Rinal Hardian #1204240

Community Engagement

Community Engagement Strategy of

Heritage Urban Regeneration Company (GHURC): A Quick Evaluation
As one of essential features in enhancing connection between governments, policy makers
and the communities, community engagement has long been utilised in many sectors of
public sphere, ranging from health, environment, education, politic, socioeconomic, and so
on. Particularly in design and planning sectors, community engagement is considered having
a major role in the success of a project. This is because decisions about the built
environment, such as land use, zoning, and community design, directly affect many aspects of
neighbourhood. Therefore, it is critical to have a well-implemented community engagement
approach to ensure that concerns of community and residents are taken into account in future
plans and projects.
One of the planning projects that puts community engagement into practice is Gloucester
Heritage Urban Regeneration Company (GHURC). GHURC project aims to revitalise several
historic areas of Gloucester City, United Kingdom. As new residential areas, offices, retails,
commercials and the public spaces will be built on the sites; many issues emerge among
communities. Being a diverse city with various different communities and neighbourhoods,
community engagement has become a key success of the programme. GHURC intended to
implement community engagement at a local level using methods that are suitable for each
community. To achieve this goal, GHURC has produced a document (Community
Engagement Strategy revised 2009) laying out the strategies to carry out community
engagement processes throughout the project.
GHURCs Community Engagement Strategy provides broad scheme for the inclusion of
community participation, (channelling public participation and input into decision making).
GHURC planned to create opportunities for the communities in all level of participation. The
Communities are involved from simply just obtaining information to actively participating in
decision making. The strategy also aims to enable all sections of the communities of
Gloucester to contribute to the project. This means the accessibility, transparency and
democratic processes of GHURC community engagement is projected to be carried out to the
highest possible standard (GHURC 2009).
This essay will discuss strengths and weaknesses of GHURCs strategies to engage the
communities in Gloucester City for the successes of heritage revitalisation project. The
evaluation overview of the strategies will be based on four criteria: degree of
representativeness, information distribution strategy, and the level of communication
provided to the community.
As briefly stated earlier, there are several levels of involvement that take place in the project.
These include: informing, consulting, involving, collaborating/participating, and
empowering. This suggests that the strategy aspires to achieve what is called deliberative,
inclusive processes (DIP) of engagement. DIP can be seen as an interactive form of public
consultations, whereas traditional models, such as a permanent advisory committee, an
opinion survey or a call for written submissions are considered consultative but could not be
regarded as deliberative, i.e. the people from a community are involved in such a way to
ensure that they are a proper representation of the community (Carson & Hart 2005).
Therefore, one of the crucial aspects of DIP is the level of representativeness.

