Charalambous, N., Panayi, C., & Roussou, E., (2022, August-September). Community-engaged design: learning through live projects in residential environments. In European Network for Housing Research (ENHR) Conference 2022. Barcelona, Spain.

Living environments are complex entities that are constantly changing in terms of demography, social structures, and spatial arrangements. These ubiquitous changes entail the creation of a diverse urban population and have a direct impact on everyday patterns of living, domestic activities, and family structures. Questions of inclusion, equal access to housing, and affordability have been negotiated in the context of globalization, changing forms of production, declining welfare, and developing technologies. Affordable housing to facilitate sustainable cities for all is a significant global challenge; UN-Habitat highlights the importance of empowering and engaging citizens in the shaping of their living environments to ensure a sustainable and affordable development and to contribute to promoting a sense of community by bringing together people who share common goals. Citizens and professionals need to take on new roles while the ability of urban designers, architects, and public planning institutions to effectively adopt new roles and implement a community engaged design approach, is often questioned.

This paper reflects on a community-engaged design approach in a residential neighbourhood in Nicosia, involving architects (students, educators, researchers), residents and other external stakeholders. Participatory Action Research methodology was implemented, due to its participatory context, its reflective framework and circular process of evaluation and improvement and consisted of four phases: 1. design of the co-creation framework (stakeholders, site analysis); 2. implementation of the co-creation framework phase (identification and validation phase-identification of needs, issues, opportunities, threats-, development and selection, assessment and evaluation; 3. the assessing the impact of the co-creation framework phase on participants (interest, opinions, attitudes); the reflection and recommendations. Reflecting on the outcome, the paper discusses the potential of a community-engaged design approach to encourage a sense of community and to empower the citizens as decision makers who have a sense of responsibility for their residential environment.