Rinal Hardian #1204240Community EngagementCommunity Engagement Strategy of Heritage Urban Regeneration Company (GHURC): A Quick Evaluation

As one of essential features in enhancing connection between governments, policy makers and the communities, community engagement has long been utilised in many sectors of public sphere, ranging from health, environment, education, politic, socioeconomic, and so on. Particularly in design and planning sectors, community engagement is considered having a major role in the success of a project. This is because decisions about the built environment, such as land use, zoning, and community design, directly affect many aspects of neighbourhood. Therefore, it is critical to have a well-implemented community engagement approach to ensure that concerns of community and residents are taken into account in future plans and projects.

One of the planning projects that puts community engagement into practice is Gloucester Heritage Urban Regeneration Company (GHURC). GHURC project aims to revitalise several historic areas of Gloucester City, United Kingdom. As new residential areas, offices, retails, commercials and the public spaces will be built on the sites; many issues emerge among communities. Being a diverse city with various different communities and neighbourhoods, community engagement has become a key success of the programme. GHURC intended to implement community engagement at a local level using methods that are suitable for each community. To achieve this goal, GHURC has produced a document (Community Engagement Strategy revised 2009) laying out the strategies to carry out community engagement processes throughout the project.

GHURCs Community Engagement Strategy provides broad scheme for the inclusion of community participation, (channelling public participation and input into decision making). GHURC planned to create opportunities for the communities in all level of participation. The Communities are involved from simply just obtaining information to actively participating in decision making. The strategy also aims to enable all sections of the communities of Gloucester to contribute to the project. This means the accessibility, transparency and democratic processes of GHURC community engagement is projected to be carried out to the highest possible standard (GHURC 2009).

This essay will discuss strengths and weaknesses of GHURCs strategies to engage the communities in Gloucester City for the successes of heritage revitalisation project. The evaluation overview of the strategies will be based on four criteria: degree of representativeness, information distribution strategy, and the level of communication provided to the community. As briefly stated earlier, there are several levels of involvement that take place in the project. These include: informing, consulting, involving, collaborating/participating, and empowering. This suggests that the strategy aspires to achieve what is called deliberative, inclusive processes (DIP) of engagement. DIP can be seen as an interactive form of public consultations, whereas traditional models, such as a permanent advisory committee, an opinion survey or a call for written submissions are considered consultative but could not be regarded as deliberative, i.e. the people from a community are involved in such a way to ensure that they are a proper representation of the community (Carson & Hart 2005). Therefore, one of the crucial aspects of DIP is the level of representativeness.

In this regard, GHURC strategy has several strengths. First, the strategy is designed to give a brief guideline in achieving well identified communities and stakeholders to work with. This will help the project to measure whether the participants have been representative enough or not. There are two broad categories of communities that have been identified. First, communities of place local residents as verified by the census and existing ward boundaries; and second, community of interest local people identified by other aspects of their life such as employment, ethnicity or background etc. For community of interest, the strategy seeks to create and develop several forums that are considered relevant to the project. These include: a Business Forum, based on existing business and economic associations, An extended Resident and Community Forum, based on the representative group initially set up by the City Council, Councillors Forum, Urban Youth Forum, etc.

Second, GHURCs strategy also exhibits some positive aspect in achieving proper representativeness through the variety of engagement activities that are targeted to varied groups. Carson (2005) stresses that to achieve higher representation of participants, the design of an event should not only seek to provide opportunities for an exchange of ideas to reach consensus, but must also be based on the idea that the event is an adult learning experience. Therefore, the design of the event also needs to be interactivity, varied, and allows different entry levels. Among the example of such events in GHURC project includes: the use of art/artists as a channel of both access and expression of views and ideas of local communities, targeted approach to local schools, targeted approached to hard-to-reach groups and so on.

