JUSTHOOD: mapping visions of equitable urban places with participatory futures
JUSThood is a methodology based on participatory futures that empowers citizens to envision equitable urban places for humans and non-humans by democratizing masterplanning process.
JUSThood is a three-layered approach aimed for participatory action and learning activities consisting of JUSThood methodology for spatial equity based on participatory futures, JUSThood network with regional hubs and mentors, and JUSTHood index to measure spatial equity of urban places.
Cross-border/international
Italy
Spain
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Poland: Katowice city - Koszutka, Dabrowka Mala, Murcki neighborhoods.
Italy: Milan city - University of Milan (Statale)
Spain: Barcelona - Escola sant marc calldetenes
It addresses urban-rural linkages
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
Yes
UrbanCommunity micro-grant
No
Yes
As an individual
First name: Tatiana Last name: Efremenko Gender: Female Nationality: Kyrgyzstan Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: Via Maggianico 6 Town: Milano Postal code: 20156 Country: Italy Direct Tel:+393661957632 E-mail:tatiana.efremenko@polimi.it Website:https://www.justhood.net/
JUSThood is an innovative methodology that empowers inhabitants to envision the design of urban places in equitable way. Based on a design-driven approach, JUSThood is a game-based method positioned at the intersection of three topics – masterplanning, spatial equity and participatory futures.
JUSThood methodology (already developed and tested) consists of three phases - 1) cooperation with a community leader, where the JUSThood mentor introduces the concept of spatial equity and importance of masterplanning. The goal is to leverage on and enhance the role of community leaders in urban places and neighborhoods; 2) participatory futures workshops with residents, where participants learn about spatial equity and masterplanning process through futures-driven approach; and 3) developing masterplans, where the input from the workshops is translated and developed into master plans which are installed in cities to become visible and accessible to citizens. The methodology offers diverse insights of local residents to inform the work of professionals, helps inhabitants to expand their imagination and find their desires about their places, raise awareness about different users and develop empathy for them, and become conscious about the spatial surroundings beyond their private home units.
JUSThood network (in the process of establishment) is a network of hubs and JUSThood mentors in different countries who are trained in spatial equity and participatory futures approaches. Each hub along with its mentors introduce JUSThood methodology to local communities, co-design urban places with them, and share best practices and insights with the hubs in other countries.
JUSThood index (in the process of development) is a tool which can be used to measure spatial equity of urban places. It allows to quantify and operationalize spatial equity concept to bring it to the table with authorities.
The goal of initiative to mainstream JUSThood approach in urban design and place
Spatial equity
Participatory futures
Inclusive design
Masterplanning
Design foresight
JUSThood methodology fosters participants to think environmental implication through the game-based participatory workshops by envisaging various What-if climate scenarios, and also adopting the perspectives of non-human personas (e.g. plants, animals) when thinking about the design of places.
JUSThood index will measure spatial equity of urban places which is crucial to include in sustainability agenda to ensure sustainable places are designed for all, and not only privileged groups.
JUSThood methodology allows participants to express their creative thinking and imagination when immersing themselves in various scenarios and designing urban elements within them (e.g. What color would the buildings be if the mayor of the city was a 9-year old kid?). By merging speculative questions with the specific questions about the aesthetics of urban places, participants can go beyond their conventional ideas of how things and places should look like. Thus, JUSThood brings new ways to design places by connecting with the imagination, emotions and feelings of participants. When designing cards for children in the school environment, cards have been based on three pillars: Emotions, Activities and Uses, and Imagination, which helped children to uncover their emotions in various places of the school territory
The key objectives of JUSThood in terms of inclusion are:
Train community leaders and other involved stakeholders in the principles of spatial equity.
Allow participants to immerse themselves in scenarios of different personas, imagining their needs, abilities and preferences by expanding imagination with What-if and Persona cards during participatory workshops to allow participants. This exploratory imaginative approach encourages a dialogue between different groups to express not only their needs to each other, but also think about the needs of other (humans and non-humans) who might be excluded from the participatory process.
Explore a wide variety of possible futures by employing the futures thinking approach, as well as acquire the sense of power and agency to be able to shape one’s futures rather than follow prescribed future development from top-down.
Develop and promote JUSThood index to allow city stakeholders to measure spatial equity in urban places to understand where inclusion practices have to be employed.
The involvement of citizens has been:
Getting training in spatial equity principles and futures literacy application in urban design (what-if alternative scenarios) for community leaders;
Participating in the workshops based on design-driven and futures approach
Generating input and co-designing the master plans of neighborhoods
The impact of the citizens involvement can be expressed as follows:
Citizens acquired the sense of ownership, responsibility and action for their neighborhoods by working with and getting access to the masterplans of their places
Citizens and community leaders acknowledge the diversity of users in their neighbourhoods and develop empathy for them
Citizens acquire a holistic and systemic view of their neighbourhood, beyond their private home units
During the implementation phase, local community leaders on neighborhood level were engaged in the first phase of the JUSThood methodology - “Bidirectional cooperation” where together with JUSThood mentor, community leader filled in the “Neighborhood profile” to map and analyze existing situation and challenges that exist in an urban place. Then, community leaders were involved throughout the project by co-facilitating participatory workshops and co-design final masterplans.
When the workshop was conducted in a school, the head and teachers of the school were engaged by receiving the training in spatial equity and futures thinking, and later co-facilitating workshop with schoolchildren.
