Community Matters ─ Service-Learning and Engaged Design and Planning

Community Matters: Service Learning in 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 service. Community Matters 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 for the case that educators should be adopting engaged pedagogies like service-learning, engaged research methods like action research, and engaged theories and practices like participatory design, placemaking and deliberative democracy. Together these approaches are mapping a geography of design and planning education, practice and scholarship occurring at the boundary of community and academy.

Mallika Bose is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Penn State University. She was the Director of the Hamer Center for Community Design from 2008-2012. 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.

Cheryl Doble is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Landscape Architecture Department at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, NY. 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.

Paula Horrigan is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University. Her teaching and research focuses 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 NY’s Rust.

Sigmund C. Shipp is an associate professor in the department of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College. 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.