Building the foundations of collaboration: From housing development to community renewal

Abstract

While collaborative governance and planning are seen as an improvement on technocratic “top-down” approaches, they are often criticized for exacerbating power imbalances, failing to be inclusive and/or impartial, and for ignoring historical conflict. This paper aims to investigate how strong foundations for collaborative housing renewal may be built so as to facilitate broader community renewal ambitions. Using qualitative methods and based on two case studies of housing renewal projects in communities described as “deprived”, we found the informal but foundational phase was critical in mitigating contextual and historical factors that had often led to marginalization during more formal negotiations. The foundations for the housing renewal work involved building trust and credibility, collective community capability, a “grounded” agenda and a mandate. We argue that these foundations should not be seen as informal and therefore optional; rather they fundamentally shape formal processes of collaboration and can be used to address tensions between participative and representative democracy.