Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity

Winner of the Environmental Design Research Association's 2018 Book Award

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.

Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, Design as Democracy shows how to design with communities in empowering and effective ways. The flow of the book’s nine chapters reflects the general progression of community design process, while also encouraging readers to search for ways that best serve their distinct needs and the culture and geography of diverse places. Each chapter presents a series of techniques around a theme, from approaching the initial stages of a project, to getting to know a community, to provoking political change through strategic thinking. Readers may approach the book as they would a cookbook, with recipes open to improvisation, adaptation, and being created anew.

Design as Democracy offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.

David de la Peña 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 the director of the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Texas, Arlington. Her firm, DesignJones LLC, received 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 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.