Many of the stories feature extended timelines (sometimes over decades) during which proposals repeatedly came forward and were promoted, before proving unviable as external circumstances changed or simply because the challenging nature of their context made it impossible to put together a viable development consortium.  Distrust and apathy amongst communities can too easily result from such processes with community resistance becoming a further obstacle to change.

In the two cases in this route, communities were given a privileged position in the driving seat to help define what was right for them and their community, as well as the design form that should take.  The cases differ in that the first – Queens Park (story 19) – involves a community that was keen to see radical change and embraced it from the start, with the local authority setting up a series of mechanisms that ensured a continual feed of community views into the process of fundamentally re-shaping an estate, even after the power moved from them to the contractor.  In the second – Filwood Park (story 20) – an extended Enquiry by Design process was utilised to bring a resistant community on-board to ultimately support proposals that cut the amount of open space locally, re-designing it to better meet local needs.  Similar to the charette used in story 2, or the more informal co-production methods used in story 13, these processes demonstrated the potential of well designed schemes to improve the quality of place and quality of life of existing as well as new communities. They demonstrated how fundamental engagement processes can make the unviable viable in disadvantaged areas by unlocking the development process, properly understanding community needs and wants, and by bringing communities along with the development process.