People Make Places, Melissa Mean, Charlie Tims, Demos, London (2005), (pdf file, in english)

Based on in-depth studies of three British towns and cities Cardiff, Preston and Swindon, People Make Places explores how the best public spaces are created by people and communities themselves. The book sets out the forms of governance, design principles and everyday uses that can help boost people’s participation in public space and the wider public life of their town or city.

Cities were invented to facilitate exchange – the exchange of ideas, friendships, material goods and skills. How good a city is at facilitating exchange determines its health – economic, social, cultural and environmental. Public space forms a vital conduit in this exchange process, providing platforms for everyday interaction and information flows – the basis and content for the public life of cities. At their best, public spaces act like a self-organising public service; just as hospitals and schools provide a shared resource to improve people’s quality of life, public spaces form a shared spatial resource from which experiences and value are created in ways that are not possible in our private lives alone.

What our search highlighted was the importance of understanding public space from the perspective of the participant. A new town square could be carefully, beautifully designed, but there was no guarantee that people would come and use it.
People have a wide variety of motivations, needs and resources that shape their personal capacity and desire to use the communal spaces within their town or city. This sometimes creates sharp inequalities between different people’s ability to participate in the wider public life of a city outside home and work.

We also found that public space is better understood less as a predetermined physical space, and more as an experience created by an interaction between people and a place. In other words, public space is co-produced through the active involvement of the user. This shift from a place-based to a userled understanding enables the quality of public space within a neighbourhood or even a whole city to be assessed in terms of how well it supports a range of ‘public experiences’, such as belonging and companionship, risk-taking and adventure, and reflection and learning.

So what might a user-led framework for public space experiences look like? The publicness of a space can be measured in terms of its ability to provide a platform for the creation of different types of experience by different people.

This process of co-production holds out a potentially powerful way forward in terms of closing the persistent gap between the promise and reality of public space. It is adept at countering some of the negative trends that are perceived to be undermining public space as well as working with the grain of these trends and creating positive externalities.

First, co-production helps to counter the decline in trust in other people’s behaviour and to generate a sense of community efficacy.
[...]
Where the organisation of the spaces reflected the principles of co-production, however, there tended to be a much higher confidence in other people’s behaviour and greater openness to a diversity of activities and people; people felt safe, but were more willing to take risks, for example by talking to people they did not know or trying a different kind of activity.

Second, by drawing on the diversity of people in the creation of shared experiences, co-production helps spaces to avoid the twin dangers of a lowest-common-denominator blandness or extreme fragmentation. Because coproduced spaces are partly self-organised they tend to be much more flexible, responsive and therefore more able to simultaneously meet a diversity of needs.

Third, co-production is governance-neutral and can work in a range of environments – public, private and civic – to improve their quality. Public space works best where people are able to positively contribute to their everyday environments through their personal choice and actions. The implication for governance of every type of space – public, private or civic – is that more space and control needs to be given over to the people using it. This process of ‘letting go’ could also be the means by which different types of spaces are better connected together. Revitalising the public life of cities demands that we start with people rather than with physical space.

« Intro.01 « Intro.02 « Intro.03 « Intro.04 « Intro.05 « Intro.06 « Intro.07 « Intro.08 « Intro.09 « Intro.10

These Open Peer-to-Peer design steps should be considered more as guidelines than a complete methodology: we should apply them, test them, study them more (as in research as in practice).

And this is the right time to study and test these participative practices. We can say that there have been two cases that show a change in how society perceive this kind of participation: Times’ decision to choose Web 2.0 users as person of the year¹, and the Nobel Peace prize awarded to Muhammad Yunus for inventing micro-credit services² (this kind of service is not related to Open Source and Peer-to-Peer, but is based on communities and activities that are open and peer-to-peer as well).

It is now possible to say where Open Peer-to-Peer guidelines can be applied and studied.

1. Design and research directions

There are four main directions where Open Peer-to-Peer guidelines could be applied and studied:

1. improve local conditions
   Opportunities for projects related to specific local dimensions are increasing visibly, and therefore an Open Peer-to-Peer design methodology is very interesting, because it offers more chances of success in involving local communities and in addressing complex projects. Moreover, it has been developed for such projects.
2. develop / deliver commercial / non-profit community-based services
   The importance of involving active users, not anymore as individuals but as a community, is gaining consensus both for business activities and non-profit or institutional ones. An Open Peer-to-Peer methodology can be used here as it allows community involvement giving it a real active and peer-to-peer role in creating content and developing projects.
3. organize complex design processes based on participation
   The Open Source organizational forms / design methodologies have proved with Linux to be able to develop complex projects in a relatively short time through an open and equal participation. The Open Peer-to-Peer Open methodology has been developed from them, and therefore can be applied to projects where there is awareness of its complexity (and need for a relatively quick solution).
4. design for contexts with scarce resources or economic return probabilities
   Thanks to their ability to involve participants beyond the more restricted logical market, Open Peer-to-Peer communities can find an application in disadvantaged contexts too. It is difficult to develop/deliver product/service systems to countries and markets characterized by scarce resources (or poor prospects for profit), but there are now economic strategies that study this: the Bottom of the Pyramid ones³. An Open Peer-to-Peer methodology can be applied in these strategies because it allows the development of projects based on a community of volunteers (thereby reducing the economic resources necessary), and because it can involve local communities in all these contexts inside the design process (succeeding to get projects suited to specific socio-cultural contexts). And it can develop and provide product/service systems that seeks to reconstitute/strengthen the social fabric, and not product/service offering unsustainable lifestyles both environmentally and socially.

