Civic Design Research Articles

Youth Participatory Action Research for Equitable Urban Design

The Nashville Youth Design Team (NYDT) is a youth participatory action research and design collective based in Metro Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee, USA. Developing out of a longstanding collaborative partnership between the Civic Design Center, a Nashville-based nonprofit that supports community engagement in urban design and planning, and researchers from Vanderbilt University, the NYDT seeks to improve youth health and well-being through research, design, and advocacy. In this paper we briefly describe the origins and goals of the NYDT before applying the NYDT’s action research process to the team’s most recent project, the Dream City Workshop, to illustrate how the team’s work aims to center youth voices in decision-making spaces and challenge structural inequities within the built environment. The Dream City Workshop is a two hour design thinking workshop, where youth participants are encouraged to create a city specifically designed to meet the needs of young people; a city where the only limit is their imagination. The goal of this workshop is to help young people think creatively to resist hegemonic norms and challenge structural inequities like structural racism and classism to imagine a better and more inclusive city for all. Following a detailed description of the development and implementation of the Dream City Workshop, we consider the strengths and weaknesses of the NYDT’s action research process and the workshop, specifically exploring how the team, through their work, seeks to address structural racism and work towards health equity. We conclude the paper by providing recommendations for others interested in cultivating similar locally focused action research projects and collectives.

Civic Design as Social Practice

If communities know best, what knowledge do designers need to possess in order to be effective and equal community members working together with others who seek change in the world?Questioning the elements present in civic design can help anticipate its possible trajectories and futures—and what that means for current and future design practitioners.

Working from within Government to Support the Design Industry in Jalisco, Mexico

…introducing design and working from/within government in Mexico has been an interesting endeavor due to its initial maturity level and by how we approach design at our local government level…Civic designers are putting their unique stamp on public projects that not only enhance the State but are also expanding the role of design throughout Mexico.

Beyond Labs: The Future of Civic Design

The next era must challenge what we mean by design in the context of public organizations, and it must challenge how we use design to enable better government in ways that are simultaneously more fundamental and more ambitious.In the past two decades, civic design has led to substantial improvements in how societal issues are addressed. Where might it go from here?

Embedding Equity in Civic Design to Transform Customer Experience

Every interaction between the government and the American public is an opportunity to deliver the services our people expect and deserve.Bringing a design mindset and focus on equity to the complexity of the U.S. federal government helps create customer experiences that can work for everyone.

‘Creation of a better urban environment’: Sydney’s Civic Design Society 1962–1984

ABSTRACT The increasing acceptance of urban design as an important planning and development framework from the 1960s was mediated through different institutional and place-based circumstances. In Sydney, Australia, a now largely forgotten body, the Civic Design Society, made a significant contribution as ‘a central rallying point for all persons and organizations concerned with fighting ugliness and with making our towns and cities better and more beautiful’. This paper recounts the origins, activities, contributions and legacy of what began as a university club and became an inclusive forum for community and professional engagement in planning, urban renewal, heritage conservation and design issues.

Resilient Civic Design Evaluation Criteria for Response Capacity within a Seismic Risk Context in Santiago, Chile. The Case of Residential Communities Affected by the San Ramón Fault

Resilient Civic Design Evaluation Criteria for Response Capacity within a Seismic Risk Context in Santiago, Chile. The Case of Residential Communities Affected by the San Ramón Fault

A Framework for Open Civic Design: Integrating Public Participation, Crowdsourcing, and Design Thinking

Civic problems are often too complex to solve through traditional top-down strategies. Various governments and civic initiatives have explored more community-driven strategies where citizens get involved with defining problems and innovating solutions. While certain people may feel more empowered, the public at large often does not have accessible, flexible, and meaningful ways to engage. Prior theoretical frameworks for public participation typically offer a one-size-fits-all model based on face-to-face engagement and fail to recognize the barriers faced by even the most engaged citizens. In this article, we explore a vision for open civic design where we integrate theoretical frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing, and design thinking to consider the role technology can play in lowering barriers to large-scale participation, scaffolding problem-solving activities, and providing flexible options that cater to individuals’ skills, availability, and interests. We describe our novel theoretical framework and analyze the key goals associated with this vision: (1) to promote inclusive and sustained participation in civics; (2) to facilitate effective management of large-scale participation; and (3) to provide a structured process for achieving effective solutions. We present case studies of existing civic design initiatives and discuss challenges, limitations, and future work related to operationalizing, implementing, and testing this framework.

