Here and There

Last month I attended the Global Development Institute  conference “Scaling up participatory development in towns and cities of the global south” at the People’s History Museum. The purpose of the conference was to understand the opportunities and constraints on scaling up participation by sharing experiences and analysing outcomes. For my part, I was particularly interested in the “scaling up” element. I have spent the last few years working on a number of huge strategic spatial planning projects and I’ve become increasingly curious as to how we can embed meaningful engagement into these large-scale, long term processes. It’s tricky, there’s no getting around it. The last strategic spatial project I worked on covered an area that was home to 2.8 million people - the great consultation techniques we know and love become difficult to implement at that scale. You can’t exactly invite them all a workshop, hand them a cup of tea and ask them what they think. No wonder then, that th...