Fan Chen
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Fan Chen's MPhil/PhD Design research project
Cultivating Green Connections: Co-Designing Community Green Spaces in Lewisham to Foster Ecological, Social and Cultural Resilience for Sustainable Urban Design
Fan Chen is a designer–researcher investigating how co-design with community green spaces can foster ecological, social and cultural resilience for urban sustainability. She works with organisations in the Lewisham area, including Sydenham Garden (a charity-run therapeutic garden), Deptford Railway Meadow (a resident-led urban wildlife site) and the London Wildlife Trust, co-creating workshops such as bee-friendly community hives, cyanotype textiles and natural-dye products with diverse groups, including children, LGBTQIA+ communities and people living with dementia.
Her thesis positions co-design as a mediator between grassroots care practices and urban governance, translating everyday making into durable policy prototying, and treats community green spaces as embedded policy laboratories that enable ecological stewardship and collective care. Methodologically, it advances a more-than-human orientation, a care-politics stance, and a resilience lens that privileges small, iterative, error-tolerant prototyping over one-off projects. The research interfaces local practice with policy frameworks (SDG localisation, urban plan and design logics, biodiversity and health-equity agendas) and examines how digital/AI tools can support participation while addressing risks of techno-solutionism and data governance.
Outputs may include: (1) a situated methodological framework for co-design in urban nature; (2) material prototypes and workshop protocols that increase opportunities for nature contact and stewardship; (3) evaluation pairings that link process indicators (participation, dwell time, networks) with outcomes (wellbeing, equity of access); and (4) actionable recommendations for institutional embedding and long-term maintenance.