Making Community Design Work

Exploring rural community place assessment through mobility and social media data in Fort Gaines, Georgia

“…Mixing methods and triangulating data between methods helps overcome limitations of these individual methods (Gaber, 2020), and most applications of social science to planning and design, such as post‐occupancy evaluation (Marcus & Francis, 1998), ethnography (Cranz, 2016; Low et al, 2005), and community design (Melcher, 2013) combine multiple methods. Community design – the practice of designing with the participation of the community members – is often the strategy relied upon by planners and designers to gather and synthesize an understanding of the human needs, preferences, and behaviors within a place to apply that knowledge to design decisions and planning recommendations (Hester, 2002; Melcher, 2013; Sanoff, 2000; Toker, 2012).…”

“…On‐the‐street presence, photo elicitation interviews, phone surveys, mobile workshops, and interactive online surveys (Toker, 2012) are among other tools that can be applied. These approaches might assist researchers and practitioners with obtaining broader inclusiveness and representative ideas about places since some groups – minority segments, for example – often prefer to take part in online participatory activities (Correa & Jeong, 2011).…”

Identifying Regional Environmental and Sustainability Issues: Adoption of an Interdisciplinary Design Charrette Approach

“…Stakeholders of CII were reluctant to prioritize the issues they identified; prioritization is a common goal for charrettes in addressing community problems (Toker 2017). Although participants agreed in listing prevalent issues and concerns, their consensus was to avoid any ranking, so that public and local, state, and federal officials would address regional concerns equally.…”

Local (Traditional) Knowledge as the Key for Sustainable Rural Development: Utopia or Reality? (Introduction to thematic section)

“…Examples of sustainable projects in rural areas show that networking of people with similar interests and establishing partnerships are crucial for the projects' success. The contacts between people often provide opportunities for learning from each other (Toker 2012) or mutual learning (Wates 2014). As demonstrated by the case studies, informal workshops, seminars, and courses -through which people gain new knowledge and skills, exchange experiences, develop social innovations etc.…”