Co-creating regenerative futures: The role of architectural and social lab processes in communities shaping their civic and social infrastructures

As part of the CoLab Dudley (CoLab) team, I am working with locals to co-create Street Detectorism and Stories of Place: experiments that employ participatory site analysis, collective reimagining and creative manifestations to reveal patterns and insights that will help to inform community-led regenerative experiments that are rooted in place and prioritise actions for the future collective good (Krznaric, 2020). These projects are initial trials of participatory architecture in Dudley, which the PhD research project would build upon with CoLab and CIVIC SQUARE (CS) through the research question: 'How might a combination of co-creative architectural processes and social lab approaches provide a platform for communities to co-evolve regenerative ecosystems?'

Current literature focuses on the benefits of participatory architecture on the completed building quality (Jenkins & Forsyth, 2010), or post-occupancy impact on wellbeing (Samuel, 2020). This research would explore how participatory architectural processes can contribute to social, experimental and systemic change (Hassan, 2014) and help to build regenerative communities.

The research would implement Mang and Reed's practice methodologies for Regenerative Design and Development (2012). This would involve 'understanding the relationship to place' and its potential through living systems thinking (Krone, 1983-2010) and permaculture (Mollison, 1988); 'designing for harmony with place' through locally embedding 'regeneration capacity' by moving beyond participation to co-creation (Ind & Coates, 2013) and using Cultural Animation methods (Kelemen et al, 2018) to facilitate communities to respond to contemporary and systemic challenges with creativity, cognitive diversity, design justice and communal dreaming (Hansteen-Izora, 2021); and creating a culture of 'coevolution' through integration of network weaving (Holley, 2017) to build relationships and regenerative roles (Sanford, 2020), and CoLab's developmental principles-focused evaluation (Patton, 2017) to aid 'continuous learning and transformation to, and in anticipation of, inevitable change' (Wahl, 2017).

Proposed Structure
Year 1
- Design of a creativity-based research methodology and its transition to future collaborations (Beaule et al, 2021);
- Ethical approval;
- Literature review to develop a theoretical understanding of social labs, co-creative architecture, ecosystems, and regenerative design;
- Case studies - identification and evaluation of projects where participatory architecture and social labs have shaped community ecosystems, with a comparison of place-specific contexts;
- Development of co-creation and research networks, to build relationships with potential co-creators and sharing learning with wider networks;
- Start of pilot study workshop co-design process in context of Dudley High Street.

Year 2
- Thesis structure planning and drafting;
- Pilot study analysis, mapping effects within the Dudley High Street ecosystem;
- Continued literature review and sharing learning with emerging findings in the co-creation and research networks;
- Testing, iteration and analysis of workshop emergent practice with co-creators through Cultural Animation.

Year 3
- Co-design of an emergent framework to support co-creative architecture and social lab processes that contribute to regenerative ecosystems;
- Testing and analysing the framework with CS in the context of Ladywood, and other learning partners in the research network through Cultural Animation;
- Thesis writing.

Year 4
- Framework dissemination;
- Thesis preparation and submission.