Community Matters: Service-Learning in Engaged Design and Planning

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.

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 ChicagoThis 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

• Introduction: Why Community Matters 1. Taking Stock: Perspectives on Community Matters Part 1: Partnering to Advance Productive Community Dialogues 2. Partnering, Because Community Matters 3. Establishing a Place for Common Ground: A Case Study of the Role of a Service-Learning Studio in Neighborhood University Development 4. Spaces of Connection: Implementing the Design of a High-Tech Learning Space for Youth Part 2: Original Seeing: Beholding Community 5. Recalling and Remembering Community: Cell Phone Diaries 6. Considering Public History 7. Finding and Reassembling Community Amidst Disaster Part 3: Co-Imagining Alternative Worlds 8. Clearwater Studio: Co-imagining a Living Past and a Common Future 9. The Politics of Radical Pedagogy: Transforming Power and Seeking Justice 10. Rust to Green: Cultivating Resilience in the Rust Belt Part 4: Changing from Within: Recasting Academic Communities 11. Democracy Matters, Beginning in the Classroom: Towards a Collaborative (Democratic?) Design Studio 12. Changing Racial Attitudes: Community-based Learning and Service in East St. Louis, Illinois 13. Putting Community First: Reflections on History, Identity, and Power in Local and Global Service-Learning Part 5: Outcomes Matter: Creating an Evaluative Community 14. Reaching Out and Reaching In: Investigating Community Impact of a University Outreach Program 15. Probing Impacts: Voices of Community 16. The Semester Ends but the Community Challenges Do Not: A Legacy to Continue the Work in East Harlem 17. Life Before/During/Between/After the Service-learning Design Studios Bibliography