LUISA KOSTER
Big Title
A THESIS ABOUT REPURPOSING UNDERUSED CHURCHES TO MEET COMMUNITY NEEDS
As church attendance declines, many church buildings face uncertain futures. Church communities are often left to navigate complex reuse decisions without expertise in adaptive reuse or participation, while neighborhoods are rarely meaningfully involved despite being directly affected.
This project explores how participatory reuse processes can be structured through a co-design–based toolkit, enabling church communities and neighborhoods to collaboratively navigate reuse decisions in dense urban contexts.
ROLE
Service Designer:
Participatory process design, Service concept development, Stakeholder alignment
Design Researcher:
Expert interviews, Community survey, System & stakeholder mapping, Insight synthesis
CONTEXT
Bachelor’s Thesis
Design Management International (HSLU)
Spring 2024
METHODS
Research:
Research synthesis
Expert interviews
Community survey
Mapping:
System mapping
Stakeholder mapping
Co-design:
Workshops, Prototyping, Testing
TEAM
Luisa Koster
Mentor:
Hans Kaspar Hugentobler
OUTCOME
CommunityKIT:
A participatory service tool, supporting transparent and inclusive decision-making in church reuse processes.
CONTEXT
Church communities are increasingly confronted with the question of what to do with underused church buildings. While attendance declines, and spatial pressure in cities grows, decisions about future use become more urgent.
Many parishes, however, lack experience in adaptive reuse and are faced with complex legal, social, and organizational considerations, while also managing high ongoing costs for maintaining large, often protected buildings. This thesis therefore focuses on mixed-use approaches, as they allow multiple functions to coexist, helping distribute costs, reduce risk, and respond to diverse neighborhood needs within a single building.
PROBLEMS
Fewer people attend church, more buildings stand empty
Maintaining large church buildings is becoming too expensive
Church communities are not experts in reuse or redevelopment
Reuse decisions feel overwhelming, while external experts are often too expensive
People feel emotionally attached to their churches and fear losing them
CHALLENGE
Church reuse is not only a spatial or financial challenge, but also a question of how decisions are made. Church buildings are deeply embedded in their neighborhoods: they shape local identity, provide social spaces and function as community anchors — even beyond religious use.
Despite this local relevance, neighborhood residents are often not meaningfully involved in reuse processes. While many stakeholders are part of the process, participation often remains symbolic and limited to late feedback rather than shared decision-making.
Research Question:
To what extent are neighborhood residents involved in the process of church reuse, and how could this integration take place successfully?
RESEARCH
To understand how church reuse decisions are currently made and why neighborhood involvement often remains limited, a qualitative research phase was conducted. The research focused on existing reuse processes, stakeholder roles and participation dynamics in the context of church buildings in Zurich.
METHODS
Literature Review
Church reuse, participatory planning, adaptive reuse, governance models
Six Expert Interviews
Church administrators, theologians, urban planners, sociologists, public administration
Two Community Surveys with 28 participants
Residents living in the direct neighborhood of church buildings
Case Studies & Observations
Existing church reuse projects and comparable community-led reuse initiatives
INSIGHTS
The research insights revealed that the challenge of neighborhood involvement is not caused by a lack of interest, but by missing structure within complex reuse processes.
Synthesis of research findings highlighting structural challenges in church reuse processes:
QUOTE
FINDING
DESIGN CRITERIA
Expeert Two:
‘’The conversion to the Kunstklangkirche in Wollishofen
was received positively by the congregation of older members,
as it remained something close to the church and left the option
of holding worship services open.’’
Citizen Nineteen:
‘’The church should be a low-threshold space that is accessible to everyone and where everything that people want is possible.’’
Expert Three:
''Based on this overall social mission, the parish is also
responsible for considering what makes sense, what we see from
our perspective and what the neighborhood might need.’’
Existing church members appreciate it when the option of traditional church rituals is left open.
The parish tries to design for their neighborhood, which is often not an active stakeholder group.
Design Criteria One:
GIVING A VOICE
The intervention should allow the existing church community, if any, to have a say in the reuse process.
Design Criteria Two:
FOCUS ON LOCAL NEEDS
The intervention should help to clarify the needs of the local neighborhood.
Expert Four:
‘’If you already have a plan for the outcome, this is not
suitable for a participatory process. There is then a great
risk that the process will not be sustainable.’’
The initiators must
not have a concrete idea of
the implementation,
otherwise there is a risk that it will not be sustainable.
Design Criteria Three:
OPENNESS TO THE
OUTCOME
The intervention should make it possible to approach the reuse process with an open mind for a
sustainable outcome, not a preconceived solution.
Expert Four:
''Participation is only participation if it is really about being able to co-decide at the end.’’
Citizen Twenty-Six:
‘’It would be essential for me to get exciting people involved, be supported and take on some responsibility.’’
Participation is not only the search for ideas, but above
all: the decision-making of ideas.
Design Criteria Four:
ABILITY TO DECIDE
The intervention is intended to enable a democratic vote among church members and non-
church members on the change of use.
Arnstein: ‘’Participation processes should be transparent
and open to all stakeholders. Citizens should have access to
information about decision-making processes, including agendas, minutes, and relevant documents, to ensure accountability and trust.’’
Restrictions and opportunities
should be clear and communicated from the start and be transparent during the process in order to give participants realistic instructions.
