Connecting Across Boundaries

Capturing aspirations for boundaries/connections and environmental resources. pdf download

Goal: To understand connections and identify environmental resources and aspirations for their role in the community’s development.

Audience: All residents, in a variety of focus groups.

What you need:
– Paper
– Pens/pencils
– Maps of the community
– Representations of options
– Stickers

Description

The aim of this tool is to understand connections within the community and between the community and the wider region and to identify environmental resources and social value associated with these resources as well as aspirations for their role in the community’s development.

This tool is divided into two steps. The first step aims to discuss design options for what emerges from previous analysis and research and looks specifically at the key boundary/connecting spaces of the research context. The process is designed to engage residents’ desires as to the closed or permeable character of the community’s edge conditions and explore different possibilities of profiling as a way to either connect/enclose the neighbourhood to/from the wider area. On an intermediate scale, the exercise can allow discussion around possibilities for collective spaces, and on a macro level the exercise can help to verify priorities in transport connections between the community and the rest of the city.

The second part of the exercise is aimed at investigating residents’ opinions about natural assets within the physical context of the community which connect the area to adjacent parts of the city or countryside. The aim is to understand from the members of the community about the possibility of shared natural resources, which can double up as recreational spaces within the community, and also opportunities for connection to a wider ecological network of protected spaces.