My Mainway: Designing in Dignity for Policy Making

This chapter addresses one of the enduring challenges when considering the dignity of participants in large scale policy making. Dignity is closely associated with personal autonomy, with having the freedom of self-determinacy, however policy and especially policy making for the urban environment must take a collective view. This collective view will involve experts through professional training in addition to experts through experience (for example local community members). We present here a case study where Lancaster City Council, in the NW of England, wanted to set up an inclusive, respectful process to determine the future of a run-down housing estate, known as “Mainway”, in the centre of the city. The estate consists of 257 dwellings with about 500 inhabitants and is owned directly by the Council. It has significant challenges in terms of anti-social behaviour, crime, drug use and a high turnover in tenants. Additionally, the fabric of the buildings is deteriorating, in 3-4 years, the buildings will start to become unsafe.

We were asked to design a participatory process that gave tenants and other community members a strong and inclusive contribution to the discussion about what to do with Mainway. This was challenging, not only with COVID restrictions but also the residents of Mainway are very heterogeneous. Some were active ‘meetings goers’ but others had very different perspectives, these included people suspicious of all authority and people who seldom left their flats, with some never leaving at all due to extremely poor health.

The result of this was the My Mainway initiative. In this chapter we describe the first 12 months of this ongoing project. Using a framework of dignity inspired by legal design, we will explore how a complex, £35 million urban regeneration project can be understood in terms of dignified participation that gives a voice to the seldom heard, is fair and respectful, and offers advocacy to those in need.