Over 10,000 people involved in the co-design of their town. A $26m programme of capital improvement of the spaces and places that make up people's everyday lives in a poor former coal-mining town, founded upon an initial grant of just $200,000. A new network of civic organisations supporting urban renewal. A programme of popular design that has leveraged over $500m new public and private investment.
The Castleford Project started in 2003. People living in the former coal-mining town in West Yorkshire, England wanted the public spaces and places in their town to improve. Media broadcaster Channel 4 Television wanted to support the process, as part of its wider commitment to participating in contemporary culture.
Since that time, an innovative programme of public participation has followed. People living and working in the town nominted sites they wanted to see improve. Supported by Channel 4 and the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment, a team of cultural entrepreneurs, design and property advisors was formed to lend support and devise a project plan. A new network of community stewards selected competing architects and landscape designers. A programme of social, economic and cultural activity ran alongside the concept development of designs of new public spaces. And since 2005, 11 projects across the town have been co-designed and delivered, from small improvements to local parks, to new play facilities, a new town square and a new architect-designed pedestrian bridge.
As a result of the process, three new community groups have formed and are now in their fourth year of existence. Local artists and artists from Europe and Cuba have been commissioned to provide the town with new works of public art. Improvements in the town have rolled out. And over $500m of new residential and commercial investment have been ear-marked for the town.
The project is an outstanding example of how initial seed corn investment funding of renewal can enable creative and cultural initiative that engages the community and public agencies on a town or community-wide basis that in turn triggers the delivery of a larger, on-going process of regeneration and renewal.
The Project has been cited as best practice in community-led renewal by the U.K. Government and has been presented at design events in the U.K., United States, Europe, Russia and China.
The implication of the project is that there are routes to place-making and transformational social and physical change that are design-led but can more closely align with local identity; can position the designer as social broker and catalyst, rather than author; and projects that involve communities on a town-wide scale can act as a catalyst to longer-term, sustainable change, a shift in values and community confidence.
The entire process will be the subject of a ground-breaking series of TV documentaries on Channel 4 in the U.K. in 2008.
