Additional Team Members - Cecilia Colombo, Alice Devenyns, Granville Community Kitchen, William Dunbar William Saville Residents' Associaiton, Simon Morrow
Between October 2019 and May 2020, the UCL Civic Exchange team carried out the knowledge exchange project ‘Civic Design Exchange: Co-designing Neighbourhoods with Communities’. This project was carried out in partnership with Granville Community Kitchen, which acted as a link between UCL researchers and the residents from two tower block in a North-West London council estate.
The estate is going through a major a regeneration scheme that involves a phased demolition and redevelopment of the whole estate. In the first masterplan that came out in 2005, these two blocks were planned to be refurbished, not demolished. In 2016, a new Masterplan Review was published, which included the demolition and redevelopment of these two blocks. When residents found out that their homes will be demolished at the end of 2016, this came as a great shock to some of the residents. The Masterplan Review 2016 proposes to demolish the two buildings, as well as other constructions on the site, and to build a new development with 213 new homes – 176 (83%) market and 37 (17%) affordable – and commercial units on the ground floor.
The Community Plan, a document co-drafted by the research group with the Residents’ Association, includes a project proposal, feasibility plan, and a proposal for a participatory organisation plan (community-led management).
The co-design process implemented during the months of the project included activities for the exchange of information and knowledge, which represented guidelines on how to better allow collaboration between planners and communities.
Project funded by The Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Funding
