Including All Voices

The effects of climate change are unevenly felt by people who are under resourced and vulnerable to temperature fluctuations.

This inequality is on a trajectory to get worse so focusing on climate equity is essential. Our ‘Including All Voices’ session explored how the built environment sector can work differently to create resilience initiatives that bring everyone with them.

Speakers

• Jacob Heitland, Director of Climate Action, Newham Council (Chair)
• Slaney Devlin, Chair, Somers Town Neighbourhood Forum
• Martina Juvara, Strategic Planner & COP Delegate, Urban Silence
• Fola Olaleye, Senior Consultant, Jacobs
• Kuljeet Sibia, Senior Design Manager, London Legacy Development Corporation

Jacob Heitland, Newham Council

Jacob is Director of Climate Action, a new role at Newham Council. The borough is at high risk of extreme heat and flooding, and average incomes are low, he said.

Newham has a low carbon footprint and a high-performing circular economy: “abject poverty forces resourcefulness”. But resilience must be about a transition to a just, fair and joyful economy.

• The sobering reality is that climate change triggers cascading effects, Jacob warned. Vulnerable individuals experience multiple impacts at once; for example, living in a neighbourhood with high air pollution that also lacks emergency service capacity.
• Just resilience initiatives must be grounded in local lived experiences. Residents should be involved in service development – community ‘engagement’ is not enough.
• Local authorities need mechanisms to bring together multiple stakeholders and interweave professional capacity and lived expertise in a meaningful way. This means factoring in different actors’ access to time, space, energy and values – through contracts ‘from the many to the many’.
• The public sector needs to build a coherent approach to climate resilience. On a local authority level, strategies for public health, transport and climate should reinforce each other. On a London-wide level, Jacob asked, why does the GLA’s London Growth Plan undermine its London Climate Resilience Review?

“It takes time to build trust. It takes time to build social infrastructure that capitalism has often eroded. So how do we balance establishing these with keeping pace and the pressing need for climate action, pretty much yesterday?” – Jacob Heitland

Slaney Devlin, Somers Town Neighbourhood Forum

Slaney leads a community forum in Somers Town in Camden. Somers Town is an area with high climate risk and deprivation, Slaney said.

Residents have families across the world who are already experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change. Somers Town Future Neighbourhood is plugging into this global picture to encourage engagement with local resilience.

• Somers Town is one of twelve ‘Future Neighbourhoods’ funded by the Greater London Authority to enable a green recovery from the COVID pandemic.
• Residents are interested in present challenges. Talking about the current energy crisis, creating green jobs and addressing poor air quality has helped to build broader buy-in with resilience.
• The community looked at the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals when writing its resilience strategy. They worked back from crises in the global south and thought about what could be done locally in Somers Town.

“Often the most vulnerable places do have social infrastructure. I know my little part of the world very, very well, and we have an extraordinary social infrastructure. So the question for the sector is, how do you support and harness that?” – Slaney Devlin

Martina Juvara, Urban Silence

Martina is a strategic planner and director at Urban Silence, a strategic planning and masterplanning company.

Climate disasters happen when places or people can’t recover quickly from extreme weather events, Martina said. If we cannot control the events taking place, we can definitely try to understand what makes places or communities vulnerable and plan to accelerate speedy recovery. Understanding and mapping vulnerability is essential to prioritise resilience by taking an evidence-based approach in planning.

• Barcelona is leading by example. The city has mapped vulnerability to inform where shelters for extreme weather events are placed as a priority.
• Climate disasters create knock-on effects, as different parts of city infrastructure depend on each other. Digital technology, like the Climate Resilience Demonstrator (CReDO) – a Digital Twin Hub initiative supported by Anglian Water, BP and UK Power Networks can explore cascading risks at a city level – but it has yet to include the impact on different communities and how deeply affected they might be.
• UNDP and Culture Pulse are exploring digital twin technology and AI to profile in detail individuals and behaviours: this has the potential to model scenarios of vulnerability and impact of different resilience policies.

“Budget constraints are naturally a good guardrail to help us prioritise. But budget allocations should really be thought as investment in the lives and livelihoods of future generations.” – Martina Juvara

Fola Olaleye

Fola is Senior Consultant at Jacobs, a global engineering solutions company.