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In this regard, GHURC strategy has several strengths. First, the strategy is designed to give a
brief guideline in achieving well identified communities and stakeholders to work with. This
will help the project to measure whether the participants have been representative enough or
not. There are two broad categories of communities that have been identified. First,
communities of place local residents as verified by the census and existing ward
boundaries; and second, community of interest local people identified by other aspects of
their life such as employment, ethnicity or background etc. For community of interest, the
strategy seeks to create and develop several forums that are considered relevant to the project.
These include: a Business Forum, based on existing business and economic associations, An
extended Resident and Community Forum, based on the representative group initially set up
by the City Council, Councillors Forum, Urban Youth Forum, etc.
Second, GHURCs strategy also exhibits some positive aspect in achieving proper
representativeness through the variety of engagement activities that are targeted to varied
groups. Carson (2005) stresses that to achieve higher representation of participants, the
design of an event should not only seek to provide opportunities for an exchange of ideas to
reach consensus, but must also be based on the idea that the event is an adult learning
experience. Therefore, the design of the event also needs to be interactivity, varied, and
allows different entry levels. Among the example of such events in GHURC project includes:
the use of art/artists as a channel of both access and expression of views and ideas of local
communities, targeted approach to local schools, targeted approached to hard-to-reach
groups and so on.
Third, the strategy gives reasonably strong emphasis on so-called hard-to-reach groups in
the communities. GHURC acknowledges that the problems do not lie within the
group/individual but rather on the way of approaching that requires more creativity and effort
in the engagement method being employed. The strategies are directed to ensure these groups
are not under-represented. This helps GHURC to reduce missing voice in its
implementation of community engagement
On the negative side, even though there some directions for the selection the members of
community of interest (for example, in the case of establishing relevant forums and
community ambassadors), the strategy does not provide a clear direction as for the selection
of demographic/structural representation. This could lead to participants are not selected at
random. If this happens, then true diversity and attitudinal representativeness cannot be
achieved (Gastil, 2005 cited in Bruce, 2006). Random selection is important factor to prevent
participation being dominated by squeaky wheels, hence increasing the chance of the voices
of the wider community to be heard (Carson & Hart, 2005).
Beside a degree of representativeness, information distribution strategy is also considered a
crucial element that underpins community engagement practice. Successful information
sharing allows the communities to be aware of the issue and to make a decision whether they
want to take part in a community engagement activity. In regard to information distribution,
GHURCs strategy provides several strengths. First, GHURC utilise wide range of media to
reach the people, such as community newsletter, leaflets, community/local and national radio,
online media, and so on. By using numerous media, the information would more likely to be
well distributed. Second, GHURC recognises special need in information sharing for the
hard-to-reach groups by requiring a variety of approaches such as printing information in a
range of formats and languages and using engagement media which do not exclusively rely
on the ability to read and write. Third, GHURC commits to share good practice and lesson
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learn from the project to other practitioners by developing strong links with other agencies in
the area. This information sharing is conducted through interactive website and email. By
doing so, they can learn from each others experience to improve their community
engagement technique for future application.
However, there is also room for improvement for the proposed strategy. One of these is:
GHURC does not include methods for internal information sharing among staffs. It is
important to develop information provision strategies for practitioners and decision makers to
ensure that they are well informed about the engagement process, up to date about the
progress and aware of any issues that might occur during the process (Queensland
Government 2011).
Next criterion is the level of communication. GHURC intended its strategy to provide
direction in the use appropriate methods and channels to facilitate two way communications
in all aspects of the GHURCs activities. As a result, GHURC provides numerous
opportunities for the communities to communicate and channelling their views and concerns.
This leads to higher level of communication that in return will create a successful and more
inclusive engagement. GHURC also has open and flexible channels to engage the
communities. For example, there are channels for clear and formal structures, such as the
Business and Resident & Community and Urban Youth Forum, steering groups and
consultative panels that are dedicated to facilitate discussions, feedback and decision making
processes. GHURC also utilise informal structures such as community events and a variety
of media, such as video, arts projects or photography, to enable people that are not
comfortable in a formal setting to express their views and opinions.
Nevertheless, the use of flexible channels also has a consequence, especially the informal
one. As noted by Buchy (2000), unless objectives are made clear at the beginning of the
engagement process, an open and flexible discussion with participants could lead to high or
unrealistic expectation. Therefore, any limitations, challenges and their impact on the
outcomes should be communicated early on.
In conclusion, this essay has discussed GHURCs strategy for community engagement in
Gloucester City in term of its strengths and weaknesses by briefly reviewing the GHURC
project based on its representativeness, information and communication strategy. Even
though there are some room for improvement, with more positive implications, it is safe to
say that GHURC provides well-performed strategies to ensure the success of its community
engagement project.

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Reference
Bruce, D 2006, Perth Coastal Planning Strategy: Evaluation of Community Engagement
Processes, viewed 9 May 2012,
<http://www.planning.wa.gov.au/dop_pub_pdf/pcps_community_report.pdf>.
Buchy, M 2000, Enhancing the information base on participatory approaches in NRM.L. W.
Australia, Australian Government, Canberra.
Carson, L 2005, Building Sustainable Democracies, viewed 7 May 2012,
<http://www.newmatilda.com/policytoolkit/policydetail.asp?PolicyID=28&Categor>.
Carson, L., and Hart, P 2005, 'What Randomness and Deliberation can do for Community
Engagement', International Conference on Engaging Communities, Brisbane.
GHURC 2009, Community Engagement Strategy Revised 27th May 2009, viewed 5 May
2012, <http://www.gloucesterurc.co.uk/Docs/Community%20Engagement%20Strategy
%20_Revised%20290709_.pdf>.
Government, Q 2011, Information-sharing techniques, viewed 8 May 2012,
<https://www.qld.gov.au/web/community-engagement/guides-factsheets/methodstechniques/information-sharing.html>.

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