si
des”
No
cars
, pl
ease
“Mon
oton
ous
urba
n bl
ocks
”
“No
cars
, ple
ase”
“Nic
e ur
ban
bloc
k, b
ut th
is
side
sho
uld
be
curv
ed”
“Mor
e cu
rvin
ess!
”
“[The
re s
houl
d be
] ga
rden
ing
allo
t-m
ents
”
“Rep
elle
nt”
“The
urb
an b
lock
s in
the
sout
hern
ha
lf of
the
are
need
mor
e ch
ar-
acte
rfuln
ess
(as
in th
e no
rther
n ha
lf”
Prov
isio
nal p
ropo
sal B
, dra
wn
afte
r 2nd
wor
ksho
p
��
3rd workshop (22.10.2009, 5 - 7.30pm)
At the final workshop, the drawings generated after the second workshop (including perspec-tives of different places in the designs) were displayed to the participants next to their cor-responding models. Participants were encouraged to make both alterations to the physical models and to place pasting written notes (on post-it notes) on the relevant drawings (see follwing two pages).
At station �, a new task was introduced: a Repertory Grid questionnaire which is eplained on page �8. The idea of this task was to enable participants to take position on the aesthetics of the buildings to be built in the area.
For unknown reasons, the number of participants at the final workshop was only nine, so station 1 was excluded from the process.
��
Mak
e im
prov
emen
ts
to th
e pr
evio
us d
e-si
gn (1
:�00
)
Eva
luat
e th
e ph
o-to
s ac
cord
ing
to th
e gi
ven
crite
ria
Mak
e im
prov
emen
ts
to th
e sy
nthe
sis
de-
sign
form
ed a
fter t
he
prev
ious
wor
ksho
p (1
:�00
)
(Thi
s st
atio
n w
as n
ot
amm
ende
d du
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Repertory Grid
The outward appearance of buildings is an important factor in the perceived pleasant-ness of the built environment. Data analysis methods that have long been in use in market analysis could be applied to the built environment to investigate lay peoples’ aesthetic preferences.
In the 1950s, psychologist George kelly developed a method for analysing the ways in which a subject attaches meanings to his or her experiential environment. While the meth-od, known both as the Repertory Grid method and the Kelly Grid method, is rarely used any more in its original context of clinical pschology, it is used in product development and market analysis to analyse customers’ and users’ preferences. The method is especially interesting from the point of view of urban design in that it offers a way of analysing the connections and correlations between words and visual material, such as photographs or actual physical environments. This is significant because experiences of physical environ-ments are in many cases difficult to verbalise; even though they are significatn factors in the quality of life of residents, they are difficult - even impossible - to bring into negotiation in existing planning procedure.
The Repertory Grid method can be used to identify what features of the built environment are valued by residents, and what are important features of popular environments. Ap-plied to the context of urban design, the method can be conducted in the following way: the subject ranks photographs of various environments or buildings according to sets of self chosen, bipolar evaluation criteria, such as “I would like to live here vs. I would not like to live here”. If there is more than one interviewee, the evaluation criteria are hosen beforehand and each subject evaluates the photographs according to the same criteria. After the interviews, the results are fed into a computer program which perfoms a primary component analysis of subjects’ rankings, in other words analyses the correlations between rankings and photographs and plots a scatter graph of their correletions. While it is beyond the capability of the author to explain the concept of primary component analysis, the use of the scatter graph is fairly simple: the closer any two points are to one another, the more closely they correlate.
In the Wikivermo workshop, the Repertory Grid “interview” formed one of the four design stations. At this station, a large pinboard was used, with 10 rows drawn on it. At one end of the first row was the text “pleasant facades”, and at the other end of the same row was the other part of the bipolar evaluation criterium, “unpleasant facades”. Each of the other rows was marked in a similar way, with a different evaluation criteria for each row. Each row also contained a set of nine small moveable photographs (the same set of photos was on each row) which participants were asked to re-order the photographs with repect to the evalua-tion criteria. In this way the participants ranked the photogrpahs by the predefined evalua-tion criteria. As with the wikiplanning process in general, subsequent groups were allowed to reorder the photographs on the matrix, making changes to previous groups’ preferences where desired. At the end of the workshop, the matrix was photographed and the results fed into the computer program.
