Scotland's Approach to Participatory Planning: Characterizing the Charrette

Since 2010 the ‘charrette’ has been promoted by the Scottish Government as an effective approach to community and stakeholder involvement in participatory design; yet, there has been little opportunity to formally reflect on the mainstreaming programme that has now delivered sixty charrettes across Scotland.  This paper presents a preliminary review of the programme by focusing on charrette commissioning, construction and delivery as detailed in post-completion reports. The purpose is to better understand what constitutes a Scottish charrette.  For this study the researcher identified forty-six reports published between 2011 and 2016.  A conceptual framework guided report content analysis, which found eight charrette characteristics with sufficient content to derive subcategories.  These characteristics and subcategories broadly describe charrette design and implementation. To conclude, this analysis is used to develop a charrette-descriptor table, which provides a preliminary means to distinguish between different charrette-approaches found in Scotland. 

charrette; participation; design; planning; decision-making