The barriers of participatory landscape design approaches based on experts’ opinions

It is no longer acceptable to design an unchangeable plan, especially in landscape architecture where end-users should be at the centre of any design. Much literature discusses the influence of public involvement in the landscape design process and its necessity in contemporary life. However, the implementation of public participatory design has proved to be challenging and even problematic in many cases in the world. The initiated, civic leaders and professional experts generally develop and manage open space planning and design with a relatively limited level of public participation considering what is possible. The range of creativity from those who participate is limited for a range of reasons, premises and constraints; these will be discussed in the literature review. The need exists for landscape architects to work from an understanding of the ranges of participation and the ranges of creativity that can be elicited in order to deliver sustainable designs. For several decades the theories of public participation were discussed in Europe and North America, but the application of this in many other countries remained under-researched. Of specific interest in this article, public participatory design was used in Iran for the past few centuries (until a few decades ago) as a common solution. Although this practice has continued in many villages, public participation is not often practised in Iran’s cities anymore, and the few attempts at using it were not successful. So the aim of this article is to identify the obstacles to public participation specifically in Iran, and to classify these barriers by Iranian architectural designers. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods has been used in this study. First, the main obstacles were extracted from the literature, then they were classified into five groups, namely technical, cultural, social, economic and political. After classifying the obstacles, these were assessed by interviewing Iranian landscape designers, with the help of the Delphi method. The Delphi method is a structured communication technique or method, originally developed as a systematic, interactive forecasting method which relies on a panel of experts. The experts answer questionnaires over two or more rounds. After each round, a facilitator or agent of change provides an anonymous summary of the experts’ forecasts from the previous round as well as the reasons they provided for their judgments. Thus, experts are encouraged to revise their earlier answers in light of the replies of other members of their panel. It is believed that, during this process, the range of the answers will decrease and the group will converge towards the ‘correct’ answer. Finally, the process is stopped after a predefined stop criterion and the mean or median scores of the final rounds determine the results. In this research, the Delphi panel comprised ten landscape architects, six architects and four urban designers who work in laboratories and companies which depend on landscape architecture. Their assessment emerged in a table and its content validity ratio (CVR) was calculated and interpreted. The main obstacles extracted from the literature were classified into five groups: technical, cultural, social, economic and political. Each of these groups contained a few obstacles and there are twenty-two elements in total. Technical obstacles included finding the right members to represent people and end-users, the age at which people participate in the design process, lack of expert knowledge and experience in public participatory landscape design, lack of people’s knowledge and experience in public participatory landscape design, inefficiency of public participatory landscape design methods, uncertainty over how people ideas and decides affect the last decision and the design, and the lack of a free and comfortable relationship between end-users, employers and designers. Executive obstacles included increasing arguments between participants of public participatory landscape design, inefficiency of implementing systems and the time-consuming nature of public participatory design. Cultural obstacles included unwillingness of people, employers and designers to involve in a participatory design process. Social obstacles included lack of free time in contemporary society, divergent orientations and interests of contemporary society, the separation of contemporary society from social activity, lack of popular power to prove what they want in participatory design process, selfishness in contemporary society and prioritization in decision-making which depends on social outreach. Economic obstacles included the high expense of participatory design process. Political obstacles included nervousness about public participation and wrong and inefficient policies. Finally, technical and political groups of obstacles achieved the highest rank in respect of expert opinions. From among twenty-two obstacles, respectively, the unwillingness of employers to involve in a participatory design process, the age at which people participated in the design process, the lack of a free and comfortable relationship between end-users, employers and designers, wrong and inefficient policies, and lack of popular power to prove what they want in participatory design process were distinguished as the most important obstacles. Based on the research foundations, we presented a few suggestions to improve the participatory design process in Iran. On the one hand, the unwillingness of employers to be involved in a public participatory design process was distinguished as the first and main barrier. In Iran, the main employer of public landscape designers is the Government. On the other hand, wrong and inefficient policies were distinguished as the third barrier and, in Iran, this refers to governmental regulations. So, from these statements the important role of Government and its regulations in improving the participatory design process emerges and it shows that there is a need for promotion and revision of governmental regulations and policies. Developed countries, in contrast, have special regulations and policies which encourage public participatory landscape design and guide the process to be more efficient.