Abstract
Community engagement and empowerment are the essential components of Community Design (CD), which aims to achieve social equity and empower the stakeholders in a community through a collaborative design process. With the increasing emphasis on sustainability, the significance of placekeeping in a CD project grew over time. However, due to the lack of empirical research and a holistic framework to examine placekeeping, there is little guidance to support placekeeping efforts on the ground. These issues leave questions about the mechanism of community engagement and empowerment in placekeeping, including which elements of the participatory process enhance the level of community engagement? How do we know the CD process is genuine? What facilitates or hinders empowerment? How can we facilitate placekeeping in CD? To address these questions and contribute to building further interdisciplinary knowledge of engagement and empowerment, I conducted sequential mixed-methods research on three CD case studies in Japan (5 networks, ranging from 10 to 22 participants each). Qualitative data obtained through interviews and project-related documents (e.g. annual reports) from each case study were analyzed through the hybrid approach of thematic analysis. The qualitative analysis provided detailed insights into the process and consequences of various community engagement activities. The analysis identified five major themes, including the nature of community engagement, factors that contribute to building Self-Determination Theory supportive environment, factors that support or hinder community engagement, dimensions of empowerment, and facilitators and barriers of empowerment. The insights from the qualitative research informed the selection of measurements and design of the survey questionnaire. Quantitative data collected through longitudinal and cross-sectional surveys were analyzed mainly by Exponential Random Graph Modeling (ERGM) and meta-analysis using random effects model to examine how community members achieve relational empowerment in responding to their engagement and autonomous motivation levels. I synthesized findings from qualitative and quantitative research by the mixed-methods analysis using a side-by-side table, comparing results from both strands of research. This study makes several contributions. First, the study proposes the RELEASE framework to illustrate the mechanism of community engagement and relational empowerment, highlighting the significant roles of environmental (i.e. Self-Determination Theory supportive environment) and behavioral (i.e. community engagement) factors in facilitating greater relational empowerment. The framework also emphasizes the need to address thwarting factors (e.g. other commitments in life and external environmental factors) and understand how network propensities affect relationship building. Second, based on the findings of various facilitators and barriers to community engagement, I present strategies to build SDT-supportive environment to promote greater community engagement. Third, the study suggests a list of network-building interventions to achieve higher relational empowerment, based on past network studies and the findings from ERGM and meta-analysis. Fourth, this study demonstrates how to combine qualitative and quantitative research to better understand community engagement and empowerment in the placekeeping phase of CD. With the ability to examine multiple CD projects consistently, practitioners and researchers can generate more empirical insights from the field and facilitate further theoretical development in the studies of CD and empowerment.