Articulating the Value of Community Engagement in the Built Environment

This research offers a critical review of current community engagement practices in the built environment, advocating for a shift from tokenistic participation to transformative, equity-focused collaboration. It argues that community engagement advocates—such as planners, community leaders, architecture students, collectives, and government officers—can play a pivotal role in challenging traditional and exclusionary practices. By centring the experiences and strategies of these champions, the study aims to reveal how community engagement can be reimagined as a genuinely transformative practice that fosters inclusion and power-sharing.

Therefore, this researcher will aim to understand how to transition from superficial consultation to genuine collaboration with communities while doing placemaking in cities like London, looking at the experiences of these community engagement champions in the built environment. To achieve this, the research involves the collection and analysis of personal data from human participants during interviews, focus groups and an evaluation cafe, specifically professionals within the built environment sector who act as champions of community engagement.