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What does the Repertory Grid questionnaire tell us about the environmental prefer-ences of the reference group?
The photos most favoured by the refernce group are located on the right-hand side of the graph, and the least favoured are on the left. When it comes designing new building with a view to pleasing inhabitants, the most essential evaluation criteria are probably “Over-all best vs. overall worst” and “I would like to live here vs. I would not like to live here”. These two criteria correlate with each other almost perfectly.
Near the “overall best” point we find the photos of a Jugend apartement building and the famous Hundertwasserhaus in Vienna. We can conclude from this that these are the par-ticipants’ most favoured photographs. Slightly further away - and thus in “second place” are photos of designs for Helsinki’s Hernesaari and Jätkäsaari areas by architects Anttila & Rusanen and Sarlin & Sopanen respectively.
On the left-hand side of the graph are the least favoured photographs, of which the pho-tograph of Amsterdam’s “Whale” building most closely correlated with the “Overall worst” point. Photos of a building in Helsinki’s Kontula suburb and a street in Vantaa’s kartanon-koski were the second anf third least favoured photos.
The results of the Repertory Grid reveal some surprising things. It is notable, that neo-modernist facades currently favoured by architects may not be distinguished in the minds of laypeople from the facades of 1970’s suburban blocks of flats. This is seen in the fact that the photo of the esteemed Eden-block in Helsinki’s Vuosaari correlated closely with the photo of a prefabricated element building in the ill-reputed Kontula suburb. It is also interesting that photos of the jugend apartment block and of the historisist Kartanonkoski area were directly opposite to each other in the reference group’s preferences - suggest-ing that historist-style buildings may not be the answer to the public’s apparent thirst for jugend-style buildings.
It goes without saying that the Repertory Grid method does not reveal conclusive truths about residents’ architectural preferences. The greatest area of ambiguity is the issue of what aspects of the photograph being evaluated influence its ranking - is the subject’s reaction influcence primarily by the facades of the building or cars in front of it? This are of ambiguity might be addressed by conducting the grid questionnaire at a larger scale, where a large sample base is asked to rate a large range of photographs - numerous dif-ferent photographs of the the same building or ennvironment. The geotagging functions of on-line photograph repositories such as Flickr offer an interesting platform for this.
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3.5 Observations and evaluation of the WikiVermo project
At a general level, there are many positive things to say in evaluation of the WikiVermo. The lay participants were enthusiastic throughout the workshops and gave overwhelmingly posi-tive feedback regarding the process – they seemed to appreciate the opportunity to have their say in a constructive and enjoyable way before the major decisions are made. The planners who took part in the workshops were pleased that numerous possible solutions were inves-tigated in a short period of time, and they enjoyed the opportunity to work side-by-side with residents. As one planner described her experience of the project: “This was the first time that I got to be on the same side of the fence as the residents”.
While such praise affirms the idea that it is possible to create planning processes in which residents are given the opportunity to do more than just complain and resist, a more rigorous examination of the wikiplanning process is necessary if we want to understand the meaning and consequences of the process and it results.
But first, to evaluate the results of WikiVermo, we need to ask: what was the question to which the results of WikiVermo are the answer?
3.5.1 How should planning participation projects be evaluated?
The role of the public in the process is often seen by planning professionals in a functionalis-tic light; inhabitants should be heard in order to identify their “needs”, implying that residents’ quality of life is determined by the extent to which objective “needs” are satisfied by solutions. Participatory planning methods often emphasise the importance of consulting local residents in order to attain valuable “local knowledge”, which the residents of an area are in a unique position to provide. The idea that “residents are the best possible experts on their everyday lives” seems to be gaining popularity, which although in itself a positive development, serves to over-emphasise the significance of information at the expense of values.