SPATIAL PLANNING LEGISLATION IN GHANA: EXPLORING THE EVOLUTION, CONTRIBUTIONS, AND THE WAY FORWARD.

This paper explored the evolution of spatial planning in Ghana’s context. Using Institutional Analytical Framework, the paper posits that spatial planning has gone through several changes over the years. Additionally, it was revealed that spatial planning as an idea dates back to nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization that mostly happened in developed countries. These had less focus on civic design and came to be more competent in state policy. Although planning in Ghana antedates the early 90s, nationwide spatial planning commenced with the preparation and initiation of CAP 84 (Town and Country Planning Ordinance) in 1945. Fast forward spatial planning in Ghana is presently being done by tenets and provisions as captured in Act 925 - Land Use and Spatial Planning Act 2016. However, this paper establishes possible conflict and duplication of planning efforts and practices by looking at Act 925 and Act 480 - National Development Planning System Act, 1994. It envisages that planning in Ghana will go through another evolution to avert the “spatial” and “policy” perspectives to planning and as well attain coordinated efforts to guide the course of planning in Ghana. Keywords: Spatial planning, Land use, Evolution, Planning conflict

On destruction in design

Sometimes to build something new you have to destroy what exists. We learned what should have been this obvious fact of existence through our collaboration with a group of 7th grade middle school students that we enlisted in a civic design project. The students were nominally tasked with designing new spaces for inter-cultural communication and public reflection on the small island our university campus shares with a small residential community in the middle of one of the most capitalized urban landscapes in the modern world. Why did it take a group of young middle schoolers to help us as design researchers recognize the significance of destruction as a design move? How can we use this experience to inform our discussion of politics in design, where the interesting question is not whether a design has politics or not, but what politics a specific design proposal does manifest (in this case, the destruction of an artifact), and how such acts can help surface the underlying tensions within a society or community? These are some of the questions that we probe in reflecting on this episode from the perspective of design.

Bandung dan Pemaknaan Dago dalam Sejarah: Masa Lalu, Masa Kini

This article explores the history of Bandung, in particular the Dago street area, as a history of place. It looks into how Bandung include Dago has been defined, its etymology and the way in which the people that inhabit the place use and place meaning to these urban spaces. The article argues that civic meaning is rooted in the historic creation of place. It also looks into civic design and civic reform going through different governmentality from the colonial up into the present period to see how much the meaning of place is both historical but also politic and strategic to the present needs of the people that inhabit it.

A Study on Democratic civic education practice design based on 6th grade English textbook:Focusing on contents and method according to 2015 Revised Curriculum

A Study on Democratic civic education practice design based on 6th grade English textbook:Focusing on contents and method according to 2015 Revised Curriculum

Precarious Interventions

In this paper, we present ethnographic account of people's everyday behavioral health experiences in the city of Jackson, Michigan to explore community forms of care work through an infrastructural lens. Detailing people's interactions with clinical processes and health policies, local resources, and diverse social worlds, we highlight problematic healthcare delivery gaps, as well as the informal (and often invisible) practices people depend upon to manage their health needs given socioeconomic hardships and cultural concerns. We also discuss the city's efforts to support local behavioral health needs through the development of a community health record. Placing fieldwork findings in conversation with the goals of this ongoing civic design project, we propose the analytic sensibility of precarious intervention to unpack the significance of the infrastructural tensions and power relations at play when people seek solutions to complex sociotechnical problems. Precarious intervention calls for CSCW research that attends to 1) the collective labor necessary to create and maintain ecologies of care in the face of infrastructural brokenness; and 2) the high-stakes and varied costs of 'engagement' for different community stakeholders.

