Land Securities Group is the largest commercial property development and investment company in the United Kingdom, and roughly holds a £7.9 billion. Landsec aims to transform the Lewisham Shopping Centre into an Experimental Town Centre. My team was tasked with designing ways for co-creating value alongside the local community of Lewisham. Their goal for the future redevelopment of the town centre is to embed new models of community development that fosters creativity and participation.
Our intervention focuses on supporting organizations working with vulnerable youth to deter anti-social engagements by leveraging the power of networks and creating a more cohesive community to contain the effects of gentrification. We created a collaborative ecosystem of local youth charities to support the youth better and engage the local community. Where the town centre re-development may cause community dispersion. our proposal highlights a new way of urban development to help Landsec play a key role in building community cohesion, thus creating a safer community that develops collectively, empowering almost 1,000 vulnerable young people.
Collaborated with a team of five to dissect Landsec's vision and deliver pathways for Landsec to increase participation and create community cohesion. My key contributions were creating the research protocol, fostering stakeholder relationships, ecosystem analysis and visualising the operations and impact of our service intervention.
01/07
We began with interviews of Landsec stakeholders and analysis of the project's blueprints, identifying areas for interventions. Our research into Lewisham's socio-economic condition, combined with local resident and council interviews, highlighted the role of youth charities in addressing youth crime. Deep dives with charity leaders offered insights into their operations, challenges, and impact, further validated by shadowing a charity workshop. Recognising the charities' transformative effect on Lewisham and its youth, we recommended amplifying their impact as part of Landsec's redevelopment strategy. This led to the establishment of partnerships with three local charities for future collaborative efforts.
Improve the perception of Lewisham in the community.
Increase footfall at the new town centre.
Boost engagement within the community.
29% (and rising) of the crime rate in Lewisham is attributed to youth anti-social behavior. (2021)
Lack of public spaces to constructively engage the youth, especially those from vulnerable backgrounds.
Local youth charities aid the children’s development, but lack the resources to support them.
02/07
03/07
To empower these youth charities and their workers by finding solutions to some of their most pressing business challenges, so that they can focus their efforts on creating an even greater impact on these vulnerable youth within Lewisham.
We believe that if we help these youth charities amplify their ability to support vulnerable youth, then the youth will significantly be steered away from a life of crime, thus building social cohesion and creating safer communities within Lewisham.
04/07
We conducted various ideation exercises such as Crazy-8s, Worst Idea, Storyboarding, and SCAMPER within the team and with the charity leaders. We designed low-fidelity prototypes of our service propositions and quickly tested them with the charity leaders and the vulnerable youth, to gain insights on the success and failures of each. Our partnerships with some of the youth charities within Lewisham allowed us to prototype and refine our direction away from what may not have been feasible and impactful, by receiving real-time feedback from our target audience.
05/07
AmpUp is our non-profit business consultancy which helps Lewisham youth charities that want to improve their services for vulnerable young people, by increasing their revenue streams, expanding their networks, providing visibility to their work, and accelerating their impact.
06/07
Once we prototyped our service architecture, we designed the value exchanges within the ecosystem, and the service architecture using different tools such as Journey Maps, Value Proposition Canvas, Service Blueprint, Service Value Map, and Social Innovation Canvas. These helped us dive deep into our service propositions to identify any hurdles and challenges, future opportunities, and potential revenue streams.
07/07
By amplifying the efforts of charities to support vulnerable youth, our service contributes to increasing social cohesion and community engagement.
The relationship our service fosters between Landsec and the local youth charities will ensure that Landsec contributes to the community through participatory development.