JUSThood methodology is based on a multidisciplinary approach, which covers the following knowledge fields:
Urban design
Futures Thinking
Design foresight
Social sciences (in particular anthropology and sociology)
JUSThood methodology was co-created by one representative from Academia specialized in Urban Anthropology and Design Foresight, one representative from practice specialized in Urban Design and one representative from practice specialized in Placemaking. Integration of the methods was an enriching process, in which design tools and futures thinking tools were adapted and applied to urban design. The goal was to understand how design tools can help to create various urban narratives and navigate participants to map their ideas and interventions on the masterplans, which later can be used by urban professionals to build spaces.
JUSThood tackles the three current challenges. First is that masterplans are largely used in a top-down way. They usually represent the scale of cities and districts with zoning and listed rules. But, they are difficult to comprehend and get access to for the general public. There is a need to create human-scale neighbourhood-, street-based plans for more effective implementation. When developing master plans, architects and planners frame the quality of life of people and make decisions about the way they live in cities. Masterplanning mostly considers the physical environment based on spatial analysis, but it cannot count for what community life looks like. This is a top-down approach, where the planners exercise their own imagination of future cities. As a result, the lack of community input can alienate it from the future vision of the area. Therefore, it is necessary to create smaller-scale and flexible master plans and shift to a bottom-up approach by democratising master plans to create a rich urban social life. Second challenge is that conventional participatory approaches often do not expand the imagination and possibilities of people and places. Most of the participatory events try to solve specific problems in the areas, and being solution-oriented, it is difficult for participants to uncover their desires, or what could be imagined beyond typical interventions. Thus, there is a need for more participatory alternatives. New innovative, artistic, experiential approaches could have a great influence on citizens’ sense of belonging, imagination and commitment to action. Third challenge is that participatory approaches often struggle to truly include various stakeholders (including non-humans) as the field of urban planning has been historically dominated by men, and mainly responded to their existing behaviours and uses, rather than creating new ones for others.
JUSThood methodology can be and already has been replicated in various geographical contexts in Europe - Poland, Italy and Spain, as well as in various urban contexts - neighborhood, street scale, university campus and school yard. At the same time JUSTHood methodology with its tools can be used by various stakeholders depending on their goal.
JUSThood methodology can help communities and community leaders to uncover their visions for urban places and formulate them into concrete strategy and master plans, which can be delivered to public authorities or look for funding opportunities.
JUSThood methodology can help public authorities to design and implement community engagement strategy in a creative and innovative way. It can also help urban professionals to embed spatial equity principles and facilitate community engagement processes in design of the projects, or real estate developer to develop new estates go beyond creating physical layout and establishing business processes by bringing spatial equity and inclusive principles in design of the projects.
The JUSThood method is placed as a bridge between the participatory activities and designing the master plan by planners. It is placed as a bridge between the participatory activities and designing the master plan by planners. The methodology consists of three phases:
First phase is a bidirectional cooperation with community leaders. In this phase, a community leader has to fill out a “Neighbourhood template” to provide basic information about the neighbourhood. The JUSThood mentor introduces the concept of spatial equity and the importance of masterplanning. Training the community leader is crucial to ensure a bigger impact on the community. Afterwards, community leaders reach out and invite communities to the workshops. This phase helps to prepare the base plan for the neighborhood area for the workshop and provides basic master plan resources to the community leaders, who often lack any sort of maps and plans.
Second phase is participatory futures workshop with residents. In this phase, residents join a participatory workshop. Design-driven foresight approach (Buhring, 2017) has been used to develop a workshop methodology. Three sets of cards were designed to engage people in creating scenarios and working with master plans: cards with (1) What-If questions; (2) Persona; (3) Urban Design Elements. Several prototypes of the cards have been developed and tested before the actual implementation of the project. Below is the description of the development process of the cards.
Development and installation of the master plan. Based on the input from the first two phases of the JUSThood method, the master plans of the areas are created by professionals - city planner, urban designer, urbanist, architect, landscape architect. After, the plan is permanently located in the project area in the neighbourhood. The goal of this phase is to democratise and make master plans more accessible and visible to inhabitants.
JUSThood largely tackles the three following global challenges:
Fighting inequality - inequality includes gender, age, ability, species inequality. With the JUSThood methodology it makes it possible to include different voices in the participation process, even those ones that cannot be physically present or heard during the co-design workshops (with the help of Persona cards). JUSThood index will make it possible to measure and compare the spatial equity of urban places to highlight, voice, discuss and improve places to make them more equitable.
Contributing to sustainable cities and communities - JUSThood contributes to transformative placemaking by creating places for all, including humans and non-humans. It brings the urban design process to the local scale to extract local knowledge and expertise which is valued, used and carried on by the communities.
Contributing to democratization of governance - JUSThood brings the top-down masterplanning process close to communities and empower them to use and co-create masterplans for their places, as well as installing them in the neighborhoods. It also allows to use futures thinking to think the impossible and question the status quo of our societies and processes.
Completed outputs:
Masterplans for 6 urban places has been co-created with the JUSThood methodology
4 community leaders are trained in the JUSThood methodology and 126 participants got acquainted with spatial equity principles, futures thinking and masterplanning process through participatory workshops
3 versions of JUSThood cards have been developed and tested for neighborhood, university campus and school yard.
Planned output:
establish JUSThood hubs with mentors at least in 10 countries in Europe and 10 countries outside of Europe by the end of 2023;
train at least 20 JUSThood mentors in the methodology across the countries;
create an online database on www.justhood.net with implemented projects and case studies around the world;
organize several webinars to discuss participatory futures and spatial equity approaches in different countries.
create the JUSThood index based on rigorous research by July 2023;
write an academic and non-academic publications and index methodology;
promote the open-source JUSThood index package across urban organizations and local authorities for deployment
JUSThood contributes to the skills of Envisioning sustainable futures: futures literacy and exploratory thinking through participatory futures workshops.