While inhabitants undoubtably have useful and unique information of their local environment and clearly identifiable needs, such as the need for a kindergarten or appropriate access to green spaces, we should not make the mistake of seeing residents as robots with clear and objective needs, such as the need for lubrication of joints and a regular supply of electricity. The intention of the WikiVermo project was to find out what the reference group’s members feel to be desirable with regard to the future of the Vermo area before all of the essential plan-ning decisions were made. This is matter that goes beyond the territory of “needs” and enters into the messy realm of subjective desires and values.
Just as we should not see participants as entities having objective needs, we should also not approach the issue of participation in planning as we might approach a scientific experiment, where we try to identify pre-existing truths, and in which the quality of our results can be evalu-ated in terms of their reliability and repeatability. Residents do not have static and pre-existing desires and values regarding the built environment. After all, their opportunities to influence their own environment are typically very limited, and thus it is natural that most people do not form opinions and preferences regarding a matter which they have no hope of influencing.
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Rather than trying to reveal pre-existing values, participatory planning methods should allow participants to form a considered position in relation to a context-specific planning case hav-ing first developed an understanding of the problem at hand. As one of the tenets of democ-racy is providing participants with access to the prerequisites (e.g. education) for meaningful participation, a democratic process of participation is one in which participants are given the opportunity to learn to express themselves using the terms of the conversation.
For the reasons mentioned above, the WikiVermo project was structured as a series of three workshops at two week intervals, so that four essential aims could be achieved:
1.Participants should be given the opportunity to develop understanding and insight into the relevant planning issues�.Participants should be given the opportunity to develop considered value-positions in rela-tion to the conversations and proposals generated by the group�.Participants should be given the opportunity learn to express their values and preferences using the means of expression at hand (verbal communication and 1:�00 models)�.The process should lead to an unambiguous result of which participants have a shared un-derstanding and acceptance (although not necessarily consensus).
How should we evaluate the capacity of the wikiplanning method to fulfil the aims stated above? It is clear that the lay participants have a degree of influence on the end results; after all, they manipulate the blocks more than anybody else. Yet it is difficult to directly assess the extent to which the urban designs ensuing from the process represent the values and desires of the reference group, and so we will approach the question in reverse: to what extent did factors other than the reference group’s desires and values contribute to the end result?
3.5.2 The influence of the method itself on the results:
The wikiplanning method, the structuring and timing of the workshops has a significant influ-ence on the resulting designs. Limiting the time that any one group can work on a model to 10 minutes has a number of effects:
- participants do not tend to spend time searching for blocks of the required size and shape – rather, they often grasp any available block and try to find a suitable way to add it to the model
- in the early stages of the workshops, participants do not have time to consider their actions in much depth; it is only in the later stages, when the model has at least some degree of comple-tion and coherence, that calm and considered “fine tuning” can occur
- participants do not have time to place blocks with much precision, resulting in a “messy” or “loose” design (this occurs regardless of whether or not the participants are professionals or laypeople)
During the WikiVermo workshops, the working time allowed for each model was extended to 1� minutes at the request of participants; the consequence of this was immediately visible in the precision and regularity with which blocks were placed. Their apparent messiness makes
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the results of wikiplanning seem, by modernist standards, childish, chaotic and unprofessional. The systematicness that is sacred to modernists is clearly lacking from these models, which almost completely lack straight lines. In their lack of orderliness, the results of wikiplanning workshops are often somewhat reminiscent of medieval urban structures - this is perhaps no coincidence, the long-term development of cities involves iterative alterations - we might call them micro-contributions - to the existing urban fabric. The tendency towards medieval-type urban structures should be acknowledged as an intrinsic quality of the wikiplanning method, for better or worse. In the drawing-up of the models, the architect is forced to make his or her own judgement on to what extent he or she should bring formal order and regularity to the design.