Design Criteria Five:
TRANSPARENCY FOR
EVERYONE
The intervention should help to
keep the process transparent for
all participants.
KEY INSIGHTS
-
Reuse processes involve many stakeholders, but lack clear structures for coordination
-
Church communities carry responsibility without having reuse or facilitation expertise
-
Neighborhood residents are affected by reuse decisions but rarely involved in shaping them
-
Complexity and unclear responsibilities hinder sustained engagement
-
Decision-making requires structure before participation can become meaningful
Problem Map of the reframed area:
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DESIGN DECISIONS
These insights and the reframed problem space formed the basis for the following design decisions:
Design Criteria
1. GIVING A VOICE
The intervention should allow the existing church community, if any, to have a say in the reuse process.
2. FOCUS ON LOCAL NEEDS
The intervention should help to clarify the needs of the local neighborhood.
3. OPENNESS TO THE OUTCOME
The intervention should make it possible to approach the reuse process with an open mind for a sustainable outcome, not a preconceived solution.
4. ABILITY TO DECIDE
The intervention is intended to enable a democratic vote among church members and non-church members on the change of use.
5. TRANSPARENCY FOR EVERYONE
The intervention should help to keep the process transparent for all participants.
Design Decision
Ensure that existing church members are actively included and can articulate what should be preserved within future reuse scenarios.
Create structured ways to make local needs visible and comparable, even when residents are not formally organized.
Prevent early fixation on specific reuse solutions and keep outcomes open during the participatory phase.
Design Response
Participatory formats that explicitly invite church members to express values, traditions and non-negotiables before reuse options are developed.
Guided activities that help surface everyday needs, expectations and concerns of neighborhood residents in an accessible way.
Tools that encourage exploration of multiple scenarios before narrowing down options or making commitments.
Design participation to explicitly include shared decision-making moments.
Clear decision points supported by voting or prioritization formats that allow participants to influence outcomes collectively.
Make constraints, rules and responsibilities visible throughout the process.
Visual and shared information formats that communicate boundaries, possibilities and next steps in an understandable way.
Based on the research insights, it became clear that the main challenge was not the lack of ideas for reuse, but the absence of a shared structure to navigate complex decisions. Church communities and neighborhood residents would need guidance to support participation, decision-making and transparency over time, without requiring expert knowledge.
At the same time, many church communities do not have the financial resources to engage external specialists in participation or facilitation. Relying on expert-led processes would therefore not be realistic in most cases.
For these reasons, the design decisions explored whether a toolkit-based intervention could be an appropriate response:
One that could structure the process, translate complexity into accessible formats, and be used independently by different stakeholders across diverse church contexts.
CO-DESIGN
Research showed that common participation formats in church reuse processes , such as surveys or short workshops, often remain superficial and do not allow for shared responsibility or decision-making. To meet the design criteria of giving stakeholders a voice, focusing on local needs, ensuring transparency and remaining open to outcomes, participation needed to be continuous rather than one-off.
For this reason, the design decisions explored a co-design-based toolkit as an appropriate format. Co-design allows stakeholders to be involved over time, supports shared decision-making and can be used without relying on external participation experts.
PARTICIPATION FORMATS COMPARED
INTERVENTION
Rather than proposing a fixed reuse solution, the intervention called CommunityKIT, focuses on structuring participation and decision-making. It aims to create open thinking spaces in which stakeholders can express interests, negotiate priorities, take responsibility and participate in shared decisions, while remaining transparent about constraints and possibilities.
By combining co-design principles with a toolkit format, the intervention consists of a guided process supported by guiding questions. This structure is intended to support continuous involvement over time and adapt to different church and neighborhood contexts.
PROCESS
For each step, five different questions deal with the adaptive reuse. These are asked abstractly so that the individual needs of church buildings are perceived in their unique neighborhood context. The questions leave results open and allow participants to decide on specific
activities.
In this way, the five design criteria can be fulfilled. The result is left open, and the parish is bound to external proposals by the questions that arise in the provided cards. By confronting the parish with questions, addressing all interested parties and acting inclusively in the stakeholder analysis, this participation process should be open to all voices. Transparency for participants should be made possible through the questions answered in previous steps, regarding the possibilities and restrictions in financing, resources, history and culture of the building. Through the questions in the communication strategy step, consideration should be given to providing transparency to participants (e.g. through a community platform). The local needs of the neighborhood are discussed in the participation process with the neighborhood itself as they are considered experts of their environment. The decision-making process should be decided jointly by all participants; evaluation circles require a critical assessment of practicability, sustainability and impact on the community.
EFFECT
This project shows how church reuse processes can be structured to enable meaningful participation under real-world constraints. By focusing on process rather than predefined outcomes, it highlights how service design can support shared understanding, transparency and collective decision-making without relying on external facilitation.
The approach is transferable to other adaptive reuse contexts where complex decisions and diverse stakeholder interests need to be aligned.
For Residents
Strengthens social ties and gives them a real voice in shaping their neighborhoods, fostering a stronger sense of belonging.
For Churches
Strengthens social ties and gives them a real voice in shaping their neighborhoods, fostering a stronger sense of belonging.
For Urban Development
Strengthens social ties and gives them a real voice in shaping their neighborhoods, fostering a stronger sense of belonging.
Open Question:
How can participatory tools maintain influence over time when institutional priorities or community engagement naturally decline?