Building the Civic Design Field in New York City

In the past decade or more, there has been a steady increase in design activity directed towards improving civic and government initiatives in many parts of the world. However, civic and public sector design is still emergent ‒ critical analysis of existing work is scant and there are few sector-level initiatives that seek to support and build the field. Here we present the methods and findings of a 2018 study conducted in New York City which aimed to assess the support requirements of civic and public sector design practitioners and the field as a whole. Data was collected in multiple ways, through desk research, guided conversations with expert practitioners, an online survey, and a project workshop. We highlight the importance of sector support activity and propose practical projects for the field in New York City. Our recommendations cover issues such as organization growth trajectories and funding models. Whilst our focus is on New York, both the research approach and findings are relevant to other places.

Beyond the cacophony of the immediate and towards a preferable future: transformation of urban 'planning' in Africa

Beyond the cacophony of the immediate and towards a preferable future:transformation of urban 'planning' in Africa Paul Jenkins (bio) and Garth Klein (bio) Introduction Following up a recent article in this journal (Klein and Jenkins 2018) which examined urban planning education in Brazil and South Africa, in this opinion piece the authors take a wider look at what we call urban 'planning' in sub-Saharan Africa and how it needs to be transformed. We argue that the current planning procedures are still dominated by those developed in the global North and do not keep up with the dynamic of extremely rapid urban expansion and densification in Africa, and that these procedures are also increasingly coming to benefit the growing middle class in the region, as well as the elite, to the detriment of the actual and projected urban poor majority. Our engagement with 'transformation' in the South African context visà-vis planning education is thus widened and deepened here, as we reflect on how African urban dwellers have for centuries managed land and environmental resources through embedded governance mechanisms which are based on socio-cultural structures and agency. We argue that only by understanding how these (at times ancient) practices have evolved and, in modified form, govern most urban physical change – especially the so-called 'informal' – can urban 'planning' be decolonised from its global North 'specialist' approach and thereby be re-embedded as a socially legitimate form of governance of land and environmental resources in the realpolitik of Africa's fast-growing cities. [End Page 190] Thus, looking beyond the 'cacophony of the immediate' – typically that of decrying the dystopic nature of urban change in sub-Saharan Africa – this opinion piece argues that urbanisation is here to stay and is creating new forms of urbanism as well as manifestations of urbanity. These need to be seen not as problems but as solutions with which urban planning needs to work. Urban planning as we know it: seeing the present more clearly What do we mean by 'urban planning'? Urban planning generally refers to state regulation of use of urban land and environmental resources, in principle in the public interest. While forms of planning towns and cities have existed for millennia, the origins of 'modern' urban planning can be found in the beginning of the twentieth century, largely as a reaction to rapid urbanisation in the global North and reaction to the impact of poorly regulated capitalist endeavour (especially industrialisation, but also land and housing markets and associated necessary services for the latter). While initially focused on planning urban expansion, the state began to reserve stronger powers for wide regulation of land and environmental use after the Second World War in the UK, in the USA through the New Deal, and in Europe through the Marshall Plan. In all cases, despite the generally capitalist economies, all contexts were characterised by a period of a strong state and growth in regulatory capacity. Urban planning as a profession developed initially through architecture – where 'civic design' emerged in the 1920s in the Western world – although by the mid twentieth century, urban and regional planning (otherwise known as 'town and country planning' and/or 'physical planning', depending on the context) became a profession in its own right. This was naturally associated with control of education, as with other professions, and also the growth of university education, with a professional body exercising oversight under government statute. In this, the profession of urban planning followed the tendency in the second part of the nineteenth century for specialisation in education, and the post-Enlightenment 'capture' of the 'high ground' for knowledge by academia. As such, by mid twentieth century, other routes to education such as apprenticeship were dropped in favour of academic training – sometimes criticised both for the subsequent ignoring of other valid forms of knowledge (Illich 1977) [End Page 191] as well as for the subsequent academisation of valid knowledge (Shipman and Shipman 2005). In more recent decades the field of planning has diversified into specialist areas, including that called development planning, often with an economic developmental focus within what are seen as historically 'underdeveloped' contexts.1 While covering an increasingly widening and complex professional field of...