2. A research for a social knowledge discipline

For a design discipline that begins to take an interest not only in technological innovation but also in social innovation, the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude can offer useful elements and many possible directions of research.
So far, most of the interest towards the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude has been revolved around the organization of scientific research or entertainment services. It is possible too to study also other areas where it is possible to develop Open Peer-to-Peer community-based services (and hence economic activity and business). There is a potentially vast and promising field: all the cases specifically linked to the social dimension, and therefore public services, non-profit organizations and strategies that may belong to the commercial sector but linked to the Bottom of the Pyramid strategies.
For example, in the case of public services, the eGovernement strategies implemented so far (and, in general, the reform strategies of public services) have not reached a large number of people and the desired outcomes. This is the reason why the introduction of the Open Peer-to-Peer methodology is possible, as it provides an active role of users in the co-creation and delivery of services. An introduction that proposes the Open Peer-to-Peer communities and attitude as useful not only at the operational level but also at the strategic level, where local institutions assume the role of their facilitators. With the shift from local government to governance, local institutions are becoming facilitators of participation (of both civil society and the economy sector). In particular, Charles Leadbeater⁴ and Hilary Cottam⁵ and the Demos⁶ think-tank , for example, are moving in this direction.
Fields of application of this attitude and its organizational forms are therefore wide; the attention to the “social side” has two advantages. The first is that we work in an environment suitable for the introduction of this attitude (for the affinity to the participatory and collaborative dimension, and the need to solve real unaddressed problems). The second consists in the possibility of studying the social dimension of an Open Peer-to-Peer project, something this context can offer more than others.

There are many critical aspects in the relationship between design and the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude that could be studied. Here there are the most important ones:

• How can design relate with the Open Peer-to-Peer attitude?
  The Open Peer-to-Peer attitude is a recent and evolving one, and brings with it new values and new strategies; therefore it is necessary to study this attitude in depth, and also study how the discipline of design can relate to it. And then how the role of the designer, the design process and the object of the project change.
• How does design relate with these Open Peer-to-Peer Communities and their local dimension?
  We should not forget that these Open Peer-to-Peer communities have their own local dimension (even if they are distributed). And the relationship with the local dimension is one of the latest trends that can be found in Web 2.0 services.
  Fortunately, the discipline of design is studying how to relate with the local dimension since several years.
• How does design relate with the knowledge produced and shared within a community?
  Knowledge and its sharing (or not) is a tricky issue and currently of great interest and the subject of debates and reflections. In this case, we should understand how to manage knowledge both within the discipline of design and both within communities characterized by an Open Peer-to-Peer attitude.
• How does design relate with the complexity of a community?
  A community is an organizational form with a degree of complexity, and this is intuitive. Nevertheless, some studies on Open Peer-to-Peer organizational forms showed how they have a high complexity and the ability to improve it in solving complex problems (a capability that the other disciplines are looking with interest now). But the concepts related to the complexity and the their relationship with design are a recent phenomena, which require deeper researches.
• How does design relate with the relationship between market economies and gift economies?
  These Open Peer-to-Peer communities present different forms of economic organization, that lays between the market economy and the gift economy. This characteristic should be studied in depth to understand the extent to which they can survive in an different economic environment, and the extent to which this characteristic can be extended in society, through the contact with other communities.

The research and implementation of this Open Peer-to-Peer attitude within the design discipline can bring new opportunities both to the design practice and the design research. And introducing an attitude that has at its center the collective construction and sharing of knowledge can make a further step in the configuration of design as a knowledge discipline for a knowledge society.

(the end)

Notes:

1. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1569514,00.html [↩]
2. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/press.html [↩]
3. (2004) Prahalad, C.K, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Wharton School Publishing [↩]
4. (2006) Cottam H., Leadbeater C., The User Generated State: Public Services 2.0, http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/archive/public-services-20.aspx [↩]
5. http://www.designcouncil.info/mt/RED/health/ [↩]
6. http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/userledservicedesigninlocalauthorities/overview http://www.demos.co.uk/projects/participativepublicservices/overview and other publications [↩]