Can participation in design deliver a better public realm? I doubt it. This conflicts with my political and democratic instincts which incline towards allowing non-experts some say in decisions about the public realm, but I draw the line when it comes to design.
There is plenty written on why participation is a good thing, yes. But much of this is cloaked in mushy pseudo-scientific and circular justification. It’s a good thing, surely, makes practitioners and participants feel all warm and fuzzy inside, it is democratic (if you can be at all arsed to participate), and anyone who argues against is labelled appropriately and escorted to the nearest exit.
The only defence I accept is that policy development, and also design, is as much about processes as it is about the prescriptions and outcome. A Mexican architect, and old acquaintance, was so frustrated by academic witterings on participation from years of working in development projects and despaired when locals invariably prioritised rebuilding the local church over better sanitation and a reliable potable water supply. Local examples of this are articulated later, but generally people don’t have a clue as they’ve not been given any training in aesthetics.
Leaving aside whether people are able to sensibly prioritise (it is not an entirely rational process), it is a fact, probably, that most people have little idea about good design, and are quite happy to defer decisions about such things to their personal shopper, architect, home cook or interior designer – or sublimate their desires by watching some food or house porn TV. For there is an art, or is it a science, to getting design right even in food. Colour, proportions, perspectives, illusions, tonality, density, balance, taste, smell. Some of us have a deep understanding of these things by intuition or perhaps through practice, but most of us simply haven’t a clue and just “like what we like”. We need professionals to tell us what is good and what is bad and not the marketplace, which has yielded a land of mostly ugly clone estates. We should not make the mistake that getting involved in the process means that you are qualified to specify the design of the public realm as if it was your own living room or their back yard or their garage. Typically local groups are fixated on a single issue (an abandoned piece of land, a derelict building) united by a desire to do do something. This is often frustrating for them (because meddlesome bureaucrats tease them with show stopping arguments). But this just winds them up and they get someone to design them a sculpture or a planting scheme which is plonked incongruously in the slot, without any consideration for the design. This process too is supposedly democratic, but where’s the taste?
I can’t afford a personal shopper nor an architect, but have learnt that careful / deep research, selection of quality materials, artisanal techniques and time honoured tradition trumps my DIY / ‘have a go’ instincts at design. Sure, sometimes my first idea is the best one, but it doesn’t always meet the design brief. I am happy to spend time learning about why something works or doesn’t, design-wise in the same way that I am happy to spend time understanding how to appreciate music, which probably means you’ll really hate my music collection. I am happy to let professionals and learned types, academics or autodidacts, stretch my appreciation of things to things I thought I didn’t like. I am disturbed by how the role of professionals is continually undermined by psuedo-democratic decisions, phone-in democracy, vox pop, media-assisted medical prescribing, participatory consultations claiming to get beyond the usual suspects or otherwise.
Design for the public realm really needs a coherent and strong set of design principles, and clear boundaries, or else the we end up with a hotch potch which appeals only to the lowest common denominator – amplifying the worst and obscuring what’s really valuable. So don’t let the process lot fool you into thinking that democracy has good taste, quite the contrary, as man of the moment Grayson Perry so cogently asserts.