A Change of Guard

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Monday, 10 September 2012

A single mother in a Cambodian slum inspired Lucinda Hartley to change the world

Designers don't always know what's best
By Michael Short 
The Sydney Morning Herald Journalist 
September 10, 2012  

[WHO] Urban designer, landscape architect and activist Lucinda Hartley
[WHAT] Tackling social exclusion by transforming neighbourhood design
[HOW] Giving communities opportunities and skills to create their own solutions

ONE billion people live in slums. The United Nations estimates that number will have increased to three billion by 2050, which means one in three people on the planet will be living in substandard urban dwellings - and often squalor - without any security of tenure.
Here, in Australia, one of the world's richest nations, slums and informal settlements are rare. But we are one of the world's most urbanised populations, with about eight in 10 people living in cities. Melbourne and Sydney, in particular, are experiencing the social and economic problems caused by urban sprawl: lack of infrastructure, poor access to services, insufficient public transport, loneliness and isolation, inadequate healthcare, too few schools, and a lack of parks and other public amenities that foster community life. There are one million Australians living in such social exclusion.

In Melbourne, these issues have been exacerbated by successive governments that have allowed the city's boundaries to expand, rather than encouraging and facilitating a sufficient increase in medium-density housing in existing suburbs. The distance between the eastern and western boundaries of Melbourne is now about 150 kilometres - more than the distance between the centre of the city and Bendigo.
The issues here and in poorer countries pose a formidable challenge to urban designers. Today's guest in The Zone has leapt at the challenge; both here and around the world, displaying innovation, imagination and passion to ameliorate the problems.
Lucinda Hartley is a co-founder of a Melbourne-based firm called CoDesign Studio. With her partners, staff and a fast-growing national army of volunteers, she is creating a new design methodology that is already changing how projects are conceived and executed.
Hartley argues there is a fundamental link between the built environment and social exclusion; disadvantaged neighbourhoods typically have poorer quality public spaces, and are less safe and less healthy. So, she has rejected the traditional approach of designers, whereby government and other service providers are seen as the sole providers of infrastructure and plans, based on a project brief, which are simply delivered to clients by designers.
Hartley's core notions are that there are manifold untapped resources in communities and that solutions are best generated from within those communities, rather than by consultants, no matter how skilled they might be.
''We say design is too important to be left to designers … Even though a slum in Cambodia may seem quite different from working, say, on the fringe of Melbourne, the ideas about bringing people into the design process are essentially the same. So we are now working in Victorian cities and towns as well as internationally.
''We believe that public spaces in particular, but all kinds of design, will be better if they have the strong input, or even the leadership, of the people who are going to use them … We don't really do typical design projects. What we prefer to do is focus on building people's capacity and getting their ideas, their vision, their opportunity and really acting as a catalyst to let those things happen…
''It is looking at it from the bottom up, rather than from the top down. What we have seen in the projects that we have done is that it may not be the most beautiful or the most aesthetic, award-winning project, but in terms of the long-term social and environmental sustainability, it is a lot improved because we have got the buy-in of people from the beginning.''
She says fewer than 10 per cent of urban designers work with communities, a figure she is determined to increase.
Hartley's evolution towards urban-design activism started early. Her parents were both academics - her mother a climate-change researcher and her father a geologist - who worked in a number of countries, so she was exposed to various lifestyles and cultures. At 19, she went to Cambodia to teach English, and experienced an epiphany of sorts.
''I met a lady in my class and what inspired me was that she was the same age as me, yet facing huge challenges in her life. She was a single mother, which is a challenge anywhere, but particularly when you're living in a slum in Cambodia. What she did with her resources and the drive that she had to make a change in her own life and her community inspired me.
''And I thought if she is making the most of her life with what she has, then what am I going to do with the resources and skills that I have. At that moment I knew that I was going to follow a path that was to do with social action. I did not yet know that that was going to involve landscape architecture and cities.''
She came back to Melbourne and studied landscape architecture, but was not sure how to apply her community ideas. So she went back to Cambodia and started working with communities to design in slums and informal settlements. One project was supposed to involve creating a traditional school, but it became clear from talking to the locals that the real problem was flooding. ''We built a series of footpaths instead of a school. So it was really a school without a school.''
Hartley returned to Australia convinced solutions were best generated by communities, not governments or experts, and she soon found a group of like-minded designers. CoDesign Studio was launched in 2010 as a social enterprise - a firm that charges for its services but puts the money back into the business, rather than seeking to maximise profit, and focuses on projects that generate a social or environmental benefit. The enterprise was given start-up funding by Social Traders, a not-for-profit organisation set up in 2008 and funded in 2012 to support the establishment of commercially viable social enterprises across Australia.
Since then, Hartley and her colleagues have been working in Australia and overseas. She recently did an extensive project in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's largest city, that involved months of talking with locals in slums across the entire metropolis to come up with a blueprint for improving housing. That is now happening, family by family, dwelling by dwelling, in the two most needy neighbourhoods.
In Frankston, on the fringe of Melbourne, Hartley has been working on creating a centre for young people experiencing mental-health issues. ''Instead of just bringing a design idea to that community and saying what do you think, we have actually got the young people to design the centre themselves … One of the greatest ideas came from a young girl. She was only 16, but had already been through a massive depression and issues of mental illness. Her idea was, how about we create the centre so that the whole thing looks like a journey through mental health, so that people visiting the centre would understand firstly what it might feel like and they would also have this idea that they could progress and improve.''
Hartley used partitions covered in information and illustrations about mental health, and visitors walk through a corridor that symbolises the journey from illness to recovery. ''The building itself tells the story.''
Hartley herself was ill for several years with chronic fatigue syndrome. She says it was the hardest thing she has endured, but something that helped her think through what she wanted to do with her life. It is clear she will spend that life trying to inspire and equip people to solve their own problems.
''Everyone likes the opportunity to meet with their neighbours and create something new. People really care about where they live; everyone cares about where they live. They just don't always have the opportunity or understand how to make a difference in their community.''

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