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.

About the Author
Mallika Bose is Associate Professor of landscape architecture at Penn State University, USA. She was the Director of the Hamer Center for Community Design from 2008 to 2012. Motivated by her interest in issues of equity/justice and how social structures are spatially embedded, she pursues research on built environment and active living/healthy eating, public scholarship and community-engaged design and planning. Paula Horrigan is Associate Professor of landscape architecture at Cornell University, USA. Her teaching and research focus on placemaking, participatory design, and the pedagogies and practices of civic engagement that encourage university-community reciprocity and enable community-based problem solving. She leads the Rust to Green NY Action Research Project whereby university and community partners work together on fostering a narrative of resilience and sustainability in New York's Rust Belt. Cheryl Doble is Associate Professor Emeritus in the department of landscape architecture at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, USA. She is the founding director of the college's Center for Community Design Research, which facilitates the development of academic/community partnerships that support collaborative community-based design and research projects. Sigmund C. Shipp is Associate Professor in the department of urban affairs and planning at Hunter College, New York, USA. He is the director of the undergraduate urban studies program. His research has involved a study of urban renewal, worker-owned cooperatives, and the Black church and college community development corporations. His recent research has focused on White poverty in America.

Reviews

Community Matters is a book that matters. Its goals are lofty: "a call for full participation" of all educational institutions, especially design and planning schools, to collaborate with underserved communities to effectively address the complex challenges these communities are facing. And for inspiration and understanding, several compelling programs are described in a compilation of case studies and reflective bookend chapters that illustrate the how-to and challenges of these collaborations. With the rise of service learning programs in U.S. architecture and planning schools, Community Matters provides needed guidance through its articulate report of the purposes, values, and strategies of effective community-engaged design and planning education. And for the emergent Public Interest Design movement, the book provides a powerful argument, backed up by evidence, for necessary, systemic changes in design and planning education. Professor Roberta Feldman, University of Illinois at Chicago

This book demonstrates that community is still the foundation of democracy, requiring attention to shared and unshared values, local participation and global political savvy and the design of everyday places of civic engagement. The authors show how to form, reimagine, contest, build and celebrate community. They collectively answer a most critical challenge: How can universities strengthen community through service-learning that simultaneously serves dispossessed groups and prepares students in planning and design fields to practice in ways that will support democracy. They use inspiring stories to raise tough questions that educators can no longer avoid. Randolph Hester, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, University of California, Berkeley

Book Information
ISBN 9780415723893
Author Mallika Bose
Format Paperback
Page Count 376
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 700g