Living Streets Association | 2022 October
Community consultation is an excellent opportunity for residents of all ages to exchange ideas on an ideal community. Young people speak about their dreams, while elderly people talk about their needs. People of all ages can express their yearning for an ideal community in terms of physical amenities, natural environment, and social connection, from both creative and practical perspectives.
The community residents have come together to form a planning group, pooling their knowledge, expertise and experience together to help enhance residents’ awareness and provide community-friendly strategies and solutions through design. Residents of the community have been invited to consultation sessions from the preliminary stage until now. Living Streets Association worked to deliver community consultations over many years, alongside design students of a community resident, who is also a landscape architect, to consult residents and seek opinions on their proposed idealistic design for the community.
These consultations also have an important educational significance.
1. Develop morality and a sense of connection with others. The children and young people have the opportunity to show their care for community affairs, which is something that affects their neighbours as well as themselves. Children look at themselves from a broader perspective, find their relationship with the community, and find their own place in the community.
2. Taking action. In a healthy relationship with the community, children discover that they can be contributors. Children discover their worth to the community, that their opinions are important, and that they are capable of making a difference.
3. Perspective-taking. It is the fundamental driving force of training social skills. Considering multiple, and even disagreeable opinions can strengthen the development of morality and intelligence. Children can learn to look at things from the perspective of others, while understanding, appreciating, and respecting others’ opinions. They can gain the ability to put themselves in other people’s shoes, and also learn how to dissolve high tension
4. Understand that everything is interdependent. People often forget to treat each other with compassion, so they see the deficiencies of others, and they are critical. On the other hand, people are eager to be recognized, so it is easy for them to care too much about other people’s opinions. A better life only comes from the mutual support of each other. Only when we learn to show acceptance, tolerance, and forgiveness and realise that we are all interdependent are we able to coexist joyfully.
We hope that more and more young people are able to join us in experiencing this community consultation process that is able to extend our wisdom and depth of life.
Living Streets Association 