This roundtable invites all participants to explore the topic of spatial transformation. Bring your research, projects, and experience to the table and exchange ideas, methodologies, and challenges across different contexts, emphasising landscape and architectural design, and ecocentric, nature-inclusive, or biodiversity-centric examples.
The session begins with a unique opportunity for Nordic and Western European designers to engage with Yue Ma, a visiting academic from Soochow University, China, who is visiting Oslo for the RSD13 symposium. Yue Ma will kick off the session with a brief presentation, introducing key themes and insights from their work in place-based transformation. Following the presentation, everyone is invited into an open dialogue, bringing together diverse voices in the design field and fostering cross-cultural perspectives on spatial transformation.
RELATED RSD13 PAPER
Community Empowerment: Multi-party co-construction to promote participatory decision-making in agricultural landscapes of older communities
Yue Ma
Currently, the development of cities has entered the era of stock, the number of old communities is large, and the previous top-down model of community renovation is no longer suitable for urban renewal and social development. Since China’s design started late and is mainly limited to the physical space design level, public participation is often more form than content, and empowerment is the core to realise effective public participation. Therefore, understanding old communities’ design from an empowerment perspective is essential for effective public participation. Based on the community empowerment theory, this paper uses the Chengdu Lunan community as the implementation sample.
It analyses the site inductively through participant observation and semi-structured interviews in more than 40 surveys over two and a half years. The site was analysed through participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The community was viewed as a complex system of co-creation, and the roles of each participant in community empowerment were analysed: the government, the neighbourhood committee, the community residents and the designers. By organising the space based on the concept of sharing, we can implement a community regeneration planning paradigm in which multiple participants can build and govern together. The participatory decision-making process of community regeneration has enabled residents to exercise their initiative while the multiple participants perform their respective roles.
This paper studies the new model of community empowerment and multi-party co-construction. It applies to the landscape space of the Lunan community in Chengdu for practice to enhance the old community’s spatial re-production capacity, realise sustainable regeneration, and provide a sample and foundation for the empowerment of the community to be implemented and learnt from. The path of this output can provide a new model for the systematic renewal of old communities.
KEYWORDS: community empowerment, participatory design, older neighbourhoods, agricultural landscapes
PROFILE
Yue Ma is a master’s student in Art Design at Soochow University. She is dedicated to exploring social innovation design and sustainable community development and has a strong interest in future studies and speculative design. Her research primarily focuses on participatory design, urban regeneration, community building, and futures design. Yue Ma has led several national projects and published academic papers in journals and conferences. She aims to leverage the power of design to promote sustainable development while fostering socially inclusive transformations.