Is wikiplanning an accelerated version of the organic development of cities through time?
3.5.3 The influence of the blocks on the results:
The wooden blocks used in the workshops for the 1:�00 models are available in a range of sizes and shapes, although all represent buildings whose plan depth is 1� metres (apartment blocks) or 9 metres (detached, semi-detached, and row houses). The length of the blocks are multiples of �.� metres, and the number of storeys varies from 1 to 1�. The size and shape of the blocks limits the range of urban forms that can be generated, but this is not necessarily purely a limitation. The wooden blocks can be compared to language: any language has a fi-nite number of words, and communication is a matter of selecting and assembling appropriate words in order to build expressions which reflect our intentions as well as possible. Meaning does not reside in the words themselves, but in the way they are put together. Similarly, it not the blocks themselves but the way they are put together that the participants’ intentions are re-vealed. Indeed, words can also open possibilities of expression as well as limiting them; in the same way, unusually shaped blocks or sweets used in wikiplanning workshops often inspire ideas for functions and activities that may not have otherwise occurred to the participants.
3.5.4 To what extent are the results of wikiplanning the result of the facilitator and plan-ning professionals present at the workshop?
In the wikiplanning method, the process of learning about the planning problem in question is not separated from the process of expressing opinions and preferences regarding it. The role of the facilitator and experts is to help the participants both learn and express their views.
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This is problematic, as the participants thus become prone to indoctrination by the facilitator or experts. In wikiplanning workshops, no attempt has been made to present the facilitator as “neutral”. As long as the facilitator is a human being, it would be unfeasible to assume that they would put aside their own views, preferences and values, even if they tried. Instead, as facilitator, I made brought my own views into the discussion and made an effort to draw atten-tion to the value judgments behind my comments and questions. Neutrality is an impossible ideal, but a willingness to “lay one’s cards on the table” and a willingness to take counter-claims seriously (and when necessary, to provoke them) is the next best thing.
The Three Minute Education in Urban Design
The most blazen case of the partiality of the facilitator is the “Three Minute Education in Urban Design”, given in the form of a lecture at the beginning of each new wikiplanning workshop. One of the key aims of the training is to incite a gentle and light-hearted contempt for the archi-tectural profession, so that participants do not feel daunted by the task of making a design for an urban area in the space of a few hours. This is done by highlighting the apparent arbitrari-ness of the form-giving aspect of urban design.
WIkiplanning at its worst? The Three Minute Edu-cation in Urban Design is intended to counter the tendency of participants to leave ambiguous areas of “no-mans-land” between urban blocks.
Another key aim of the three-minute training is steer the participants’ designs away from the type of designs that the wikiplanning method itself easily leads to. Left without any training, participants in workshops often design “forest suburb” type urban structures, where housing blocks are scattered freely in the landscape with little or no perceivable structure or street network. While such forest suburbs are a valid preference in their own right, they cannot be said to reflect the intention of the participants if their emergence is more a result of the design method than of conscious choice. For this reason the three-minute architectural education is formulated to encourage participants to design urban structures that adhere to the European tradition of cities, consisting of perimeter blocks which collectively delineate the street net-work. The training consists of three “commandments”:
1.Form arbritary, but visually appealing compositions�.Ensure that spaces between building blocks belong clearly to one of the following catago-ries: yards, streets, parks, squares. Hybrids of these, or undefined spaces, are discouraged.�.Place squares where there most people.
The intention of these commandments is not to encourage the emergence of traditional Euro-pean city designs, but to free the participants from the constraints brought by the wikiplanning method itself. If the lay participants first learn to compose urban structures where a there is a
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distinct hierarchy of privacy-publicness, where there are clear transit routes and where yard areas clearly serve a particular building, then they are free to make a choice between this type of urban structure and the forest-suburb type which is the default emergent typology for the wikiplanning method. “Making a choice” does not here mean choosing one solution over the other, but rather exercising consideration as to what extent and in what ways the two different urban typologies should be combined and integrated.
