Community Matters: Service-Learning in Engaged Design and Planning
Edited by Mallika Bose, Paula Horrigan, Cheryl Doble, and Sigmund C. Shipp
New York: Routledge, 2014.
Community Matters: Service-Learning in Engaged Design and Planning is an edited collection by a group of educators interested in engaged pedagogies, research methods, and theories that bring together education, practice, and scholarship. The book presents, explores, and reviews issues common to many design and planning educators working at the borders between campus, community, traditional teaching, and service-learning. The book's goal is to describe a series of cases where university planning and design faculty collaborate with local leaders in order to improve conditions in distressed neighborhoods.
Community Matters brings to the fore crucial questions for all educators in landscape architecture, architecture, and planning: What is our role in and responsibility towards the communities that surround us? How are diverse, sensitive issues like race, gender, social justice, and ecological democracy approached through design theory, professional practice, service-learning, and community outreach? What are the benefits and shortcomings of this type of work for educators, students, universities, and communities? How are digital and social media used as a form of engagement?
The book presents work related to five broad topics. "Partnering to advance productive community dialogues" deals with defining the role, strategies, and concerns of project stakeholders. "Original seeing: Beholding community" presents new ways to literally see the community and better understand meaning and place. "Co-imagining alternative worlds" views the experience of three educators in dealing with new types of partnerships to redefine service-learning. "Changing from within: Recasting economic communities" looks at students and their role in learning participation. And in "Outcomes matter: Creating an evaluative community," contributors consider the impacts of service-learning programs on students, educators, and the university.
Counter Balance
Throughout the book, the authors stress reciprocity, partnership, environment, society, and agency as goals of service-learning, and teaching and outreach as service-learning's primary purpose. This type of engaged scholarship is familiar to those in land-grant universities, especially with vigorous Cooperative Extension Services embedded in the community. So the concept of connecting professional education and research to community outreach, the education of students and of the public in a co-related manner, and shared purpose in addressing environmental, economic, and social challenges is not new.
It is nonetheless significant that teaching and learning be engaged in real-world situations. This type of pedagogy is not easily reproduced, understood, explained, or experienced by design students whose education, by and large, takes place facing a computer screen, which is not to say that traditional studio work is not part of the process. Publically engaged pedagogy is fraught with the imperfection, unpredictability, and challenge of community work, but is a much needed counter balance to theory-based, two-dimensional representational expertise, and one-way professor to student communication. In the complexity of engaged scholarship, we find the richness of exploration, co-learning, community building, and empathy for the other.
Embracing Complexity
An engaged approach to teaching and learning is a complex affair, challenging the very structure of how design is taught and how design studios function. Most striking about the examples presented in Community Matters is the diversity in approach, scale, studio structure, final outcomes, and the questioning and refinement of service-learning itself. For example, in "Democracy matters, beginning in the classroom," Deni Ruggeri presents the many requirements placed on developing a studio that embraces the designer's role as social agent embedded in an open space, democratic context. Specifically, the requirements for democratic and engaged design are structurally and procedurally counter to or undermined by the requirements of teaching time frames, course objectives, and accreditation goals. Ruggeri presents the Minto Brown Studio model as an alternative structure that aligns theory and pedagogy with time frames and deliverables.
In a separate section, but very much related to complexity, Nadia Anderson introduces the concepts of preform- and postform-making roles. In "Finding and reassembling community amidst disaster," Anderson describes the importance of the predesign phase of a project as a way to initiate connectivity between site, student, and community. Anderson also states the importance of the nonmaterial aspects of culture and values. Not only is a framework for approaching affordable post-flooding housing in Cedar Rapids thereby achieved, but a strong theoretical and procedural guideline is set for other project types.
In "Life before/during/between/after the service-learning design studios," Jeffrey Hou presents an encouraging perspective based on a decade-long community-university partnership in Seattle (2002–2012). Hou's description of community-university partnership projects reveals the complex, iterative, and transformative process of service-learning. Hou's long view, multi-project perspective on service-learning positions the field as not so much a specific process to rally around, but rather a new terrain to explore.
The Future Matters
Universities engaged in service-learning are many. The book provides a broad overview including the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry Center for Community Design Research, ISU Community Design Lab, the Hamer Center for Community Design, and Action Research Illinois. The projects show the diversity, complexity, and challenges of publically engaged design for instructor, student, and community alike. Community Matters brings to light the need for more communication, discussion, and execution of engaged design projects, especially as an alternative to administrative, off-site, policy/expert-driven design.
Community Matters accomplishes a great deal in covering what it sets out to do. My next set of questions is: How has this legacy affected the practice of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning as a whole? Are there any studies that follow up on the graduates of these programs in order to see how engaged design has informed their practice? Do we see transdisciplinary collaboration with physical and mental health professionals, climate change scientists, and cognitive researchers as part of future projects?
Finally, Community Matters describes how the many methods used to approach co-plan, co-design, and co-build spaces and an atypical approach to landscape architecture scholarship and practice illuminate new ways to produce knowledge. Specifically, the book points to ways and forms of public and political engagement that function as alternatives to established expectations, methods, policies, and built form. This cross- and transdisciplinary attitude toward the theory, planning, and design of communal spaces establishes a primary form of knowledge production, engaged scholarship with an engaged community, that creates new ways of seeing, communicating, sharing, and building knowledge.
