The aim of the project is to grow capacity for cross-sector design collaboration in placemaking through the use of a creative approach called 'cross-pollination'. The approach was developed and tested in a variety of research-based and practice-based projects in different settings and has proved successful in bringing people together to share and connect their assets (human, economic, cultural, social) as a basis for forming partnerships with the capacity to lead design initiatives. The idea is to scale up collaboration by providing spaces that can enable and empower placemaking actors (local authorities, civic sector organisations, community groups, academic institutions, cultural institutions and businesses) to incubate cross-sector collaborative design initiatives in local areas. The project will engage with three locally based partners who represent three different types of stakeholders or routes to placemaking in different locations in the three nations of Wales, Scotland and England: a local authority (Merthyr Tydfil in Wales), a place commission (Glasgow in Scotland) and a business improvement district (Clapham Junction in England). The activities of the project will help capture and share local knowledge, develop skills and capacity among individuals and organisations, and deliver local impacts.

Under reforms to the English planning system, new powers are being granted to communities to draw up neighbourhood plans in an attempt to produce the 'Big Society'. These plans will take precedence over development plans drawn up at the level of the local authority and thus represent a highly significant potential shift of power to communities in determining how their neighbourhood should function. Crucially, however, the proposed Neighbourhood Forums and Neighbourhood Development Plans seem to ignore the fact that communities are fragmented and that individuals within them may not have a full appreciation of the range of issues facing different people within the same area. Indeed, different parts of the community may have very different conceptions of the geographical area that comprises their 'neighbourhood'. These local understandings may have little or no overlap with the formal legal boundaries that sit across neighbourhoods, making it difficult to interact with the structures of policymaking. The Localism and Connected Neighbourhood Planning project seeks to develop a technique to help disconnected communities come together to gather information and devise creative solutions to mutual problems to inform the neighbourhood planning process. A web-based interface will be built that can be accessed through smartphones to allow community members to gather geographical information about their neighbourhood. This information will appear in the form of online maps comprising boundaries, photos, text and ratings of different areas. Two case studies will be undertaken with neighbourhood groups in Birmingham and Bristol who will be loaned smartphones to gather data about their area. Workshops will be held with community members first to train them to use the smartphone interface and second to help them analyse the materials that they collect. This process will not only allow the community to produce robust information about their area, but in bringing different community members together, will facilitate a process of conversations within fragmented communities to find creative solutions to common problems. The interface will be developed in such a way as to be straightforward enough for communities to use with minimal input from external agencies. This is particularly important as, in the context of public sector funding cuts, third sector organisations that have previously helped communities engage with regeneration and redevelopment are having to scale back their activities. The project will have a longer-term impact through integration with an ongoing undergraduate placement module run in collaboration with Chamberlain Forum, a Birmingham-based umbrella organisation for community groups. Students from the University of Birmingham will be working with neighbourhood groups for the next 3-5 years and will be able to help different communities gather data about themselves to inform neighbourhood plans using the technique developed by this project. The project will work with MADE (Midlands Architecture the Designed Environment) and the Glass-House (a charity focussed on community-led design) to disseminate the technique within the urban design and community sectors. Members of the communities who have been using the technique will take part in a workshop with urban design professionals to talk about their experiences on the project and suggest how it could be further developed.

The four AHRC projects involved in this collaborative grant application share the view that academic theories are not ends in themselves; rather that they must serve the needs of the communities studied. Indeed many scholars have raised concerns about the gap between academic interests for advancing knowledge for knowledge sake and the practical problems and needs of the communities studied by academics (Kelemen and Bansal, 2002). Our collaboration is unique in that it has a dual focus on rigour and relevance and seeks to advance and promote a 'Pragmatist agenda' across the humanities, arts and social sciences. This Pragmatist agenda is rooted in the American Pragmatist philosophical school of thought represented by John Dewey, William James and Charles Peirce. Put simply, American Pragmatism may be described as a practical and anti-foundationalist philosophy that focuses on the future and is concerned with improving the conditions that enable individuals to thrive in their everyday lives. It collapses not only the artificial division between theory and practice, emphasising the link between knowledge and action, but also other restrictive dualisms (e.g. body-mind, subject-object), by a process of inquiry that understands knowledge as a practical activity and the value of theory by the practical consequences and actions it produces (Kelemen and Rumens, 2012). By working together with our community partners, our international academic link and his community partners, we will reflect upon as well as share our existing experiences about advancing theories that meet the dual criteria of rigour and relevance. The project will benefit greatly from a cross-disciplinary approach in terms of both content and mode of delivery. Underpinned by a Pragmatist philosophical approach, the collaboration taps into narrative methods, dramaturgical approaches, visual studies, sociological theories, design studies and community studies. Its innovative mode of delivery includes open participant sessions, drama exercises, experiential workshops, story telling, visual methods and crowd sourcing in an attempt to address issues of language translation and cultural capital across academics and community partners. The work of our Japanese partner which relates to and involves communities affected by the Tsunami (2011) and their way of coping with a crisis situation will benefit greatly our project by providing insights into an ongoing successful collaboration between academics and communities. Professor Kiyomiya's research focuses on what is considered 'actionable' knowledge by communities and what makes knowledge relevant, useful and/or practical at their end. We will produce two installations as a result of the workshops held in the UK and Japan that will tour various venues. The UK installation will also travel to Japan. We will disseminate our findings in conference papers and journal articles and will feed our lessons into the teaching curricula of the five universities taking part in the project.

