Working with the council to centre community voices
Designing a more sustainable and inclusive Leeds starts with listening to the people who live here. Meaningfully engaging citizens in urban governance is essential to finding just and innovative solutions in such complex systems.
In partnership with Leeds City Council, academic researchers set out to improve how citizens engage with urban planning. They quickly uncovered a surprising truth: while many people were eager to share their views, their voices were getting lost in the noise. Could breaking down communication barriers be the key to rebalancing power and making more impactful decisions?
Impact
- Civic engagement: responded to Leeds City Council's Areas of Research Interest, supporting its goals to engage citizens in planning and policy
- Strengthened community voice through workshops, addressing systemic power imbalances, and sharing knowledge with the council.
Key information
- Major funders: Research England Policy Support Fund
- Partners and collaborators: Leeds City Council, Climate Action Leeds, Little Woodhouse and Garforth Neighbourhood Planning Groups, Voluntary Action Leeds, Hyde Park Source, Oblong, and Woodhouse Community Streets
- Disciplines: environment, sustainability, policy
- Investigators: Professor Katy Roelich, Dr Martina Ricci, Professor Paul Chatterton, Dr Katy Wright and Dr Radhike Borde.
A shared concern sparks a collaborative journey
Martin Elliot, Head of Strategic Planning at Leeds City Council (LCC), reached out to Professor Katy Roelich after seeing her research on public perceptions of infrastructure, which called for more creative ways of engaging citizens in decision-making in complex systems.
Martin was concerned that, despite their efforts, community voices weren't shaping planning decisions in Leeds as much as they could. He was interested to find out if Katy's expertise offered a potential pathway to help change this.
Around the same time, Policy Leeds opened a call for projects that responded to the Leeds City Council's 'Areas of Research Interest (ARI),' supported by the Research England Policy Support Fund (2023-24).
Katy saw that one of the ARI's focused on 'citizen power and engagement' and aimed to address power imbalances in communities, which aligned with Martin's needs. Together, Katy and Martin proposed a project that would investigate how creativity and the arts could improve citizens' engagement with urban planning decisions. The work was then awarded funding.
The challenge: a disconnect between community voices and planning decisions
As they delved deeper into the area, Katy and co-researcher Dr Martina Ricci realised that many of the community insights the council wanted already existed. However, they were going unheard as systemic barriers and pressures to speed up planning decisions prevented their integration.
Katy said: "It became apparent that the problem wasn't necessarily trying new engagement methods to get new knowledge – it was that knowledge existed and wasn't being used very well."
Discovering this disconnect between community activity and council activity made the team pause and reformulate their project.
A new direction: rethinking power, participation, and processes
What started as an exercise to evaluate the use of creative methods to gather citizen views evolved into a deeper exploration of why existing knowledge wasn’t influencing policy.
The team ran workshops with colleagues at the council, inviting input from local civil servants, community groups, neighbourhood planning groups and voluntary sector representatives, including Little Woodhouse Neighbourhood Planning Group, Garforth Neighbourhood Planning Group, Hyde Park Source, Oblong and Woodhouse Community Streets. They explored participants' experiences of citizen engagement in urban development.
The findings were analysed using the Berkana Institute's 'two-loop model', which describes how systems rise, peak and decline, while simultaneously giving rise to new systems. It posits the coexistence of two interrelated 'loops' and emphasises the importance of both in driving change: while the 'dominant loop' provides stability and order, the 'emergent loop' is essential for generating new possibilities. The analysis highlighted tensions between the 'dominant,' bureaucratic system of local planning and 'emergent,' informal avenues for citizen action and engagement with urban change.
Katy said: "As we went through it became clear that there was a fundamental problem – the planning process is hierarchical, and systemic structures were making it hard to hear community voices. There was lots of activity happening in Leeds where citizens were expressing their views, but the existing structure was making it hard for the council to hear this and use the knowledge to inform decisions.
"This meant that our original plan to encourage people to say more didn't mean anything was going to change. This would increase frustration and make things more problematic. So, we needed to understand both how to make citizens heard and to rebalance power."
This discovery shifted the project's focus from new data collection to improving communication channels. Plus, balancing the needs of the council, community groups, and academic research required continuous recalibration. However, these challenges ultimately strengthened the project's direction, refocusing the research on a more pressing and deep-rooted problem.
Despite this shift, their objectives remained the same: overcoming power imbalances and engaging citizens more effectively in urban planning.
Findings to help deliver change
Katy, Martina, the wider academic team (Professor Paul Chatterton, Dr Katy Wright and Dr Radhike Borde) and partners at Leeds City Council presented a final report (PDF) to project participants in December 2024. It offers local authorities, neighbourhood and community groups 15 key recommendations on how to address power imbalances and "build bridges between the dominant and emergent systems to provide opportunities for meaningful citizen engagement in urban change."
Whilst the report was not the output that Leeds City Council anticipated from the project, Ian MacKay (Head of the Neighbourhood Planning and Engagement Team at Leeds City Council) described how the report "gives his team a licence to refer back to to support them when challenging dominant thinking and a starting point to join up the dots." He said how important this was in the fragmented and risk-averse public sector. The planning team is actively committed to implementing the report recommendations through the Local Plan consultation running through the autumn of 2025.
Though still in the early stages of implementation, the research is already shaping planning strategies in Leeds and has broader relevance for councils across the UK. Martin Elliot noted that the findings had 'opened the council's eyes' to the barriers limiting citizen engagement.
Discussions with the community and voluntary sector are ongoing, as local organisations are keen to apply the two-loop model and use the report to inform their strategic thinking.
Deryck Piper, Chair of the Little Woodhouse Community Association (LWCA) and the Little Woodhouse Neighbourhood Plan Forum (LWNPF), said: "It feels like we can hear our voice in the results – but the framework developed in the report gives us a different way to talk about this that will really help us to push for change."
As the project broadened perspectives on citizen engagement, it revealed the need for further exploration. As a result, Katy and her team are pursuing additional funding to expand the research.
Lessons learnt from changing course
Whilst the project evolved differently from the team's initial expectations, Katy believes this was for the best. "There's a positive in the rethinking and replanning – if we'd pursued the original approach and methodology, the findings wouldn't have been so useful," she said.
One of her key takeaways was the importance of building strong relationships with partners and developing a deep understanding of stakeholder needs, which, she notes, makes for a more compelling case for future research.
Despite this, she found there was a dichotomy in establishing long-term partnerships when delivering short-term projects in a fast-paced policy context.
She said: "It's worth taking time to build relationships, but that slows things down… but then by taking it slow, the research went in a different direction and it feels in a longer term that's going to be more beneficial."