Design as Democracy: A Workshop on Community Planning & Participatory Research

How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? How can we respectfully engage with communities in participatory research? By bringing community members to the table, we open up the possibility of exchanging ideas meaningfully and transforming places powerfully. In this workshop, Marcia McNally, Randolph Hester, and Sibyl Diver will share ideas from the new book Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity, and introduce interactive methodologies for participatory planning, design, and research.

Marcia J. McNally is a recognized leader in international environmental mobilization and on-the-ground citizen participation. She retired from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010 but continues to teach at Berkeley and in Taiwan. McNally now lives in Durham, North Carolina, where she runs The Neighborhood Laboratory, an on-demand community design center.Randolph T. Hester Jr. champions cultural and biological diversity through his writing and built work in complex political environments, from Manteo, North Carolina, to Los Angeles and the East Asian-Australian Flyway.Sibyl Diver is an environmental scientist at Stanford’s Department of Earth System Science. Taking a community-based approach, Sibyl has spent the past 10 years studying collaborative management between indigenous communities and state agencies in Pacific Northwest salmon watersheds.