While learning in the wikplanning process is not formally separated from the expression of views and desires, we can say that the “learning aspect” dominates the early stages of wiki-planning workshops (even in one-off workshops), and it is only in the later stages that the “expression of views” aspect can be said to be considered and even partly reflective of the participants’ own values and desires.
As with most wikiplanning workshops conducted so far, the WikiVermo project had a qualified architects in addition to the facilitator, acting as commentator who offered their own evalua-tion of the design after each 10 minute modeling session. At best, the facilitator and experts help participants realise and clarify their views by suggesting several possible interpretations of the participant’s gesture; this happens not only through presenting drawn interpretations of the models, but also verbally and through models during the workshops. A typically example is the “tidying-up” done by the facilitator, who shows the participants at least two different pos-sible ways of re-modeling the block to make it more ordered and “realistic”, from which the participants can choose.
An important aspect of the facilitator’s and expert’s role is identifying to what extent a design gesture made by a lay participant is symbolic and to what extent it is literal. The intention of wikiplanning workshops is to bring the values and desires of the reference group into the design process. However, the communication of participants’ values and desires through the means of miniature models is prone to ambiguity, as it not always clear whether elements add-ed to the model are intended to be interpreted in literal or in abstract terms. Often lego bricks or blocks are used to prescribe abstract values and qualities which might be more articulately expressed through speech but which are perhaps communicated with more force and potency when represented in the model as by physical object. For example, several times during the WikiVermo project participants inserted tower blocks into the model, whose height was as much as �0 storeys. In the context of Finland, where the tallest housing block in Finland is �� storeys, a �0 storey tower block is an extreme gesture. We might presume that suggesting such a tall tower is a consequence of the participants’ inexperience and inability to mentally vi-sualize and understand how large a �0-storey tower is. It is not always appropriate to interpret participants’ gestures literally, for the intended meaning may be more abstract. The intended message of the �0-storey tower block may have been “I think there should be a tall tower here” or “ I think there should be a notable landmark here”. It is the task of the facilitator to try to identify the intended meaning with the participants and to offer possible interpretations (ideally by suggesting relevant precedents or similar cases from the local area) so that an agreement can be reached on what the physical, literal implementation of the gesture should be.
At times, elements are added to the model which are not intended to be interpreted literally at all. An example of this occurred in an early wikiplanning session, where the task was to make improvements to a fictitious high-rise suburb. One participant, a male engineering stu-dent, decided the suburb needed an airport to connect it to other urban areas. This in itself a
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somewhat symbolic gesture, whose intention may have been to highlight the need for better transport connects. Later in the session, a female environmental activist built an “organic veg-etable distribution centre” on top of the airport, without dismantling the airport’s runway. Here, the values of the activist were made visible not only in themselves but also in opposition to the ideas of the engineering student; a game of chess was being played between two different value-systems, with lego and sweets acting as the chess pieces. Although such abstract mat-ters are not traditionally seen as the domain of planning and architecture, it is important that participants’ value-gestures be brought into discussion so that their possible literal, physical implications can be identified. The offering of possible interpretations and asking, “Is this what you meant?” is perhaps the most central aspect of wikiplanning.
Urban design as a battleground of values: an airport is later turned into an organic vegetable distribu-tion centre. The challenge for the facilitator is to identify a pragmatic expression for underlying values
3.5.5 What are the implications and significance of the drawing-up of models and get-ting feedback on the resulting drawings?
An important part of wikiplanning workshops is the drawing-up of the models after the work-shop. The drawings can then be re-presented to the lay participants so that they can a) give feedback, and b) come to understand the implications of their design work so that they can make more considered judgements during the next workshop. While some participants use post-it notes to attribute a function or other quality to a space or block in the model, much of the information regarding location of various services or the quality of space is communicated verbally (if at all) and thus is not carried through to the next sub-group to work on the model. This means that after the workshop, there can be great ambiguity as to what the intention of the lay participants was.
