Park makers: Stimulating the self-management of public parks

Abstract

The stimulation of citizen participation has led to the upraise of bottom-up citizen communities. These communities grow from idealism but often have a hard time to become a durable initiative when the first challenges arise and the enthusiasm has disappeared. This graduation aims to gather an understanding of how citizen initiatives can be supported by design.

In Rotterdam citizen communities maintain, organise and manage public parks completely by themselves as citizen volunteers. I take these park communities as the case study for the project and research what challenges they face. By creating a design that supports the community in dealing with these challenges, I aim to derive insights on how citizen communities can be supported by design.

The research on the current park context exposed the challenge of getting citizens involved in the park activities. By iteratively specifying and redefining the design goal, it was finally formulated to supporting the park user to become a park maker.

From ideation and design activities, the design of Park Makers was created based on the insights that were obtained on the park context. With this design, park users can match with other park users and propose ideas for the park. The design aims to improve the transparency of the park community and simultaneously manifest the different park users with their unique interests and motivations.

The design was evaluated with park users and the park community. Park Makers is strong in creating an overview of the various park users and the activities they execute in the park. The matching function would be especially of value to lonely citizens. The idea wall and propose idea functions invite citizens to concretize their ideas for the park in a simple manner. When proposing an idea, the rules of the park and the conditions the idea should meet must be clear from the start and need to be integrated in the platform. The implementation plan and costs should be detailed in a further developing phase.

The aim of the project was to research how citizen initiatives could be supported by design. The results from the evaluation research therefore were analysed again to extract guidelines on designing for a citizen participation community. The design of Park Makers enhances the flexible and non-committal characteristics of citizen initiatives and creates an overview of who is in the community and what activities are being organised. The differences of people in the community, for instance their personal interests or motivations to participate, should be facilitated and balanced with contributing to the common cause.

Citizens need to experience the three concepts in the community for them to continue participation. Citizens requires something in return for their work (mutual exchange), the feeling that all members are involved in organising the park (self-organisation) and finally that they are responsible for the park (shared ownership).

The guidelines for designing for citizen participation found in this project can be used to develop more concepts that demonstrate the application of the guidelines. These concepts can then again be evaluated to adjust the guidelines and to keep on improving the understanding of the behaviour, motivations and interests of people in a citizen participation context.