Residents of a neighbourhood in Peterborough have a new tool to understand and re-imagine their public space thanks to TCAT’s co-design team. The [download id=”16381″] draws together census and demographic data and six months of engagement with over 350 Peterborough residents. It paints a picture of the assets and public space gaps in the neighbourhood.
TCAT has been working in collaboration with our partner GreenUP since September 2017 to engage residents in diverse co-design activities, including asset mapping, exploratory walks, participatory infrastructure audits, pop-up planning kiosks, travel safety mapping, and more. In January, we brought a team of Masters of Planning students from Ryerson University on board to support the process. The Ryerson team developed the portrait document, and hosted a Neighbourhood Enhancement workshop on March 6. The workshop brought out over 60 adults and 30 youth to creatively re-vision their neighbourhood.
Still in the works with our Ryerson partnership is the development of a Citizen’s Design Toolkit for the neighbourhood. The design toolkit will present principles for active, green, and human-scale design, and will visually represent residents’ ideas from the workshop. Our team will be out throughout the spring and summer engaging residents with the toolkit, and encouraging them to participate in our upcoming design charette. The charette, scheduled for July 26, will bring residents together with professionals from across the built environment and public health disciplines to co-design and refine ideas for the neighbourhood.
The Jackson-Park Brookdale Neighbourhood is the first of three Peterborough neighbourhoods that TCAT is supporting to undertake a participatory planning process, thanks to recently-announced multi-year funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada. We have begun outreach in our second neighbourhood, Downtown Jackson Creek, and are excited to begin resident engagement there soon!
For more tools and examples of co-design, visit our website: http://www.participatoryplanning.ca