The architect or planner who draws up the results of wikiplanning workshops (which to date has been the author of this paper) exercises a considerable amount of power, in that in the process of drawing it is necessary to make interpretations of the model which may not match the intentions of the participants. For this reason, in the WikiVermo project, two possible in-terpretations were formulated after the first and second workshops, which were presented to the reference group at the next workshop. During the last workshop, the reference group was asked to comment on the drawings using written notes which they attached to the relevant drawing.
3.5.6 Do the end results reflect a group consensus?
If the purpose of the WikiVemo project was to give a voice to a reference group of local inhab-itants, to what extent was this aim achieved? Does the final design reflect the values and de-sires of the participants, or is a lose-lose compromise that does not reflect any one individual’s
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best interests?
While participants expressed satisfaction with the process and with most parts of the design as presented to them during the last workshop, is their apparent satisfaction a result of their values and desires having been adequately interpreted in the resulting design, or was their satisfaction – and lack of any significant conflict throughout the process – due to relative disin-terest, lack of understanding of the planning problem, or inability to make their voice heard as they would have liked? It is easy to reach consensus on a matter on which stakeholders have no strong opinion; for this reason is is very difficult to ascertain whether the apparent agree-ment in the WikiVermo project was the consequence of a considered consensus or whether the agreement sprang from disinterest and incomprehension.
3.5.7 Residents rebel – proof of democracy?
In the WikiVermo project we find an instance where participants appeared to have mastered the given means of expression to such an extent that they were able to launch a protest, using wooden blocks, against the influence of the facilitator. After the second workshop, two of the models were rearranged and tidied in order to achieve more “realistic” (here meaning realis-able more or less within the constraints of current building and planning practices) designs. These were then drawn up, and during the third (and final) workshop, the drawings were presented to the reference group who were encouraged to both write comments on post-it notes and to attach them to the relevant drawing as well as to make alterations to the physical model.
Free will in action? The participants’ last minute changes to one of the models; left, before; right, after
Most of the participants took a strong dislike to four perimeter blocks which I had constructed, believing them to be a reasonable interpretation of what the reference group has modeled in the previous session. However, the participants strongly felt that the perimeter block in ques-tion were too monotonous and dull, and so half-way through the workshop, three participants remodeled the perimeter block to make the streets between them curved. Also, they made the height of the buildings in the blocks vary from two storeys to 1� storeys, the tallest building being a novel castle-like structure with terraced roof-top gardens, reminiscient of the famous Hunderwasserhaus in Vienna. The alterations resulted in a varied and rich urban structure,
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made without any input from the experts present.
The significance of this last-minute remodelling may be considerable, in that it seemed to demonstrate that members of the reference group had, in the space of the three workshops, become so articulate in urban design that they were able to use their new-found skill to launch a protest against the work of the facilitator of the workshops.
3.5.8 Participants’ responses
The reference group’s answers in a questionnaire given during the last workshop reveal that the resulting design was seen by the group to be both better than the proposal made by a professional architects’ office before the WikiVermo project. Also, the groups saw the final de-sign as representing a “good environment”. Suprisingly, few respondents felt that their notion of “the good environment” had changed during the course of the workshop, possibly implying that the WikiVermo process was for them a forum in which to express their pre-formed values (see appendix 1 for details).
For their part, the representatives of the local planning authority were satisfied with the WikiVer-mo process, because a wide range of possible planning solutions were investigated in a short period of time. Also, the planners were pleased to have experienced a non-antagonistic pub-lic participation procedure, where they worked alongside residents and not in opposition to them.
The final design of the WikiVemo project (and a report on the project as a whole) was pub-lished as part of the preparatory material for the planning of the Vermo area. It is to be hoped that the planner will be able to integrate some of the key aspects of the reference group’s design with the demands of the local landowners, technical and environmental planners, politi-cians and other residents who are to be heard via statutory consultation procedures that are required by law.
