Making Community Design Work

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.

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 with designers to collectively create vibrant, important places in cities and neighborhoods. 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 is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, it offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.

Explores new thoughts and practices in the movement toward an architecture that serves everyone, including the poor.

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.

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.

How insights from the social sciences, including social psychology and economics, can improve the design of online communities. Online communities are among the most popular destinations on the Internet, but not all online communities are equally successful. For every flourishing Facebook, there is a moribund Friendster—not to mention the scores of smaller social networking sites that never attracted enough members to be viable. This book offers lessons from theory and empirical research in the social sciences that can help improve the design of online communities. The authors draw on the literature in psychology, economics, and other social sciences, as well as their own research, translating general findings into useful design claims. They explain, for example, how to encourage information contributions based on the theory of public goods, and how to build members' commitment based on theories of interpersonal bond formation. For each design claim, they offer supporting evidence from theory, experiments, or observational studies.

"The best book on collaboration ever written!" —Diane Flannery, founding CEO, Juma Ventures And now this classic book is even better—much better. Completely revised and updated, the second edition is loaded with new tools and techniques. Two powerful new chapters on agenda design A full section devoted to reaching closure More than twice as many tools for handling difficult dynamics 70 brand-new pages and over 100 pages significantly improved

Growing numbers of residents are getting involved with professionals in shaping their local environment, and there is now a powerful range of methods available, from design workshops to electronic maps. The Community Planning Handbook is the essential starting point for all those involved - planners and local authorities, architects and other practitioners, community workers, students and local residents. It features an accessible how-to-do-it style, best practice information on effective methods, and international scope and relevance. Tips, checklists and sample documents help readers to get started quickly, learn from others' experience and to select the approach best suited to their situation. The glossary, bibliography and contact details provide quick access to further information and support.