On a good day 3% of people will comment on planning proposals in their area meaning that vital decisions are being made about our places without the input of 97% of the population. Planning engagement tends to be very technical and dry. Often communities get fed up with being asked what they want only to discover that their ideas have been ignored and their time wasted, so called consultation fatigue. The situation is particularly difficult in Cambridge where so many new developments are going on and the city is under such pressure from the government to grow.
The Cambridge Room aims to change all this by creating a series of inclusive and impartial spaces for accessible, engaging and impactful debate about the future of our city and the area around it. The first of these spaces is opening in the Grafton Centre, the heart of our community, next week. At its core the Cambridge Room is a research project that aims to find out how to do planning consultation better. When the government is putting so much emphasis on the economic development of Cambridge how can we make sure that communities aren’t left behind?
Now more than ever, our city needs spaces where people can come together to help decide our way forward and ensure everyone can be involved. The Cambridge Room is a vital element of this, a place where everyone can imagine a future and draw, paint, debate and share what they think a good future looks like.Cllr Katie Thornburrow.
The ‘urban room’ is a concept with a rich history - a place for the community, universities, local authorities, industry, practice and other organisations to come together to discuss – and do research on – the future of their city. Sir Terry Farrell popularised the term ‘urban room’ in the Farrell Review (2013), with the idea now being modelled by the Farrell Centre in Newcastle Upon Tyne. The Farrell Centre and the Cambridge Room are just two of a series of urban rooms popping up across the nation led by the Urban Room Network.
The thing that makes the Cambridge Room different is its focus on changing the planning system. It plans to do this by getting communities involved in data gathering about their places, creating maps that can be used as a foundation for decision making. This won’t happen without imagination, innovation and fun.
The design of the Grafton space was shaped through an ideas and logo competition, which invited contributions from local architecture organizations and students, an "evolving kit of parts," was created by Victoria Fabron, Eric Martin, Pawel Pietkun, and Luciano Ingenito from the Cambridge studio of architects Allies and Morrison. In the room you will find an exhibition, Living Atlas: 100 Years of Community Activism in Cambridge, which invites visitors to help us chart the history of planning activism in the city.
The Room will play host to a variety of events that will shine a light on planning in the Cambridge region, inviting collective action in this area. Its core mission is to be inclusive and local, to add value through knowledge sharing, to be creative, independent and participatory. The team will learn from the consultations taking place across the region, building up an archive of knowledge about how to do consultation well. Please get involved.
The Cambridge Room is at Unit 57, the Grafton Centre, and will open regularly on Wednesday and Thursday every week until the summer and on other days for events. For more information and updates see www.cambridgeroom.org