Third, the strategy gives reasonably strong emphasis on so-called hard-to-reach groups in the communities. GHURC acknowledges that the problems do not lie within the group/individual but rather on the way of approaching that requires more creativity and effort in the engagement method being employed. The strategies are directed to ensure these groups are not under-represented. This helps GHURC to reduce missing voice in its implementation of community engagement

On the negative side, even though there some directions for the selection the members of community of interest (for example, in the case of establishing relevant forums and community ambassadors), the strategy does not provide a clear direction as for the selection of demographic/structural representation. This could lead to participants are not selected at random. If this happens, then true diversity and attitudinal representativeness cannot be achieved (Gastil, 2005 cited in Bruce, 2006). Random selection is important factor to prevent participation being dominated by squeaky wheels, hence increasing the chance of the voices of the wider community to be heard (Carson & Hart, 2005).

Beside a degree of representativeness, information distribution strategy is also considered a crucial element that underpins community engagement practice. Successful information sharing allows the communities to be aware of the issue and to make a decision whether they want to take part in a community engagement activity. In regard to information distribution, GHURCs strategy provides several strengths. First, GHURC utilise wide range of media to reach the people, such as community newsletter, leaflets, community/local and national radio, online media, and so on. By using numerous media, the information would more likely to be well distributed. Second, GHURC recognises special need in information sharing for the hard-to-reach groups by requiring a variety of approaches such as printing information in a range of formats and languages and using engagement media which do not exclusively rely on the ability to read and write. Third, GHURC commits to share good practice and lesson learn from the project to other practitioners by developing strong links with other agencies in the area. This information sharing is conducted through interactive website and email. By doing so, they can learn from each others experience to improve their community engagement technique for future application.

However, there is also room for improvement for the proposed strategy. One of these is: GHURC does not include methods for internal information sharing among staffs. It is important to develop information provision strategies for practitioners and decision makers to ensure that they are well informed about the engagement process, up to date about the progress and aware of any issues that might occur during the process (Queensland Government 2011).

Next criterion is the level of communication. GHURC intended its strategy to provide direction in the use appropriate methods and channels to facilitate two way communications in all aspects of the GHURCs activities. As a result, GHURC provides numerous opportunities for the communities to communicate and channelling their views and concerns. This leads to higher level of communication that in return will create a successful and more inclusive engagement. GHURC also has open and flexible channels to engage the communities. For example, there are channels for clear and formal structures, such as the Business and Resident & Community and Urban Youth Forum, steering groups and consultative panels that are dedicated to facilitate discussions, feedback and decision making processes. GHURC also utilise informal structures such as community events and a variety of media, such as video, arts projects or photography, to enable people that are not comfortable in a formal setting to express their views and opinions.

Nevertheless, the use of flexible channels also has a consequence, especially the informal one. As noted by Buchy (2000), unless objectives are made clear at the beginning of the engagement process, an open and flexible discussion with participants could lead to high or unrealistic expectation. Therefore, any limitations, challenges and their impact on the outcomes should be communicated early on.

In conclusion, this essay has discussed GHURCs strategy for community engagement in Gloucester City in term of its strengths and weaknesses by briefly reviewing the GHURC project based on its representativeness, information and communication strategy. Even though there are some room for improvement, with more positive implications, it is safe to say that GHURC provides well-performed strategies to ensure the success of its community engagement project.

Reference

Bruce, D 2006, Perth Coastal Planning Strategy: Evaluation of Community Engagement Processes, viewed 9 May 2012, .Buchy, M 2000, Enhancing the information base on participatory approaches in NRM.L. W. Australia, Australian Government, Canberra.Carson, L 2005, Building Sustainable Democracies, viewed 7 May 2012, .Carson, L., and Hart, P 2005, 'What Randomness and Deliberation can do for Community Engagement', International Conference on Engaging Communities, Brisbane.GHURC 2009, Community Engagement Strategy Revised 27th May 2009, viewed 5 May 2012, .Government, Q 2011, Information-sharing techniques, viewed 8 May 2012, .

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