LDA 141 – Community Participation & Design

Designers and planners need new frameworks and better tools for engaging with communities. Simply going to a community and holding a public meeting does not constitute community participation. In fact, the act of going and supplanting existing patterns and cultures with outsider or expert views that purportedly improve local lives while in fact privileging outsiders is part of a long pattern that we know better as colonization. So how, then, should designers and planners prepare themselves, learn about communities, create mutually beneficial partnerships, seek input, explore ideas, and decide what to do? This is the subject of our course at UC Davis, LDA 141.

The following six projects were undertaken by student groups of 6-8 people from the majors of Sustainable Environmental Design and Landscape Architecture. This year our class, as well as community engagement, were realized largely through virtual meetings, remote site visits, and the very familiar juggling of our individual and group responsibilities. Several of these projects will continue on as student-driven group studies in the following Spring Quarter.