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Participatory building: How community construction takes engagement to a new level

52 min episode · 2 min read
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Participatory Building

Episode

52 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Design & UX

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Reuse at Scale: The Paper Garden achieved 60% reclaimed materials including donated windows, forestry wood logs, construction hoarding plywood, and office strip-out fixtures, demonstrating unprecedented material reuse for a building of its scale while avoiding landfill waste.
  • Cordwood Construction: This vernacular technique uses wood logs bedded in lime for walls, allowing participants from age six to seventy-six to master it with minimal training, making construction accessible across skill levels and ages in community projects.
  • Training Pipeline: The Triangle site runs paid traineeships teaching vernacular construction techniques to recent graduates and school leavers over extended periods, with three cohorts now trained and the first graduates working professionally in sustainable construction fields.
  • Design for Participation: Architects must shift from claiming ownership over design to facilitating community input, synthesizing contributions while ensuring structural integrity, creating processes where volunteers handle accessible tasks like earth mixing while professionals manage specialized work like plumbing.

What It Covers

Architect Jan Katay describes participatory construction projects where communities, including children as young as six, physically build structures using reclaimed and natural materials, learning vernacular techniques while creating lasting connections to place.

Key Questions Answered

  • Reuse at Scale: The Paper Garden achieved 60% reclaimed materials including donated windows, forestry wood logs, construction hoarding plywood, and office strip-out fixtures, demonstrating unprecedented material reuse for a building of its scale while avoiding landfill waste.
  • Cordwood Construction: This vernacular technique uses wood logs bedded in lime for walls, allowing participants from age six to seventy-six to master it with minimal training, making construction accessible across skill levels and ages in community projects.
  • Training Pipeline: The Triangle site runs paid traineeships teaching vernacular construction techniques to recent graduates and school leavers over extended periods, with three cohorts now trained and the first graduates working professionally in sustainable construction fields.
  • Design for Participation: Architects must shift from claiming ownership over design to facilitating community input, synthesizing contributions while ensuring structural integrity, creating processes where volunteers handle accessible tasks like earth mixing while professionals manage specialized work like plumbing.

Notable Moment

A mother watched her young child point to a wall section at the Paper Garden and proudly declare they built it, demonstrating how physical participation in construction creates lasting ownership and connection to place that consultation alone cannot achieve.

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Episode Transcript

Thinking about your next development? Finding the right piece of land shouldn't be guesswork. The national planning portal gives you powerful land insights, revealing off market opportunities, verified ownership data, and planning intelligence. Make faster, smarter decisions from day one with The UK's trusted home of planning. Discover more at planningportal.co.uk. Hello, and welcome to the developer podcast, where we talk about how to make places worth living in, which often has to do with the spaces between the buildings as much as the buildings themselves. Do you ever feel like the changes that happen in your neighborhood are out of your control? Development and construction is being done to you instead of with you, that can be bad for your health, and some studies have found that neighborhood change affects well-being. That's why it's long been accepted as an important part of the democratic process to inform and consult with local people about changes being made to their neighborhood. Public consultation has been eroded over time with loopholes to bypass it completely, and it can sometimes fail to be meaningful. But on the best projects, community engagement happens, and it plays a vital role in the design process. But what if we could do better than that? What if communities weren't just being engaged with, but were involved in the whole process, including making the bricks for construction. Today, I'm speaking to Doctor. Yan Katay, who is doing just that. Not just speaking to communities, but building with them, taking participatory design and community engagement to a whole new level and giving communities agency in the places being created. I hope you enjoy this conversation. Hello. Thank you so much for coming on the developer podcast. Tell me about who you are and what it is that you do. My name is Jan Katain. I'm an architect and founding director of Jan Katain Architects, and I'm also a lecturer at University College London at the Bartlett School of Architecture. I, think of architecture as something that has a spatial consequence, but also a civic consequence always. And, that really, has influenced, the the the way that I practice, but but also the the way that I do research as well. And the one mode of operation, the research, is interrogating critically the practice and and vice versa. So sitting right in between those two allows me to really critically look at, our profession as a whole and where we sit and stand as architects in terms of our accountability and responsibility to communities and the natural environment. So I think one of the ways in which I came across your work was, some of your projects in which you really collaborated with people to to create them, where the practice of of creating these community spaces, involved people, you know, buildings, you know, with the materials, you know, being actively engaged, not just talking about the future of a project, but being engaged in it. And I think the …

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