Participatory Planning: Heritage Conservation Through Co-design and Co-decision

Abstract

Citizen participation in urban planning and architectural design has been long discussed and experimented with since the 1960s. With existing participatory design approaches, two key challenges can be identified. First, the power of citizens to directly affect the decision-making processes is typically quite limited. Second, the use of traditional face-to-face design workshop results in low levels of participation. This paper proposes an innovative participatory design approach with a focus on co-design and co-decision. The co-design stage provides citizens with a tool that empowers them to think critically of their built environment and to initiate design development in their own city. The co-decision stage gives citizens real power in determining the future changes to their city by embedding the participatory design approach into the planning permission system. This participatory design approach is implemented through a web application that allows participants to view design proposals within the existing site context from a birds-eye views and from multiple immersive views, leading to a better understanding of the design proposal‚s scale and impact. The design proposal viewer has been demonstrated on a heritage site in Singapore, showing its potential to be used as evidence for supporting or rejecting design proposals.