Designing Healthy Communities


Book Description

Designing Healthy Communities, the companion book to the acclaimed public television documentary, highlights how we design the built environment and its potential for addressing and preventing many of the nation's devastating childhood and adult health concerns. Dr. Richard Jackson looks at the root causes of our malaise and highlights healthy community designs achieved by planners, designers, and community leaders working together. Ultimately, Dr. Jackson encourages all of us to make the kinds of positive changes highlighted in this book. 2012 Nautilus Silver Award Winning Title in category of “Social Change” "In this book Dr. Jackson inhabits the frontier between public health and urban planning, offering us hopeful examples of innovative transformation, and ends with a prescription for individual action. This book is a must read for anyone who cares about how we shape the communities and the world that shapes us." —Will Rogers, president and CEO, The Trust for Public Land "While debates continue over how to design cities to promote public health, this book highlights the profound health challenges that face urban residents and the ways in which certain aspects of the built environment are implicated in their etiology. Jackson then offers up a set of compelling cases showing how local activists are working to fight obesity, limit pollution exposure, reduce auto-dependence, rebuild economies, and promote community and sustainability. Every city planner and urban designer should read these cases and use them to inform their everyday practice." —Jennifer Wolch, dean, College of Environmental Design, William W. Wurster Professor, City and Regional Planning, UC Berkeley "Dr. Jackson has written a thoughtful text that illustrates how and why building healthy communities is the right prescription for America." —Georges C. Benjamin, MD, executive director, American Public Health Association Publisher Companion Web site: www.josseybass.com/go/jackson Additional media and content: http://dhc.mediapolicycenter.org/




Design Justice


Book Description

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.




Designing Community


Book Description

"Urban development sites can become battlegrounds as a result of the conflicting interests of developers and communities. In the USA, design charrettes are often used as a means of bringing people together, using detailed design exercises to establish agreement around a development masterplan. However, despite the increasing frequency of their use, charrettes are widely misunderstood and can be misapplied. This book provides detailed guidance on the proper and most effective ways to use this helpful tool."-BOOK JACKET.







Designing Communities


Book Description

The study described in this book arose in the contextof a three-year collective effort to bring about change in science teaching at Mountain Elementary School. 1 This opportunity emerged after I contacted the school with the idea to help teachers implement student-centered science teaching. At the same time, the teachers collectively had come to realize that their science teaching was not as exciting to children as it could be. They had recognized their own teaching as textbook-based with little use of the "hands-on" approaches prescribed by the provincial curriculum. At this point, the teachers and I decided that a joint project would serve our mutual goals: they wanted assistance in changing from textbook-based approaches to student-centered activities; I wanted to collect data on learning in student-centered knowledge producing classroom communities. I brought to this school my new understandings about classroom communi ties from several earlier studies conducted in a private high school (e. g. , Roth & Bowen, 1995; Roth & Roychoudhury, 1992). I wanted to help teachers create science learning environments in which children took charge of their learning, where children learned from more competent others by participating with them in ongoing activities, and teachers were responsible for setting up and maintaining a classroom community rather than for dissem inating information. After I had completed the data collection for the present study, I watched a documentary about an elementary school in the small French village of Moussac (Envoye Special, TV5, September 14, 1994).




Designing Community


Book Description

Greenfield sites around towns and cities, and redevelopment infill sites in existing urban areas often become battlegrounds between the conflicting interests of developers and communities. In America, design charrettes (intensive design and planning workshops) have become widely used as a means of bringing together these divergent groups, using detailed design exercises to establish agreement around a development masterplan. Despite the increasing frequency of their use, charrettes are widely misunderstood and can be misapplied. This book provides a detailed guidance on the proper and most effective ways to use this helpful tool. The book combines charrette masterplanning with the creation of "design-based" codes (also known as "form-based" codes) to control the development's implementation in line with the design and planning principles established during the charrette process.




Designing Online Communities


Book Description

Through analysis of this «how-to» literature, Designing Online Communities explores the discourse of design and configuration that partially structures online communities and later social networks.




Designing Disorder


Book Description

Rethinking the open city Planners, privatisation, and police surveillance are laying siege to urban public spaces. The streets are becoming ever more regimented as life and character are sapped from our cities. What is to be done? Is it possible to maintain the public realm as a flexible space that adapts over time? Can disorder be designed? Fifty years ago, Richard Sennett wrote his groundbreaking work The Uses of Disorder, arguing that the ideal of a planned and ordered city was flawed, likely to produce a fragile, restrictive urban environment. The need for the Open City, the alternative, is now more urgent that ever. In this provocative essay, Pablo Sendra and Richard Sennett propose a reorganisation of how we think and plan the life of our cities. What the authors call 'infrastructures for disorder' combine architecture, politics, urban planning and activism in order to develop places that nurture rather than stifle, bring together rather than divide, remain open to change rather than rapidly stagnate. Designing Disorder is a radical and transformative manifesto for the future of twenty-first-century cities.




Design as Democracy


Book Description

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.




Designing For Social Change


Book Description

This newest title in the design briefs series is a compact, hands-on guide for graphic design professionals who want to start helping communities and effectuating social change in the world. Author Andrew Shea presents ten strategies for successful community engagement, grounding each one in two real world case studies. The twenty projects featured in the book are by both design professionals and students and range from creating a map of services for the homeless community in Santa Monica, helping Chicago's Humboldt Park community by designing a website where donors can buy essential items for community members, to encouraging LA's Latina community to go for an annual PAP exam in an attempt to prevent cervical cancer through carefully designed posters, murals, and other material. Designing for Social Change is both an inspiration and a how-to book that encourages graphic designers everywhere to go out and do good with their work, providing them with the tools to complete successful projects in their communities.