Embedded Files
Why is Co-production at the heart of Liveness?
Liveness is about designing with people, rather than designing for people - and doing this in a meaningful way. Authentic, meaningful co-production is transformative - to the design, production and use of architecture and the built environment.
Be wary of 'co-washing'! Co-production is becoming a commonly used term, but it goes well beyond 'consultation' or 'engagement' - it involves communities directly and substantially in all stages of a project. This isn't a neutral process - it entails actively disrupting conventional power dynamics, devolving control and taking risks in order to do things differently.
In order to co-produce work, we seek to establish live partnerships with local stakeholders, that develop over longer periods of time, resulting in better outcomes for our students and our community partners.
Key Themes:
Co-production = co-research + co-design + co-evaluation
Co-production is a process that involves community participants and practitioners working together, ideally through multiple phases:
co-research - the involvement of community researchers to value local expertise, knowledge and experience. Co-research can involve various activities such as community asset mapping, data gathering, creative outputs such as storytelling and filmmaking. Before the delivery of the research, the scoping of research projects and application for funding should ideally also be co-produced.
co-design - builds on participatory design processes and involves a range of stakeholders coming together to establish a shared project brief and vision for the creation of new spaces and places (including architecture, urban design and landscape architecture). In order for a range of people to engage in co-design activities, it is important to establish roles and responsibilities for everyone. Professional designers and architects have a key role to play in co-design processes.
co-evaluation - encourages a shared approach to the setting of aims, reflection on progress and analysis of the success of the outcomes. Co-evaluation is a whole-project process, starting with participants sharing what success looks like for them. Moments of collective reflection throughout the project enable everyone involved in the project to take part in reviewing the work, to assess its broader value and future potential.
Co-production: "is focused around a relationship in which professionals and citizens share power to plan and deliver support together, recognising that both partners have vital expertise. Overall, co-production is fundamentally about seeing people as assets: people are no longer passive recipients of services, but are equal partners in designing and delivering activities to improve outcomes."
Empowering community oriented practices
Liveness plays a key role in democratising the design process and enabling more people to get involved in shaping their built environment. In order to support and foster community citizen involvement in design projects it is vital that appropriate support and learning is integrated, so that people can understand how design processes work. With newfound knowledge, stakeholders often go on to be more active citizens, developing new skills and undertaking more learning and training opportunities.
Notions of success are often reappraised in Live learning situations. Process is valued as much as product, and mutual learning is valued as an outcome in its own right.
Empowerment: "means that people are equal citizens. They are respected and confident in their communities... It is about ways of working and supporting someone that means they can take control and responsibility "
“(Co-production is) more democratic involvement which not only generates change in policy processes but also empowers community oriented practices”
(The Impact of Co-production, ed. Ersoy, 2017)
Control and Authorship
Liveness encourages students and teachers to consider who is in control of projects, and ask who are the authors of them? Such questions enable a broader understanding of shared authorship and encourage more democratic decision-making processes amongst stakeholders. This inevitably results in architects and designers ceding control and being part of the situation, rather than apart from it.
Sharing control and authorship often means navigating the unknown and dealing with contingencies. In facing unknown situations collectively, a live learning approach necessitates an agile and flexible approach.
Control and Authorship: “What are the real possibilities for you the architect in your position in society, not as hero who is going to save society, but as worker who is engaging practices that have the possibility of opening up new ways of doing things here and there… not remaining outside of what else is going on, but being integrated into a general social and political process, and unfortunately, in so doing, having to make choices as to what kind of social relations you seek to support, and what kind of social relations you seek to suppress?
(Poverty and Greed in American Cities, David Harvey)
Page updated
Report abuse