Making a case for evidence-informed decision making for participatory urban design

Abstract

Urban regeneration has emerged as a response to government attempts to reverse the blight of industrial decline in the United Kingdom. The challenge has however been in developing sustainable solutions while meeting the needs of the citizens. Design-led initiatives have come under a lot of criticism for its subjective approach to urban design, focussing on the requirements of the developer or designer, but failing to meet the needs of the citizen or end user. This article offers a critical review and analysis of the current approaches to urban design in regeneration. It draws on cross-disciplinary literature and examples from practice and research to identify the key issues and challenges that restricts designs’ role as an agent of positive change. The article investigates the opportunities of a knowledge transfer from evidence-based decision making to effectively devise strategies to address the identified issues and challenges in the participatory urban design process. It presents a five-dimensional (5D) approach to decisionmaking, influenced by the realist synthesis and the domain of applied ontology to bargain better informed design decisions that supports effectual citizen participation.