Triangle Community Group Project

Since 2006, the Triangle Community Group has independently and energetically pursued many small projects with the aim of enhancing the local environment, and building an increased sense of community, sometimes in collaboration with other active groups. 

The Project

This On Our Doorsteps project aims to ascertain and produce initial strategies and designs for improving the 'Triangle' of streets and houses in Brighton for which the Triangle Community Group has taken responsibility.  The Triangle Community Group represents residents and businesses living and/or working in the area between Lewes Road, Upper Lewes Road and Union Road. There are almost 1000 households overall.

The collaboration between Triangle, members of the Office for Spatial Research and Architecture students will be a learning experience for all three parties.  Triangle will benefit from seeing how the design process and design outcomes can help in achieving their aims, Office members will experience ways of developing collaborative design techniques and getting their academic expertise out of the academic silo, and Architecture students can learn more about their impact on the communities they live in while at the University, and about the skills necessary to successfully engage in collaborative design by working on this ‘live’ project.

This development project is only the first step towards achieving essential physical changes to streets and houses, necessary for the desired social change.  Initial scoping will uncover measures for tangible improvements that should command consensus in the community and uncover any barriers to those improvements.  It can also instigate small cosmetic changes (e.g. flower planters in some streets) that can kick-start a more ambitious upgrading.  Only a larger project, however, would be sufficiently funded to develop one or more detailed promotion strategies and design solutions capable of commanding the serious consideration of the Council and other potential stakeholders.

The shared learning, knowledge and community experience will have a beneficial impact on everyone involved: community members, academics and students. The needs of the community identified in this scoping phase will find some preliminary answers that could be developed further, through future collaboration.  Both preliminary and developed results could have a considerable influence on planning strategies about the Triangle area and other areas like it.

Project Partners

Triangle Community Group and Office for Spatial Research

Evaluation

Prior to this project, the Triangle Community Group had identified various challenges and needs that they wanted addressed:

• Neglected and shabby streets and housing

• A lack of green space, trees and plants within the immediate vicinity

• The impact of noise and traffic pollution on health and well-being

• Ways to improve the spatial environment for diverse resident groups and local business while preserving a historically interesting and vibrant area

On Our Doorsteps was the catalyst for this project, and its positive outcomes. The stakeholders would not have been brought together without it, and the support given was very helpful. The original choice of partners and the timeframe for their partnership looked feasible at the time of setting it up, but perhaps needed to be examined further before committing to the timeframe we'd chosen.

The relationship between Triangle and the Architecture Programme was one that architects are entirely accustomed to: a professional one in which a client gives the architect a brief, and the architect fulfils that brief. There wasn't so much a partnership between Architecture and the Triangle community as occasional meetings between Architecture and the Triangle Community executive group. This consisted of four people, all of whom were themselves professionals, working either at the University of Brighton or the University of Sussex, or at other institutions, whose jobs for the most part prevented them from meeting when students were available. As the Triangle executive group consists primarily of university employees, the project was much more one in which two sets of university employees talked to each other, than one in which a university entered a partnership with a community.

The Triangle project has become one of a portfolio of projects in which Architecture has engaged with parts of the Brighton community. It was the first in partnership with CUPP, and therefore the first to be undertaken by Architecture with certain explicit social – as opposed to design – aims in mind. As such, and because of the work's warm reception by Triangle, the project is an exemplar of a new way of working with our neighbours, one in which the community's needs are as important as the design outcomes.