Re-imagining Doris Lusk Reserve
Phillipstown, Christchurch
Doris Lusk Reserve is tucked behind the Linwood Community Arts Centre and is one of Linwood’s few green spaces. While it hosts a range of popular activities over the summer including the Linwood Village market and multi-cultural festival, the park is often empty and at risk of anti-social behaviour.
Re-imagining Doris Lusk Reserve was a co-design project empowering community to take the lead in developing a brief for the Reserve. By bringing design expertise and participation together, local people helped shape what is needed for this place, developing local agency and capacity. The idea is to raise levels of activity in the park, particularly for families and young children.
Approach
Gather worked closely with local community group Te Whare Roimata, Christchurch City Council, and local residents to create a programme for the project. Over three months, we led community conversations at the Reserve learning how local residents experience the place and what is needed to create a more people friendly place into the future.
Local children took part in a creative site survey and used models to explore what they wanted to experience in the Reserve. A community pop-up exhibition at the adjacent Arts Centre displayed the themes, results and recommendations to emerge from the co-design process in text, graphics and photographs. A particular feature of the exhibition were the 12 models created by children from Christchurch East and Te Waka Unua Schools.
Impact
This co-design process has modelled a tangible way that communities can participate in spatial planning and engagement. Local residents volunteered for roles in various events, invested in community conversations and helped with the children’s site visit and design exploration.
Children’s early involvement was particularly significant, as they not only became more visible in the community, but their insights have brought new thinking and life to the place. Importantly, their connection to the Reserve has been strengthened because they have been given the agency to make it a place of their own.
