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Green Issues Communications

 

Workshops

Workshops work best earlier in the planning stage than exhibitions. These allow key representatives and interested locals a real opportunity to influence the progress of a project. They facilitate the indepth discussion of issues based on plans and other visual materials and can generate community-led, creative solutions. Using workshops on a project can lead to real community buy-in for the resulting proposals.

The hands-on nature of these projects and their dependency on strong source material means a multi-disciplinary approach including planners, architects and other key members of the project team. The workshop format is again very flexible and can easily transform into key stakeholder focus groups.

These workshops include:

  • Production of models, plans and preparation
  • Teams of stakeholders discussing key issues
  • Recording and reporting of comments
  • Production and publication of feedback reports

 

CASE STUDY : Consultation workshops to engage the community

Consultation workshops to engage the community

This Inner London brownfield site adjoined a range of community facilities, open space and low-density residential development. The protracted process of the preliminary stages of development had led to the formation of a protest group to prevent the high-density development proposed.

The objective for Green Issues was to complete a thorough programme of consultation and address the issues raised, finding supporters among local residents and winning support for the scheme and where possible, to engage with the protestors to see if some of their more reasonable demands could be met.

Green Issues ensured that a real cross section of society was consulted with including doctors and service providers in addition to the usual residents' associations, community groups, etc. The aim was that doctors and service providers would perhaps think more rationally than those residents who were having development on their doorstep.

To ensure feedback and genuine discussion, a number of facilitated workshops were organised. Participants were split into groups with a facilitator focusing on specific issues with one table discussing transport and one discussing design. The attendees then rotated. These were conducted in the form of a ‘brainstorming’ session.

This was then followed by a public exhibition to gather broader feedback on four alternative planning options produced by the architect and a final exercise to show the completed plans.

 



Green Issues Communications