Co-Lab for Cardigan – Envisioning Our Street Together: Recap

On the 20th and 21st of September 2023, PlaceLab Melbourne held a series of fun, interactive, and purposeful workshops that brought different voices together to creatively envision the future of Cardigan Street.

As part of our Research Project “Cardigan Commons”, ‘Co-Lab for Cardigan’ was about exploring the potential of Cardigan Street to transform into a more inclusive, collaborative and wild ‘greenscape’, with a focus on community perspectives and aspirations. Read on to find out about why we thought this was important, and how this all went.

How can a street be designed to fit the needs of a community and our societal challenges?

With climate change, biodiversity loss, and urban isolation becoming pressing global concerns, cities are an opportunity hotspot to address these critical challenges (Oke et al, 2021). For this potential to flourish, societies must not only redesign our built environment, but also the development processes in which these evolve (Golicnik et al, 2020). When it comes to public space, as a shared asset of the city, it is particularly challenging ensuring that the multiple stakeholders with agency and/or interest are taken into consideration through collaborative design processes. While co-design has been identified as a pathway for effectively increasing green areas for biodiversity enhancement in the city (Basnou et al, 2020), inclusive community engagement is seen as a pathway to congregate stakeholders, improve social cohesion and create smart sustainable cities (Bokolo, 2021).

There are a wide variety of co-design methodologies, also known as ‘Participatory Design’ (PD), (Halskov, 2015) that aim to bring different stakeholders together and express their individual and collective dreams for the city. These efforts seek to overcome ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ and create spaces that foster the needs of the community, promote their stewardship of the land, and create places that thrive both for humans and more-than-humans (Hernandez-Santin et al, 2023). For a successful ‘PD’ to take place, community engagement requires a critical place-based approach for meaningful citizen participation (Arnstein, 2007), seeking consensus building (Innes and Booher, 2007) to overcome inevitable – yet necessary – conflict.

PlaceLab’s interest is in developing research methodologies that capture the dreams, commonalities, and discrepancies in urban open spaces through collaborative design tools. Our place-based approach helps us understand our specific case study and become active stakeholders in the environment we work and research, as we then define and refine our research questions. Due to challenges and time constraints in recruitment for applying our tools, this research primarily focuses on presenting the methodologies developed, rather than showcasing data resulting from a long-term strategic community engagement process. We are excited to share this process, hoping that the valuable content captured in ‘Co-Lab for Cardigan’ can inform ways to reimagine the future of collective open spaces, with input from the citizens who use and give meaning to these places. Potentially, streets can transition into more-than-human and water-oriented environments with a connected and resilient community, fulfilling the opportunity space to assist in the global transition for our societies to thrive in place.

How to imagine the future of Cardigan Street?

In the context of Cardigan Street, our Melbourne PlaceLab team has developed and tested out a co-design toolkit for a research context, to bring together different members of the community and collaboratively envision the opportunities for the street: this was ‘Co-Lab for Cardigan’.

‘Co-Lab’ had the purpose of bringing together different voices with competing needs and interests around Cardigan Street’s public space. It aimed to unveil the challenges of designing in a limited area for multiple desires, and from this a relational issue stood out: “How do different types of stakeholders collaborate in the co-design of public space?”. It also aimed in collaboration with RMIT landscape architecture academics, to interrogate the role of street design from a rewilding lens, following our key research question: “What’s the street of your wildest dreams?“. In doing so, our intention was to create a consolidated map of Cardigan Street using our ‘Co-Lab Toolkit’ as well a participatory design methodology for creative community engagement.

So, Co-Lab! What happened?

The two workshops were delivered on two days in September, with a total of 23 attendees from across local community, RMIT academics, students and staff, and urban/environmental professionals. Participants were divided into groups led by facilitators from RMIT’s School of Architecture & Urban Design.
The two-hour sessions, started with introductory talks to set the scene around PlaceLab and the Cardigan Commons Research Project.
We also heard from Brent Greene, a Senior Lecturer from RMIT’s School of Architecture and Urban Design, who presented on “Rewilding” strategies from an LA perspective, as precedents to question and reimagine street design’s status quo.

From there, participants broke into groups to introduce themselves, connect, and share their thoughts around the icebreaking question: “What is your favourite public open space?”. Following this discussion, and to immerse the participants in the ambience of Cardigan Street, we then went for a guided grounding walk to explore and consider the streetscape and its design.

On returning to the PlaceLab Melbourne studio, each team member was given their ‘Co-Lab’ Toolkit, which included an instruction zine to guide the co-design process. The first step involved each group discussing the question, “What are your team’s values?” For this, they were provided a list of values from various RMIT strategies and reports as inspiration and asked to choose six values from the list or to create their own for presenting back.

The purpose of the workshop activities up to this point was to foster connections among team members and find shared values. As a playful conclusion to this section, they were tasked with naming their team.
The following stages of the workshop had the now connected participants, working together on their allocated sections of the street, to create a collage-like map of Cardigan Street focusing on the area between Victoria and Queensberry Street.

Participants were then prompted to brainstorm in their groups, the question “What would you like to do in Cardigan Street?”. The verbs/ actions that arose from this discussion were then linked to coloured magnet pieces – or ‘blobs’ (inspired by Tetris configurations), categorised into colours: green for ‘Urban Nature’, orange for ‘Collaboration Zone’, purple for ‘Recreation Zone’, pink for ‘Moving’ and blue to be uses as a ‘wild card’. This common coding across teams, had the purpose of spatially systematising the outcomes of the workshop.

For a second iteration using the ‘blobs’, we adopted a unique perspective, taking on more-than-human personas assigned to each participant. We asked, “How should the street be designed from their perspective?”. Each group was prompted to present the key features of their proposals in a two-minute presentation, while paying special attention to the group working on their neighbouring section of the street. At the end of this exercise, all groups discussed together how to fill in any activity gaps between the sections, resulting in a complete collage-like image of Cardigan Street.

While having the same set of tools and instructions, each of the groups had a different approach and visual language to addressing the exercises. This talks to the different world views, personalities and interests from the stakeholders gathered.

Stay tuned to discover more about what was envisioned in this ‘Co-Lab’!