Feeling of Influencing the Decisions
Jeremy Till really made me think about the process of participation. Ideally, we hope the design is created by and for the community, but the residents may lack the knowledge of architecture and are too “shy” or too “brave” to express themselves. And the response we get may be inaccurate. Such as the online voting, it seems the direct way to allow maximum equal participation. However, it is very easy to “cheat” with the rendering photos; and sometimes, your architect friends/ family ask you to vote for them. I also joined one informal consultation conference during my internship. It was a renovation project for downtown. The planners used huge map board with foam massing models to visualize the existing situation and offered colorful strings and flags to show their preliminary design. So, the residents can move the flags to emphasize the corner or space they hope to change. The problem is that the 2d map is difficult for non-professional residents to imagine their daily life. But the community seem interested in the moving flags. I am not sure how much advice will be adopted in the final design, but I do remember the dinner after that conference: the architects and the community become closer. Maybe the most important thing in the participation is, as Henry Sanoff argued, the feeling of influencing the decisions.
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