Radical roots: Addressing inequalities of opportunity through place-based co-design approaches

Through this secondment, Maja Luna Jorgensen, Programme Manager at Health Innovation South West, will be seconded to the Open University to work on a collaborative project with Zebra Collective. The work will focus on "inequalities of opportunities". More specifically, it will explore place-based conditions that enhance or compromise the real opportunities of marginalised communities and citizens to imagine and pursue what they have reason to value in their lives. There is an increasing realisation that social, economic and health inequalities are rooted in places, and that they can be approached as inequalities of opportunities which these places afford for the people who live, work or socialise in them. The available opportunities are often conditioned by personal circumstances, but also structural injustices impacting on the development of skills, social relations, or cultural capital. But places can also have a positive impact in enhancing the agency and capabilities of people to imagine and realise their potential. In this context, community and voluntary sector organisations have played a significant role in reshaping places with the objective to enhance capabilities of marginalised groups and offer equity of opportunities for local citizens. They often do so by delivering and managing local services and spaces, such as community centres, libraries, parks, and even places of worship, and by building networks through which they bridge local people to opportunities outside their place. The activation of these assets and networks for the purpose of creating connected places that truly enhance and level up the opportunities of citizens to achieve what they value is not a trivial task. Indeed, the very notion of place (and the sense of a place), as well as the idea of what a positive future for the place might be, can be heterogeneous and rely on a constellation of agents, assets, approaches, and networks coming together. The aim of this secondment is to explore and develop place-based design approaches that can enable local people to collectively create a vision for their place and uncover and build on their own strengths to achieve what they value as a means for reducing inequalities. The project also aims to increase knowledge exchange and partnership working between academia and practice in the context of place-making. The objectives of the project are to a) unearth the conditions that enable or hinder individuals to achieve what they value, b) develop new place-based approaches and networks to enhance individual and collective capabilities and c) develop and share insights with organisations across sectors. The secondee will build on her experience in using design thinking to support place-based collaboration and innovation, and on the Open University's work on design and place-based capabilities, in order to develop an innovative theoretical and methodological framework to support this work. The secondment will focus on the case of Zebra Collective, a community organisation and co-op committed to social and environmental justice, which delivers training, reflection, and professional development in the social care, health, and community sectors in Plymouth. This secondment will learn from and contribute to Zebra's work on the ground to benefit the local community, particularly around community development linked to the Mount Wise Neighbourhood Centre, and will generate learning and recommendations for those supporting place-based regeneration more broadly.