Last week TOWN facilitated the first of the Westwick Row Ideas Exchange sessions – a platform for 15 selected local residents to review and feedback on the evolving proposals for Westwick Row in Hemel Hempstead.

The Ideas Exchange is a form of community review panel that TOWN established for Hartree, our project with LandsecU+I in Cambridge. It assembles a diverse group of individuals who reflect the demographics of the area, ensuring a broad spectrum of perspectives. Participants are selected through a process led by the Sortition Foundation, that aims to represent various ages, backgrounds, and experiences, to comprehensively characterise the local area.

The approach allows TOWN to gain deeper insights into the community’s needs, preferences, and concerns at regular intervals throughout the lifetime of a project and provides local people with a meaningful voice in shaping their environment, resulting in outcomes that are more sustainable and widely accepted.

The first session with the Westwick Row Ideas exchange saw the use of an AI-enhanced participatory platform to capture and synthesise insights from group discussions. This AI engagement tool facilitated the recording and analysis of conversations, ensuring that the diverse viewpoints of participants were accurately represented.