By Jonny Popper, Co-Founder and Partner of LCA

The Government has rightly placed housing, public services and infrastructure investment at the very heart of its growth agenda and is making strong progress on speeding up the planning process and enabling greater certainty in decision-making.  In doing so, even greater emphasis is being placed in effective engagement with communities and key stakeholders.

However, traditional consultation methods often fall short in capturing the diverse voices within a community, and councillors, council officers and other decision makers are much more rigorous in seeking to ensure genuine community participation for major development proposals.

LCA is at the forefront of this shift, pioneering an advanced co-design and co-production strategy alongside Steve McAdam, co-founder of Soundings, who joined LCA as Senior Advisor working two days a week in 2024.

Co-design is not new.  It’s been used hugely successfully from King’s Cross to Canada Water, the Earls Court Development Company to Peabody’s Holloway Park.  When carried out correctly, it helps embed residents, stakeholders, and designers in a participatory process that fosters shared ownership and innovation. Effective co-design not only enhances social value but also strengthens place-making, ensuring that developments are responsive to their social, historical, and environmental contexts.

We work to a structured, yet flexible, framework for community engagement, ensuring that developments are rooted in local identity while achieving high-quality design outcomes.

LCA’s 6-Step Co-Design Process

  1. Recruiting and Training Local Design Champions: The process begins by identifying and empowering a diverse panel of local residents, business owners, and community leaders. These ‘design champions’ are trained in urban design principles and place-making approaches, equipping them to actively contribute to the process and advocate for their community’s needs.
  1. Co-Producing a Nuanced Understanding of Place: Through workshops, site visits, and historical research, the co-design team develops a rich understanding of the area’s character, challenges, and opportunities. This stage ensures that all perspectives – including those of underrepresented groups – are captured, fostering an inclusive vision for the future.
  1. Constructing an Ideal Masterplan in Co-Designed Layers: Participants collaboratively map out their aspirations for the site, using iterative layering techniques to explore different uses, mobility options, public spaces, and ecological considerations. This approach allows for the organic integration of community priorities into the evolving plan.
  1. Reconciling Differences and Refining the Plan: Thematic co-design sessions provide a structured way to address conflicts and refine the masterplan. Stakeholders negotiate trade-offs, align competing priorities, and reach consensus on key development principles, ensuring a balanced and widely supported outcome.
  1. Co-Designing a Local Design Code or Detailed Scheme: A further step involves translating the masterplan into tangible design guidance. This may take the form of developing a local design code; detailed plans for the first phase of a scheme, or specific elements such as the public realm. The output ensures that the final development embodies the community’s vision and maintains design integrity over time.
  1. Publishing a Richly Illustrated Statement of Community Involvement (SCI): The process concludes with the creation of an SCI, which documents the engagement journey, community contributions, and final design outcomes. This transparent record strengthens planning applications, ensuring regulatory compliance and demonstrating genuine community buy-in.

Wider stakeholders and political leaders can also be engaged in this process, and of course it is vital to engage the wider community alongside the formal co-design workshops, all of which should be integrated into a single Engagement Strategy, which we produce and drive for our clients.

In our experience, taking the time at the pre-planning application phase to manage this well saves time later, leads to a smoother planning decision process, and directly leads to new developments that contribute to fairer, more resilient communities and higher social value outcomes.

To discuss this and how we’ve successfully managed engagement across a wide range of projects, do come and talk to us on the London Pavillion, or feel free to contact me directly at [email protected].

By Jonny Popper, Co-Founder and Partner at LCA