The Spacemaker?s Guide to Big Change: Design and Improvisation in Development Practice

This book gives definition to participatory practice as a necessary form of activism in development planning for cities. It gives guidance on how practice can make space for big and lasting change and for new opportunities to be discovered. It points to ways of building synergy and negotiating our way in the social and political spaces ‘in between’ conventional and often competing ideals – public and private interests, top down and bottom up, formal and informal, the global agendas which outsiders promote and the local needs of insiders, for example. It offers guidance on process, designed to close gaps and converge worlds which we know have become divisive and discriminatory, working from the detail of everyday life in search of beginnings that count, building out and making meaningful locally, the abstractions of the global causes we champion – poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, resilience.

Practice – the collective process by which decisions are negotiated, plans designed and actions taken in response to needs and aspirations, locally and globally – we will see, is not just about being practical, but more. Its purpose is to give structure to our understanding of the order and disorder in our cities today, then to disturb that order when it has become inefficient or inequitable, even change it. It is to add moral value to morally questionable planning practice and so build "a social economy for the satisfaction of human need." Practice in these spaces ‘in-between’ redraws the boundaries of expectation of disciplinary work and offers a new high ground of moral purpose from which to be more creative, more integrated, more relevant, more resourceful – more strategic.

Nabeel Hamdi is currently Emeritus Professor at Oxford Brookes University. After qualifying at the Architectural Association in 1968, Nabeel worked for the Greater London Council, where his award-winning housing projects established his reputation in participatory design and planning. From 1981 to 1990 he was Associate Professor of Housing at MIT, where he was later awarded a Ford International Career Development Professorship. Nabeel won the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour for his work on Community Action Planning in 1997. He founded the Masters course in Development Practice at Oxford Brookes, which was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2001. Nabeel has consulted on participatory action planning and the upgrading of slums in cities to international development agencies, charities and NGOs worldwide.