Designing for immigrants. 2 cases. Interaction design and Urban planning

Editor's Notes

• #4: In our diverse cities, deciding on issues important to the common good is no easy task. This is particularly true of urban planning. In this paper we tell about one case study in which a participatory design process in urban planning affects only partially the final outcome. We ask why this happened and we reflect on our own practices through the case.
• #5: The story starts when the city decides to destroy one fourth of the forestland of a neighborhood in the east Helsinki by planning a new residential area to be placed in Meri Rastila.
• #6: An association of local residents defended the local forestland by lobbying and organizing public meetings and candle-lit marches to protest and to spread their ideas about the future of the area.
• #7: They also held meetings with city planners to discuss plans for the future.
• #8: In parallel to this, we form a group of independent architects and designers and got funding to work on the area.
• #9: Pro Meri-Rastila members recognized the opportunity of our group and asked for help to design a master plan that would serve as an alternative to the one presented by city planners.
• #10: The challenge was to make a plan that could accommodate 2000 new residents while leaving the forestland intact.
• #11: In the area there is 30% of immigrants population, but there were not active in the actions towards protecting the forest.
• #12: We wanted to integrate immigrants who are rarely heard to voice their views on the planning of their living environments.
• #13: We believe that the planning activities could have a significant potential in terms of the development of an intercultural milieu.
• #14: We run a series of workshops, in the school inviting different groups of residents.
• #15: Two architects from the OurCity team supervised a larger design team of university students in its effort to devise an Alternative Master Plan for Meri-Rastila.
• #16: The end proposal includes the wishes of a large group of residents in the area.
• #17: The idea of urban in-filling emerged from these workshops and it became the key design concept. In-filling is a process of densification where there is optimal use of free or underused land within a built area. In-filling was a good strategy for an alternative proposal to the official city plan. Under in-filling, the bulk of the new housing proposed by the City planners would also be maintained. The neighborhood would become more densely populated, spaces for possible new services would be preserved, and existing service networks would be still in use. Crucially, the forestland would be protected.  
• #18: We argue that the main advantages of this alternative proposal were the preservation of the forestland and the participatory design processes that engaged local residents.
• #19: The proposal was presented to the city planning board in two occasions and the proposal was rejected with a very little margin of difference. 5 to 4. However, the city architects were instructed to draw a new proposal preserving the forest. End of the story.
• #20: So we ask. How the media, bloggers and authorities perceive the participatory process of local residents including immigrants? How this PD process influence decision-making? We reviewed 23 print media articles and the 6 more important blogspots on the case. These 6 blogspots gathered more than 200 comments.
• #21:    Only four articles mentioned that immigrants participated in the proposal but only one of them was in Finnish. And it did mention the participation of immigrants but only as anecdotal, not as a positive sign.   Interesting is to notice that when the authors of the articles referred to the background of the members of the OurCity project team, we were called “international”. On the other hand the foreign residents of Meri Rastila, were referred to as “immigrants”.
• #22: In this room we all agree that people who are affected by a decision or event should have the opportunity to influence it. For this to occur, society needs to openly advocate participation, including media. In addition, participatory efforts engaging different stakeholders must be evident in the end-results as they have an impact on decision-making.   We argue that the design object was envisioned in relative isolation from the participatory process it entailed, as the process was hardly perceived by authorities and the media. There are many reasons for this. One may be the failure to represent more efficaciously how citizens’ participation and the end product are interlinked; another could be that designers who are not trained in PD have trouble appreciating it. In our view, this is particularly true of architects and urban planners.   While we allocated great effort to the PD process and community engagement, we failed to adequately defend residents’ participation in the crucial decision making process. Eventually, the PD process, as well as its impact on the drafting of the alternative master plan, was played down
• #23: We need different methods also to make participatory processes visible at all stages of decision-making in urban planning. Responsible decision-making by cities requires planning processes that are more informed of citizens’ needs and that require citizens’ participation.      
• #26: As project initiators we determine the approach, methods, scope, and resources. Participants are engaged and selected afterwards. Normally we tried to avoid dissensus. The staging of the design process involves not only the framing of the problem and the social organization, but a realm of the project that may also endure long after. (Mazé and Keshavarz).
• #32: Especialmente el que se comparte en sitios como Europeana o Euscreen? different sorts of empathy, mechanisms to cross boundaries Reflect on the meaning of the characteristics of media that immigrants use? how their stories or their life influence the media in use.