3.6 Future development of wikiplanning
The wikiplanning method was originally initiated purely as a means to investigate the potential and limitations of co-creation in urban design and planning, with the ultimate intention of creat-ing a web-based forum that would allow lay stakeholders to make normative and constructive contributions to the design of their environment. The scaling of the wikiplanning method to incorporate the contributions of hundreds or thousands of partipants – instead of the current maximum of �0 – would, at best, allow for all relevant stakeholders in a planning project to air their views in a more constructive way than current participation processes allow for.
At the time of writing, an on-line augmentation of wikiplanning is being planned in cooperation with an IT company. The intention is to create software with which actual models (made of wooden blocks through the wikiplanning as outlined in this paper) to be scanned, after which an equivalent three dimensional virtual model will be generated. The virtual model can then be published on-line, and the general public will be able to walk around the planned environment (using avatars) and provide feedback. In this scenario physical wikiplanning workshops would
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still be used to involve a reference group of “lead users” whose work and contributions would then be subjected to the scrutiny of the wider on-line community.
In addition, a workshop format based on wikiplanning is currently being developed for use in schools, the emphasis being on pedagoical aims rather than participation in real planning projects.
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3.7 Conclusions
The aim of this paper has been to consider the some of the potential consequences of co-creation to urban design and planning, and more specifically whether or not the wikiplanning method outlined can offer feasible solutions to some of the fundamental problems of participation in urban design and planning.
With reference to key problems of participation in urban planning and design outlined in Part 1 of this paper, we might conclude that the wikiplanning method does indeed offer ways to address and engage with the issues. Whether or not the problems are solved is another matter, for their being solved or not is dependent on numerous factors external to the wikiplanning method itself.
What does wikiplanning help achieve? It allows participants develop insight into the planning issue in question and to develop considered value-positions on many aspects of the issue; this is done through the generation of provisional solutions which are iteratively reworked. Wikiplanning allows lay stakeholders to make normative and constructive contributions to the planning process, instead of merely objections and complaints. Wikiplanning allows for multiple relevance systems to be brought into negotiation, by offering a range of means of expression (speech, models, drawings, collages, lego figures) and a range of scales. Wikplanning allows a range of viewpoints and a range of relevance systems to be be made visible – but whether or not they become mutually understood is another matter.
An important evaluation criteria for wikiplanning is the unambiguity of its results and the degree to which the results enjoy the acceptance of the participants. As far as the clarity of wikiplanning session results is concerned, the WikiVermo case would seem to suggest that clear results can be achieved. However, as previously discussed, the issue of participants’ acceptance of the results is problematic, as it can be difficult to ascertain whether the results and their consequences have been fully comprehended by the participants.
Is wikiplanning a better form of participation than currently used forms? While wikiplanning may seem to offer a mode of participation in planning which can help avoid conflicts between planning authorities and lay stakeholders, the quality of participation is not only down to the method itself but how it is used in the planning process and with what aim. Sherry Arnstein’s (19�9) Ladder of Citizen Participation reminds us there are numerous possible levels or standards of participation, ranging from “manipulation” at the lowest level to “citizen control” at the highest. Wikiplanning could, in theory, be deployed at any level of Arnsteins’s ladder, to manipulate stakeholders, inform them, or placate them; but at best it could be used as the basis for meaningful engagement with lay stakeholders.
Arnstein’s ladder, devised in the swell of the 19�0s civil rights movement, is an oversimplified model, as it spuriously makes no recognition of knowledge, expertise and learning. Arnstein’s highest level of participation is that of citizen control; yet she does not specify how citizens would develop the capability and insight necessary to exercise control over such complex and demanding fields as urban planning and design.
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In light of my work on wikiplanning, citizen control scarcely seems to be an appealing objective. In my view, a preferable aim would be partnership (the third rung on Arnstein’s ladder), in which lay stakeholders work alongside trained experts, so that they may come to learn to understand each other’s viewpoints and then seek mutually acceptable solutions, in which professional expertise – comprising both explicit and tacit knowledge - is utilised to the full, but in which the values and wishes of lay stakeholders are well represented.
