Towards Spatial Justice: A Co-Design Guide

The built environment has always been complicit in political change, economic pressures and social movements. It is actively shaped by multiple actors – those in power and those disempowered – with different values, contested interests and varying degrees of agency. At its best, design can be a collective and inclusive process that addresses spatial injustices, empowering all those that the built environment serves, but more often this is short-circuited by ‘community engagement’ conducted at a superficial or tokenistic level.

This research seeks to assess existing forms of ‘community engagement’, identify current challenges that hinder citizens, communities, designers, clients and authorities in engaging meaningfully in a collaborative design process. It has been informed by a survey of 'best practice' in participatory design and exemplary projects that have found ways to integrate co-design into the design process at different scales, which have both demonstrated its value to resultant design and - crucially – empowered those involved.

Whilst the Covid-19 pandemic, Black Lives Matter and climate emergency movements have reframed discourse within the architectural profession as well as wider societal consciousness, they are more often addressed as independent, topical concerns. This research posits that the multiple crises in health, race, climate and others cannot be addressed in isolation and that it is only through the prism of intersectionality that 'spatial justice' can be sought: the housing crisis cannot be remedied without a robust sustainability vision; public spaces cannot truly celebrate neglected histories without addressing entrenched socio-economic inequities; post-pandemic, the city cannot nurture better health and wellbeing for its inhabitants without challenging deep-rooted petroleum-fuelled habits that dictate urban design. Acknowledging the intersectionality of the challenges that the built environment faces, this research poses co-design both as a powerful design tool to uncover inequities and opportunities to redress them, and as an invaluable civic process in the generation, exchange, and application of collective knowledge.

Towards Spatial Justice: A guide for achieving meaningful participation in co-design processes marks a significant spatial turn in the practise of architecture, both at DSDHA and throughout the wider discipline. Supported by funding from the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) Research Fund and the Architecture Research Fund (ARF), this guide reflects a broader shift in how the profession approaches design, moving away from top-down decision-making toward collaborative, participatory processes that seek to address the spatial injustices that exist in the built environment.

Co-design, the practice of engaging communities and stakeholders as active participants in the design process, has since become integral to the methodologies adopted in our studio. Our core value, Community is Context, is directly aligned with the co-design methodology, recognising that the social, cultural, and lived experiences of people are inseparable from the physical environments they inhabit. This guide aims to make co-design more accesible for standard architectural practice, ensuring that architecture as whole is able to respond meaningfully to its social context.

Through our contribution to this work and in our broader practice, DSDHA champions the movement toward spatial justice in the built environment. We recognize the growing necessity of co-design in architectural discourse and practice, as well as its role in advancing the collective goal of a more just and inclusive city. By embedding these principles into our work, we continue to push the boundaries of contemporary practice and demonstrate how architecture can play an active role in creating a more equitable and participatory future.