Your City Your Voice Belfast, Community Consultation for Quality of Life Local Project Report, Belfast: Urban Rooms, Public Engagement Pilot: 2 Royal Avenue, September 2022

Local Belfast-pilot focused report on the Your City Your Voice Belfast (YCYVB) Urban Room; consultation research that included a month-long public pilot in Belfast during September 2022 as part of Community Consultation for Quality of Life (CCQOL), an Arts & Humanities Research Council funded UK-wide project, led by University of Reading with Ulster University, Cardiff University, and The University of Edinburgh as Co-Investigators. CCQOL as a collaborative international partnership project seeks to develop new map-based models of community consultation (as more effective, early engagement); face-to-face and digital places for people to share their views more easily and safely about what they value in their local area, to help improve quality of life for everyone.

Together with an Inclusive Toolkit, created by the CCQOL team with project partner Urban Symbiotics, the YCYVB research aimed to create opportunities to better assess social and environmental value through collective and co-created knowledge with “quality-of-life” as a central and positive approach to:
• Promote a holistic view of land use, using maps and open data for more democratic decision-making in planning.
• Develop best practice guidelines for community consultation and engagement; to widen participation to, for example, tackle social justice and liveability issues.

CCQOL pilots in each UK region were created as opportunities for local people to share their own feelings about what they value in their city and neighbourhood areas. Each pilot used bespoke digital maps to measure and assess how people viewed and were consulted about local changes and what aspects of their neighbourhood and/or city they valued – seeking to engage with positive discussions based on social and environmental value through Quality-of-Life mapping, rather than more negative-comment-driven approaches. This report captures the events, reflections, lessons and initial recommendations from the pilot project, which are supplemented by final project recommendations and literature in a National Report from December 2023.