Design For Community

This book is available as an Adobe Reader eBook on the publisher's website: newriders.com Communities are part of all successful web sites in one way or another. It looks at the different stages that must be understood: Philosophy: Why does your site need community? What are your measures of success? Architecture: How do you set up a site to createpositive experience? How do you coax people out of their shells and get them to share their experiences online? Design: From color choice to HTML, how do you design the look of a community area? Maintenance: This section will contain stories of failed web communities, and what they could have done to stay on track, as well as general maintenance tips and tricks for keeping your community “garden” growing.

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

Arthur Mehrhoff′s Community Design represents a unique way of analyzing a community and the steps needed to help design a sustainable community. In this important contribution, Mehrhoff, through his work with the Minnesota Design Team, seeks to "help communities take control of shaping a sustainable future of their own by means of information, insight, and civic dialogue." He urges readers to rethink the shape and shaping of their communities by looking at "community" in a more holistic and multidisciplinary manner. Mehrhoff tackles such topics as defining community, understanding the history of a community, understanding the issues and problems affecting a community, examining the visual aspects of a community, and obtaining citizen opinion throughout the process of becoming a sustainable community. Small communities everywhere can replicate the process discussed in this book. Community Design is well written and thought-provoking and provides a nice blend of theory and practice. This book should be useful to all students, academics, local policy makers, and citizens who are interested in creating a common sustainable vision for their communities.

Since the earliest settlements, people have deliberated the issues that affect their future together. Making Community Design Work shows how planners can guide the process toward effective decision making and beneficial community design. This well-crafted book distills decades of community design experience into a sound conceptual framework of value to practicing planners as well as planning students. Umut Toker covers a broad range of planning scales and introduces field-tested tools for participatory decision making at regional, city, community, and site-specific levels. To succeed, any planning project must address both the physical space and its users. From setting goals to evaluating results, Making Community Design Work helps planners navigate the process of creating environments that meet the needs of the people they serve.

Winner of the EDRA 2015 Book Award! Community Matters: Service Learning in Engaged Design and Planning explores issues that resonate with a diverse group of design and planning educators drawn to the challenge of supporting greater community building and empowerment while combining learning with practice. The book explores such questions as: How do we foster mutuality and reciprocity in community-academy partnerships? What conflicts, challenges, limits and obstacles do we face in our service-learning studios and projects? What evidence do we have of our impacts on students and communities and how are we responding? How are we being attentive to the contemporary environmental and societal issues? What is our role as both designers and agents of societal change? How are we innovating to enable greater capacities for individuals, future practitioners and communities? This book provides compelling evidence that educators should be adopting engaged pedagogies, research methods and theories through which they can bring together education, practice and scholarship at the boundary of community and academy.

Community Character provides a design-oriented system for planning and zoning communities but accounts for how people who participate in a community live, work, and shop there. The relationships that Lane Kendig defines here reflect the complexity of the interaction of the built environment with its social and economic uses, taking into account the diverse desires of municipalities and citizens. Among the many classifications for a community’s “character” are its relationship to other communities, its size and the resulting social and economic characteristics. According to Kendig, most comprehensive plans and zoning regulations are based entirely on density and land use, neither of which effectively or consistently measures character or quality of development. As Kendig shows, there is a wide range of measures that define character and these vary with the type of character a community desires to create. Taking a much more comprehensive view, this book offers “community character” as a real-world framework for planning for communities of all kinds and sizes. A companion book, A Practical Guide to Planning with Community Character, provides a detailed explanation of applying community character in a comprehensive plan, with chapters on designing urban, sub-urban, and rural character types, using character in comprehensive plans, and strategies for addressing characteristic challenges of planning and zoning in the 21st century.

This book proposes a new interdisciplinary understanding of urban design in China based on a study of the transformative effects of socio-spatial design and planning on communities and their governance. This is framed by an examination of the social projects, spaces, and realities that have shaped three contexts critical to the understanding of urban design problems in China: the histories of “collective forms” and “collective spaces”, such as that of the urban danwei (work-unit), which inform current community building and planning; socio-spatial changes in urban and rural development; and disparate practices of “spatialised governmentality”. These contexts and an attendant transformation from planning to design and from government to governance, define the current urban design challenges found in the dominant urban xiaoqu (small district) and shequ (community) development model. Examining the histories, transformations, and practices that have shaped socio-spatial epistemologies and experiences in China – including a specific sense of community and place that is rather based on a concrete “collective” than abstract “public” space and underpinned by socialised governance – this book brings together a diverse range of observations, thoughts, analyses, and projects by urban researchers and practitioners. Thereby discussing emerging interdisciplinary urban design practices in China, this book offers a valuable resource for all academics, practitioners, and stakeholders with an interest in socio-spatial design and development.

Dieses Buch behandelt Design und Planung als Gemeinschaftsprojekt, d.h. Gemeinde oder Auftraggeber eines neuen Projektes werden zusammen mit den Experten aktiv in den Designprozeß eingebunden, und zwar von Anfang an. Diese Methode wird für kleine und große Projekte genutzt - angefangen beim Wohnungsbau über Parkanlagen und soziale Einrichtungen über Nachbarviertel und ganze Städte. Unterteilt in zwei große Themenkomplexe behandelt das Buch in Teil 1 die Grundlagen und Methoden zur Einbeziehung der Gemeinde und in Teil 2 Fallstudien, die anschaulich darstellen, wie jedes Prinzip und jede Methode angewandt und umgesetzt wird. Schwerpunktmäßig werden visuelle und ästhetische Mittel eingesetzt, um den Designprozeß zu vermitteln. Mit über 15 Fallstudien zu Bildungseinrichtungen, Wohnanlagen sowie städtischen und ländlichen Designbeispielen und zahlreichen Checklisten und Abbildungen.