Medievals and Moderns in Conversation: Co-Designing Creative Futures for Underused Historic Churches in Rural Communities

Abstract

For many living in rural areas, the loss of traditional community assets and increased social fragmentation are a common feature of everyday life. The empty village church is a poignant symbol of these challenges; yet, these are sites that hold considerable potential for new placemaking solutions that respond to the needs of communities today. This means looking beyond “the traditional village church” to recognise a longer history of church adaptation and resilience within the lives of communities. In this paper we ask: how can co-design, projected through a Wicked problems and Clumsy solutions lens, help imagine new futures for communities and their historic churches today? Clumsy solutions consider a plurality of different perspectives on the nature of problems and their resolution to deliver more effective solutions with broad appeal. In the search for clumsiness, we turn to ‘long history’ and ‘slow technology’ for inspiration, uncovering deeper resonance with historical communities of place and anchoring that continuity within church sites themselves. Our paper demonstrates how Wicked/Clumsy thinking can account for the challenges faced by rural communities today, bootstrap co-design activities in the development of clumsy solutions, and uncover clumsiness in long history and slow technology dimensions—together laying the foundation for new placemaking strategies.

Clumsy solutions and climate change: A retrospective

“…They also encompass lab and field experiments, in which randomly formed groups of people would be asked to resolve the same complex environmental problem with different decision‐making tools, before a content analysis of the outcomes of their efforts would be undertaken. Participatory action research to create clumsy solutions would also be informative (see Scobolig et al, 2016; Senior et al, 2022; Vári & Linnerooth‐Bayer, 2006). By employing a variety of research designs it might be possible to uncover which institutional settings and decision‐making procedures allow stakeholders involved in climate change governance to generate clumsy solutions.…”