Community Matters: Service-Learning in Engaged Design and Planning

Reviews / Votes

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