'My/ your Cardiff public space': Community engagement and participation in Butetown, Grangetown, and South Riverside.

This project seeks to initiate ‘My/Your Cardiff Public Space’, an awareness raising campaign on the social, cultural, economic, and environmental values and benefits of well-designed, used and managed public spaces, in the wake of a significant reduction of public sector expenditure in local authorities’ provision and maintenance of public infrastructure and services. Our main interest is to map routes to empower residents to become active agents in the planning and design decisions of their local public spaces. In doing so, we first aim to understand what really matters to the community, and by introducing a series of workshops. Secondly, we attempt to understand the tactics used by the Council to engage more actively with the residents and how in turn the residents perceived and participated in and with these methods and tools. Here we also aim to understand how the Councill reads and implements the Welsh national framework and how we need to place this in the wider context of participatory practices and theories in the UK and beyond. Finally, we offer some initial recommendations on how citizens can feel more empowered to have more ownership in the decision-making process, and design and maintenance of their local public spaces