The proposal considers the contribution community-led design can make to unlock the potential of historic places of worship to be a highly valuable community resource as well as a fundamental part of UK's national collective culture. The aim is to examine how community-led design practices can help empower those that look after historic places of worship to engage effectively with their communities and develop their creative capacity, to think 'designerly' and to realise inclusive and sustainable places. This is what we refer to as 'empowering design practices'. The project focuses specifically on the potential of places of worship to be sensitively adapted for wider community services through community-led design practices and on the impact of these practices on people, communities and place. Our core partners include advisory bodies such as English Heritage (EH) and the Historic Religious Buildings Alliance (HRBA), funders such as Heritage Lottery Fund, design professionals, such as Wright and Wright architects, research-based consultancy bodies such as the Bureau of Design Research (BDR), and design support and infrastructure organisations such as The Glass-House Community Led Design. The academic team will bring in a range of different disciplines and perspectives, from architecture, design research, arts and media to architectural history, heritage studies and cultural studies. The project starts with the observation that advisory bodies and funders for the protection of heritage - such as the Heritage Lottery Fund - are moving away from a model focused exclusively on repairs and restoration of the physical structure of buildings to a model that places a new emphasis on the long term use of these places, the engagement of the larger community in the design process and the co-production of new uses and solutions that will make the places relevant to people and society. However, despite these changes there is a concern that professional design practices are still disconnected from the needs and practices of communities; the processes that support and empower communities to develop and take ownership of their space are not well established; and there is very little understanding of the value of these processes in creating inclusive and sustainable places. The project will use design-based and other creative-based methods of enquiry (design studio, prototyping, visual and emotional mapping, asset mapping, digital storytelling) and will involve a diverse program of engagement with a wide network of communities delivered in collaboration with our partners: from one-to-one support and design workshops with communities, to peer learning events, study tours and networking activities. The project will also include a program that aims to build capacity for research by design in the context of community led design practice.

One of the driving forces behind the Connected Communities scheme is to help communities become stronger, more resilient and self-reliant so that they can adapt and thrive even in difficult times like the economic downturn. Recent research showed that good use of co-design and co-production in community-led developments could support community building, since the participatory approach encourages self-help and positive behaviour changes, as well as create new networks within the community and strengthen existing ones. Effective use of co-design and co-production in community-led developments could get hard to reach groups involved and come up with creative and practical solutions. However, successful use of co-design and co-production in community-led developments is still rare. In most cases, people are not truly treated as co-decision makers or co-developers. The majority of engagements in community-led development projects are confined to consultation practices. Experts observed that engagement activities should not focus on identifying needs, problems and deficiencies, as it could make people look at their communities with negative lenses. It would be more useful to concentrate on assets that a community possesses (e.g. self-help groups) and explore how to mobilise them to create new opportunities. As a result, we are interested in the 'Asset-Based Community Development: ABCD' concept, which begins with the self-mapping exercise to uncover hidden assets. For us, these positive principles will underpin our approach to co-design and co-production, since it concentrates on working with communities to achieve lasting changes. While the original ABCD concept aims to identify assets to create new economic opportunities, we are particularly interested in how to uncover hidden assets - the assets that are currently unrecognised by most community members (e.g. voices of marginalised members). We would like to find out why some community engagement activities include/exclude certain members of the community. What are conditions that enable/hinder community engagement? It is important to explore both practical and emotional barriers, e.g. ethnic/cultural differences that could lead to prejudices and stigmas. Although previous studies suggested that it is unrealistic to expect the same level of participation from all members of a community, there is a need to ensure that community engagement activities are designed in ways that allows active members to shine without making less-active members feel left out. We will explore how to practically make community-led developments more inclusive. We are also interested in exploring how the asset-mapping exercise might help us understand the makeup of a community. The idea is to understand the makeup of a well-functioning community and use it as an example to inspire other communities to realise their potential and help them move towards becoming well-functioning. Our main contribution and innovative element of our proposal is making the invisible (people, assets and the makeup of a community) visible so that they can be utilised to create new opportunities for communities in an inclusive manner. Hence, the aim of the project is 'to find out how to achieve inclusive asset-based community developments through co-design and co-production.' In Phase 1, we will try out different co-creation techniques (e.g. community film making and community-led design) to find out which co-creation activities include or exclude which groups and which activities are likely to identify which types of assets (e.g. economic, social or cultural assets). We will work with communities to learn from previous ABCD projects, reflect on our former community engagement experiences, identify potential barriers and explore how to address them. What we learn from piloting different co-creation activities will help us shape up the agendas and methodology for Phase 2, and plan inclusive co-production activities.