Ian Richie Architects and Merthyr Tydfil Council.
Meaningful Consultation and Collaboration - Ensuring the community shape their future.
Beginning
Ian Ritchie Architects invited us to work with them as part of a team of experts to help create a master plan to develop Merthyr Tydfil, to reinvigorate the historic assets and imagine outstanding ideas which would elevate the expanded 100 hectare park, and re-energise the people’s pride in their history, culture and environment: The Cyfarthfa Plan.
Our role was to design and facilitate workshops with stakeholders from the town to investigate with them, the rational and themes to inspire, stimulate and guide the plan. The workshops would also test, define and describe how individuals, groups and visitors to the town would experience the realised plan and how citizens would play an active role and benefit from it. A vital element to the overall approach of the project was that the town would be involved and truly consulted.
Middle
Following meetings with the iRAL team to understand the combined approach and visits to Merthyr Tydfil, we firstly delivered a workshop with a group of stakeholders which included individuals from the museum, planning, local environmental and arts groups, the council and the Design Commission for Wales. The enjoyable and active workshop used storytelling to unpick what was truly important for the town to keep, represent and grow from (and what had to be avoided and solved). The participants created stories to investigate how the Cyfarthfa Plan could grow with and for the residents of Merthyr Tydfil. Later in the project a second workshop was delivered (online due to Covid 19) with the same stakeholders to explore the iRAL team’s plan before it was launched. The participants imagined how visitors and citizens would experience the developed landscape, cultural, creative and heritage sites and test if the intended themes represented were being realised and told through them.
End
We were delighted that the participants to our workshops were surprised that they enjoyed themselves so much while they also felt they were being meaningfully consulted and involved in something that was important to them. The outputs of the workshops contributed to the design team’s plan and how it was articulated using the themes that had risen from the workshops. The second workshop helped to identify what wasn’t being successfully communicated and consolidated what was strong and inspirational about the Cyfarthfa Plan, ahead of it being launched by Merthyr Tydfil Council.
