Engaging

Engaging means deepening relationships with people and sites and working collaboratively with others to change a situation for the better. In urban practice, an engaged approach is one that challenges traditional hierarchies—for instance between researchers and ‘researched’, designers and ‘users’—and strives to bring together the knowledge and capacities of different people to catalyse action. Engaged practice acknowledges that those who have been excluded hold unique wisdom about exclusion and its consequences, and prioritises processes of change that are produced collectively and from the ground-up.