The following blog is taken from this month’s Conservation Bulletin.

You know, there’s an awful lot of rubbish talked about working with communities. Since we became so politically correct about working in the built environment we are now seemingly required to involve or engage just about anybody who might have an opinion, no matter how ill informed or how remote or how totally inexperienced they may be, in what actually might be happening to the buildings and places that shape their locale. We’ve got to the stage now where the football equivalent would be obliging Sir Alex Fergusson to consult with the Old Trafford faithful about team selection before fielding the Reds on a Saturday afternoon. I blame the telly: this notion of public engagement, this right to be involved, stretches back to the early days of reality TV and beyond. It has its contemporary genesis in that Big Daddy of reality, Big Brother, but its beginnings are in the origins of TV – in Hughie Green and Opportunity Knocks’ frenzied clap-o-meter that dictated whether the participants stayed, or went. We’re obsessed with audience participation – especially in this age of technology – when we express our opinions in public so quickly, so easily and seemingly to so little effect.

Now you may think from this that I’m anti getting people involved. Actually that’s far from the truth but I think that we should involve people in a proper way, in a human way, and dispense with the thin veneer of professionalism and respectability in which we cloak our daily workings.

My first experience of community consultation, which was by no means the worst – probably middle ranking in the spectrum of good practice, if there is such a thing – was in Liverpool and was dubbed a ‘community planning weekend’. It captured the zeitgeist of the moment: Prince Charles was on the scene making waves in the world of carbuncle extensions and was cosying up to the then RIBA president, one Rod Hackney, Macclesfield’s fleetingly famous architectural son, self-proclaimed leader of the community architecture movement – this was, after all, the doldrums of the early 1990s’ post-crash property economy and
the community was the ‘last man’ standing. The weekend brought in the hordes to workshop, think and draw their way out of deprivation. Now, worthy and feel-good though this was it didn’t have any parameters, so when Barbara from Bootle wanted the Eiffel Tower in central Liverpool it was duly drawn, and now Barbara thinks that nobody listened to her because it’s not been built and she wouldn’t trust a property professional as far as she could throw them because they’re a ‘flipping [she didn’t use that word] waste of time’. I have some sympathy with her.

Contrast this, which now seems profound and resonant, with the completely vacuous and inconsequentialmethod of contemporary consultation designed to fit the newfound PFI model of procurement of regeneration projects. Public consultation now consists of the public being invited in to vote (yes it’s back to reality TV again) on which of the four competing shortlisted schemes (worked on in the vacuum of competition over the preceding six weeks to tight deadlines answering an unimaginable series of unanswerable questions) they prefer. The outcome doesn’t really matter provided the procedure-compliance gurus can tick the box that says the community were consulted and Europe can rest easy that here in England it’s a job well done.

Usually the public prefer the nice man with the pink shirt who said flattering things about their shoes and promised them a 92-inch plasma screen. If they’re anything like my mum, or even my partner, the public are not actually very good at reading plans or interpreting CGIs no matter how flash they are, and there’s certainly no way that 20 minutes and a cup of tea in a community centre with men in pink shirts will perform a miracle of understanding. No, because a community have to be actively engaged and involved from the word go,we need to see working with the community as an opportunity, not an impediment – we need to get to know them, enjoy their company, laugh a lot, cry a little and listen to what they’ve got to say in a way that makes them feel comfortable and able to make themselves heard. We need to stop being professional and remember that working in the building environment is one of the most human, most responsible and potentially most rewarding of endeavours – it’s not just a numbers game.

There is a way, I think, that we can work properly with communities and it takes the form of an anecdote from our work in New Islington. I used this anecdote in a PFI bid as our strategy for community consultation. It was rejected because it was impossible to score against the evaluation matrix.

Marjory was one of the local residents who were to be re-housed and whose community would change forever when our work was done. In the early days we were naïve and believed that everyone would be delighted to swap their neglected though generous council house for a more modest Urban Splash flat. Wrong, naïve, insulting and dangerous: we learnt on the job and we learnt quickly – listen don’t assume. Kevin, her son,was in the room looking threatening and with a pacey Mancunian invective on what he thought we were going to do to this area in the name of personal reward. So I asked Kevin what he wanted. He said he wanted to ‘make Ancoats cider’ so I said ‘okay we’ll build you an orchard … but you’ve got to look after it’, and so it was that the orchard became part of the inspiration for the Alsop/Grant plans for the park in New Islington.We built it with English Partnership’s money and had the first taste of Ancoats cider in 2008, a seemingly vintage year for our apple variety.

Now this is one tiny example of the way we went about working with, listening to and acting upon the views of the local community. At each point they had a meaningful input into what was to happen in the area, from the selection of the architect for their ‘’ouse’ to the name for the area. We helped translate processes in which we were bound into an unbidden set of options framed by real-world budgetary parameters that they had influence over and knowledge about.

We tried to give them six options for very decision, and every time,without fail, they came to the conclusion that we would have wanted them to, which has meant that we’ve not had to compromise and the result is a lot stronger, more meaningful and resilient than if we’d imposed our own distorted vision of what we wanted to see the area become.

That six months of meetings, discussion, dialogue and argument laid the framework for a strategy rather than the implied prescription of a masterplan. I have no time for masterplans. I have no time for PFI. I probably shouldn’t worry because I think they may both be about to disappear. What this disappearance will allow, I hope, is for proper time to be taken once again to get decisions right and for people to properly inform those decisions.

People working with the historic environment understand that decisions taken in a six-week period can last longer than a lifetime. For the sake of future generations that will marvel and delight in the built environment,we have to make sure that the processes we surround ourselves will permit this generation to come up with the places and spaces that will take a worthy place in the next.