This Reel unspools a series of iterative projects involving community members and architecture students co-creating their local environment. I think of the process as a collaborative ritual involving four stages: walking, talking, dreaming, and sharing. Following the work of anthropologist Victor Turner, I have sought to evoke liminal experiences, where experts and community members merge with each other and the object of their interest—the shared environment.
Beginning in 1996, these projects include participatory design techniques like walking tours and discussions, photo collection, then drawing and model making, urban design explorations, exhibits, and presentations. In each case, multiple intelligences are engaged, and learning is set in the community, not the classroom. The role of expert is upended, as community members and environmental designers often exchange roles.
Artists and critics inspiring this work include Michael Brenson, Mark Dion, Suzi Gablik, Helen & Newton Harrison, Mildred Howard, Mary Jane Jacob, Suzanne Lacy, and Estella Conwill Májozo.
As Richard Heisenberg says, “Resilience will therefore require engagement of all the individual’s multiple intelligences (linguistic, spatial, mathematical, bodily, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, and naturalistic). Neuroscience research into learning suggests that activities that move beyond linguistic and numeric drills—beyond classrooms and computers and into nature—may be especially effective at engaging the whole person.”
Over the decades, some of the architecture students involved in these projects have themselves become community advocates, while the community activists have come to speak for good, inclusive urban design.
This creative problem-solving is called Design. We can design our lives, in all their different facets, to sit more on the 'commonification' side of the page. And by strengthening that practice, we'll find a whole host of unintended pleasant surprises waiting for us. I mean, who doesn't love free lemons?
What things do you do that are outside the norm? And why do you love doing it your way?