People occupy space

When the community makes the space. Some of the richest spaces have come from the community member taking an unoccupied space and transforming it into something that is needed or desired. They start using the space is ways that planners and designers might never think, they tend to be more accepting of coexistence of many different types of program living and changing next to each other. Community member also tend to be more creative with the use of given spaces and how they can be adapted and used. So what do designers ad planners do about this. They can’t simply give up the ropes to the people and say here make the place however, you wish. It would probably lead to a lot of conflicts and disagreements among the different community members. Those space that people create work best when they kind of more natural transformation rather than planning everything down to the last detail from the very start. However, not every space created like this works. How do designers filter through all this and make decisions? How involved are the people? How do they learn from these case studies. What makes these places so special, that allows them to work so well?