It’s essential that professionals approach community engagement as an opportunity – not a challenge, Fola said. Lived experience is immensely valuable to make services that work for those who need them.

• Professionals should think more widely about who they are designing for. What are the various profiles of local people? And how can an intervention make their lives easier or better?
• Practitioners need to do the work to bridge communication gaps with people who live in the areas they are trying to improve.
• The Smart Places team at Jacobs adopts user-centric design approaches to create user personas. They map user journeys for digital placemaking projects across the UK, Asia, and the Middle East, Fola explained. These help to capture key pain points and opportunities for diverse stakeholder groups, helping to ensure any solutions proposed are aligned with their expectations and needs.

 “We know we’re looking for diverse perspectives, but are we speaking the same language as residents? Have we actually done the work ourselves to understand what their lived experience is, so we’re able to approach them in a meaningful way?” – Fola Olaleye

Kuljeet Sibia, London Legacy Development

As Senior Design Manager, Kuljeet provides strategic design advice across major projects in the LLDC Mayoral development zone.

At its core, inclusive design should be a simple concept, Kuljeet said. Focusing on empowering marginalised voices and designing for their lived realities – not the assumptions we make.

• LLDC have released their Handbook: Creating Places That Work For Women and Girls. The handbook focuses on processes and tools in planning and development systems to create safer, welcoming and empowering spaces in the built environment.
• LLDC’s engagement has shown that spaces designed to work for the needs of women and girls tend to benefit all, as they reflect the intersectionality of society, and women are often attuned to considering others’ needs.
• She believes professionals have a responsibility to empower communities by bringing them into positions of influence. Sharing knowledge and being transparent about project constraints, such as budget, can build trust, making it easier to share decision-making and foster open dialogue around priorities and collaboration.
• She is working with young women to co-client a space for teenage girls in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The initial set-up of the co-client structure has been captured in this report: Co-client Report Co-client Engagement Methodology with Teenage Girls in Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

“Co-clienting with teenage girls and young women has been a highlight of my career to date. They’ve been humble, but necessarily direct. And they’ve worked alongside the LLDC to negotiate and translate their ideas to fit within the projects’ means.” – Kuljeet Sibia

Future of London’s takeaways

Panellists expressed little doubt that climate change will hit people who are marginalised the hardest.

The built environment sector must ground climate resilience in the lived expertise of residents. Community involvement is essential for creating solutions that resonate with those who need them. It can also rebuild local social infrastructure where it’s been eroded, driving neighbourhood resilience in times of extreme weather.

Panellists disagreed on how far residents are engaged in climate resilience from their own accord. Some speakers said that people intuitively feel the urgency of climate change and are anxious for the public sector to speak candidly about it. Others argued that under resourced neighbourhoods don’t have time to think about tomorrow.

We think it’s built environment professionals’ job to empower local people and to use sector intelligence to help people engage constructively with resilience.

A live challenge is that building social resilience takes time – and the climate emergency is already here. There are neighbourhoods in London, like Somers Town, with strong community cohesion. But those in power, shaping local development, haven’t necessarily invested in building the connections of trust needed to empower these voices. When doing things right is time and resource intensive, how can the sector balance good climate resilience with the need for pace?

Conference session write-ups

• Keynotes: Mete Coban (Deputy Mayor), Emma Howard Boyd (London Climate Resilience Review), Indy Johar (Dark Matter Labs)
• Fresh Perspectives – Young people-led panel discussion
• Fresh Perspectives – Two US projects using art and culture to explore climate resilience
• Including All Voices – ensuring communities are fully involved
• Neighbourhood Futures – Tackling climate resilience and health equity
• Homes and Buildings – Designing inclusive climate approaches
• Council-led Housing Network – climate resilience through council development
• Fresh Perspectives – Alumni ideas on climate resilience, plus domestic retrofit and infrastructure innovation in Arnhem
• Inclusive Finance – Financial models for equitable climate resilience
• Neighbourhoods – Designing inclusive climate approaches
• Health and Racial Equity – Developing community-led action for ethnic minority communities
• Make It Happen – Closing plenary with conference takeaways, including governance, finance and partnerships
• Strand Aldwych Walking Tour – how a striking new landscape was created in the historic London

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The conference is part of our major Knowledge programme for 2024/25, with a final report in Spring 2025. Find out more about our Climate Resilience and Equity programme.

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