An inclusive trans-disciplinary approach to engaged resident (community) led repair, building or space making
Neighbourhood Making is an approach to spatial development that works beyond the often polarised and biased definitions of ‘community’ currently in use, and employs a more complex, multi-user process through accountable inter-relationships that focuses on social, spatial, and governance-based needs, wants and visions.
The idea of framing a space as a ‘Neighbourhood’ rather than simply ‘a Community’ offers a more spatially attuned framing of the scale and nature of people and space. This framing allows for more nuanced understandings of actual community dynamics, leadership and project articulation. This concept does not exclude the nature of community; rather, it allows for more diverse and accurate readings of local leadership and residents in both urban and rural contexts.
The idea of ‘Neighbourhood Making’ is not novel nor unique to this platform, and is offered to a South African context as a means of working through existing complex issues of local leadership, resident politics, and government requirements, while aligning projects and user/beneficiaries towards more tangible socio-spatial processes.
Based on Socio-Technical Support principles, a Neighbourhood Making approach can range in scale from user-centred tools (apps, knowledge systems or furniture), structural products (shared facilities, buildings or small-scale infrastructures), to larger spatial products ( site-layouts, neighbourhood design or small-scale urban/rural projects). The authorship of these outputs is importantly collective; while particular actors in a project may carry more responsibility in areas of technical and social process guiding, ownership, experience, need and funding.
This is an inclusive approach and is careful to not make hard distinctions between ‘non-professionalised’ and ‘professional’ practitioners, rather it focuses on the skills, experience, and abilities of those involved in the spatial development processes. The users can include individuals, collectives or larger social groupings (aka ‘communities’) but makes careful distinction in developing and maintaining the designer/user relationship.
1to1 & Just Neighbourhood Making
1to1 offers an additional layer of Spatial Justice to this framing, and sees the neighbourhood scale as an important spatial scale that holds great potential in mobilising disparate (or connected) local residents and groups to better access to local government support towards larger spatially just plans for our town and cities.
1to1 promotes an iterative, visual, and problem-solving mode of socio-technical design support that blends traditional technical design practice with the social sciences’ criticality, rigor and systemic readings of place around the scale of a ‘neighbourhood’.
In addition, the organisation encourages a careful positioning of the practitioners involved in regard to socio-spatial justice and a practice that works through responsibly ethical principles of engagement and co-making.
Principles of a Just Neighbourhood Making Approach
- Critical (questioning, challenging, self-reflective)
- Socially Aware (demographic positionally awareness i.e: gender, race, culture, etc.)
- Empathetic (equity, inclusive, open)
- Proactive (responsible, careful, forthcoming)
- Process driven (project managerial, goal oriented, motivated)
- Structured (organised, clear, driven)
- Visual and/or Social Communicative (open, dynamic, engaging)
- Facilitative (inclusive, listener, sharer)
- Design-Led (iterative, solution driven, innovative)
Jus't Spatial Design ZA 