Overview

How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table, we open up the possibility of exchanging ideas meaningfully and transforming places powerfully. Collaboration like this is hands-on democracy in action. It’s up close. It’s personal. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts.

Full Product Details

9781610918473

Table of Contents

Reviews

Design as Democracy is a radical rethinking of participatory design by leaders in the field. Full of invaluable techniques for collective creativity, it is an indispensable resource for all designers who aspire to engage more deeply with communities. --Anne Whiston Spirn, author of The Granite Garden and The Language of Landscape Design as Democracy is a timely collection of essays that provides extremely useful techniques and best practices in transactional design, outlines the philosophical tenants that underlie such an approach, and offers international perspectives that highlight our common desire as humans to shape our communities in concert with our fellow citizens. --Kurt Culbertson, Chairman/CEO, Design Workshop Good recipes for democratic design are certain to include and be inspired by the diverse techniques and essential ingredients this book brings together. Its many stories reveal the profound power of designing together. Above all, its pages uphold democratic design's value and purpose in co-creating a more just and life-affirming world. --Paula Horrigan, Professor Emeritus at Cornell University

Author Information

David de la Pena is an architect, urban designer and Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Davis. His work and practice explore methods by which citizens and designers co-produce urban spaces, with a focus on sustainable architecture, self-managed communities, and urban agriculture in the US and Spain. Diane Jones Allen has 27 years of professional practice experience in land planning and varied scales of community development work. She is Principal Landscape Architect with DesignJones LLC in New Orleans, Louisiana. DesignJones LLC receive the 2016 the American Society of Landscape Architects Community Service Award. Randolph T. Hester Jr. champions cultural and biological diversity through his writing and built work in complex political environments, from Manteo, North Carolina to Los Angeles and the East Asian-Australasian Flyway. Jeffrey Hou is Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Washington, Seattle. His work focuses on design activism, public space and democracy, and engagement of marginalized social groups in design and planning. He is the editor of Insurgent Public Space: Guerrilla Urbanismand the Making of Contemporary Cities (2010). Laura J. Lawson is Dean of Agriculture and Urban Programs and Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her scholarship and teaching focus on urban agriculture, community open space, and participatory design. Marcia J. McNally is a recognized leader in international environmental mobilization and on-the-ground citizen participation. She retired from University of California, Berkeley in 2010 but continues to teach at Berkeley and in Taiwan. McNally now lives in Durham, North Carolina where she runs The Neighborhood Laboratory, an on-demand community design center.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available