Building understanding and insight between the stakeholders and professionals involved in a planning project is a desirable aim not only because it may lead to the emergence of a built environment which better supports the well-being its inhabitants, but also because it can improve the well-being of planning professionals in their day-to-day work. In this respect, the potential of wikiplanning is perhaps best summed up by one of the planners who participated in the WikiVermo project: “For the first time, I was on the same side of the fence as the residents”.
In Arnstein’s Ladder of Citizen Participation, knowledge, expertise and learning are not recognised
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Appendix 1: Further examples of wikiplanning
Drawing in wikiplanning
In several wikiplanning workshops, video cameras were placed within the emerging models, and their image was projected onto a large piece of paper. Participants then “drew up” the model with pens and pencils by tracing the video image. The examples below show drawings made at Helsinki’s Flow festival in 2008.
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Learning through imitation
Below are images showing an experiment into facilitating laypeople’s participation in urban design without offering any training or instruction whatsoever. Here, the facilitator prepared an urban plan in which there were two open areas to be filled in by the workshop’s participants. The idea was that the participants would mimick the formal language of the surrounding urban blocks when building the new ones. After the first group has filled iin the first two open spaces, two urban blocks prepared by the facilitator were then cleared away, ans the remaining spaces were rebuilt by the next group. This was repeated several times, and in the final design only three of the original blocks (marked here
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Social planning with wikiplanning
During the Finnish local elections of 2008, several wikiplanning workshops were organised for elec-tion candidates. In these workshops, candidates of all parties had the opportunity to publicise their ideology in the from of urban designs. Differences of values were made visible, but not solved.
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Yards
The design of yards seems to be a far easier task for lay participants than the design of larger scale urban spaces. In designing yards during wikiplanning workshops, participants display assertiveness and resoluteness, as the subject matter is falmiliar and not seen as a matter of expertise. What would be the necessary conditions for engendering a similar sense of confidence in laypeople when design-ing larger urban spaces?
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Emergent rules
In one experiment, one of the several design stations was a piece of paper on which participants were asked to propose “rules” for the workshop (both regarding the workshop process and rules about the design of urban spaces). The new rules were used to improve the wikiplanning method.
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Infill building
Like the design of yards, the infill building of pre-existing urban spaces is easier for laypeople than the design of larger areas starting from scratch. Here however, lay participants’ difficulty in under-standing physical scales is at its most visible.
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Appendix 2: Results of participant questionnaire
(Number in brackets indicates number of participants to answer in this way)
1. Who, in your opinion, has influenced the designs that have emerged from the workshops? a) I had:much influence (�)some influence (�)little influenceno influence
b) The other participants had:much influence (�)some influence (�)little influenceno influence
c) The workshops’ facilitator had:much influence (1)some influence (�)little influence (�)no influence
d) The experts that participated had:much influence (�)some influence (�)little influence (1)no influence
How much do you agree with the following statements:
�. “I have influenced the final designs sufficiently.”
I completely agree (�)I somewhat agree (�)I somewhat disagree (�)I completely disagree
�. “The changes made by the other sub-groups were detrimental to the designs.”
I completely agree I somewhat agree (1)I somewhat disagree (�)I completely disagree (�)
�. “The results of the workshop represent a good environment.”
I completely agree (�)I somewhat agree (�)I somewhat disagree
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I completely disagree
�. “The resulting design is better than the design proposed for the area [by the Swedish office].”
I completely agree (�)I somewhat agreeI somewhat disagreeI completely disagree
�. “I hold planning and design professionals in greater esteem as a result of the workshop.”
I completely agree (1)I somewhat agree (�)I somewhat disagreeI completely disagree
�. ”My idea of a good living environment has changed during the workshops.”
I completely agreeI somewhat agree (1)I somewhat disagree(�)I completely disagree (�)
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