How Features of a Civic Design Competition Influences the Collective Understanding of a Problem

From Fortune 500 companies to local communities, organizations often strive to build a shared understanding about complex problems. Design competitions provide a compelling approach to create incentives and infrastructure for gathering insights about a problem-space. In this paper, we present an analysis of a two-month civic design competition focused on transportation challenges in a major US city. We examine how the event structure, discussion platform, and participant interactions affected how a community collectively discussed design constraints and proposals. Ninety-two participants took part in the competition's online discussion, hosted on Slack. Applying a mixed-methods analysis, we found that participants shared less as they settled into teams and, due to the discussion system, had difficulty seeing how topics connected across channels; we also learned that certain messages led participants to add depth to existing topics. Based on the findings we provide recommendations for civic competitions aimed at building knowledge around a problem.

Transparency as design choice of open data contests

Open data contests have become popular virtual events that motivate civic hackers to design high performing software applications that are useful and useable for citizens. However, such contests stir up controversy among scholars and practitioners about the role of transparency, or more specifically, the unrestricted access and observability of the applications submitted throughout the contest. In one view, transparency may reduce performance because it causes excessive replication, whereas another view argues that transparency can encourage novel forms of reuse, namely recombination. This article proposes a new perspective towards transparency as a design choice in open data contest architectures. We introduce a 2‐dimensional view towards transparency, defined as observability of information about each submitted (a) solution (how it works) and its (b) performance (how high it scores). We design a sociotechnical contest architecture that jointly affords both transparency dimensions, and evaluate it in the field during a 21‐day contest involving 28 participants. The results suggest that the joint instantiation of both transparency dimensions increases performance by triggering different kinds of recombination. Findings advance literature on sociotechnical architectures for civic design. Furthermore, they guide practitioners in implementing open data contests and balancing the tension between individual versus collective benefits.

Designing the garden of Geddes: The master gardener and the profession of landscape architecture

The influence of Patrick Geddes (1854–1932) on the landscape architecture profession has been widely acknowledged, but there is no critical review of the nature of this influence on theory and practice. Geddes appears to have been the first person in Britain to adopt the term landscape architect to denote a profession in the American sense as someone who dealt with city planning, civic design and parks systems. This profession seemed to encompass his wide ranging interests, providing a suitable vehicle for his transdisciplinary approaches, but which he later transferred to that of town and regional planning. His approach to understanding landscapes was to study towns and regions from a cultural, ecological and economic perspective in a systematic way of survey, analysis and design. Geddes’s methods were gradually adopted by the landscape architecture profession, and purely Beaux Arts-architectural approaches phased out. By tracing contemporary references, this paper highlights key individuals who helped to promote his ideas in the landscape architecture profession then and now, and shows how his enduring influence and longstanding impact have to do with the systematic approach and methods he set forth. Today similar approaches are being promoted by other professions, but with a different perspective, and suggests that rather than various disciplines setting up silos, trying to defend their territories, with climate change and food security looming it is timely to promote more integrated approaches. This is well in line with Geddes’s ideas who not only encouraged interdisciplinarity, but also warned against inadvertent specialisation.

Designing trust: how strategic intermediaries choreograph homeowners’ low-carbon retrofit experience

ABSTRACT In the Netherlands, as in other European countries, the uncertain, fragmented character of the low-carbon retrofit market hampers a transition towards sustainable housing. Connecting homeowners to supply-side actors of low-carbon retrofit procedures, products and technologies in ways satisfactory to homeowners forms an important, challenging task. Service design for the benefit of a customer-centric perspective might be a solution. This paper investigates the potential role of strategic intermediaries as agents of change located between supply-side actors and homeowners. It asks how strategic intermediaries choreograph low-carbon retrofit experiences of homeowners through the design of a ‘customer journey’. Trust is a crucial determinant. This paper distinguishes between three customer-journey designs in which, depending on the role envisioned for homeowners, a different trust relation is foregrounded: a private design envisions homeowners as passive consumers who trust in the expertise offered by the intermediary; a civic design envisions homeowners as engaged consumer-citizens who trust their neighbours as reliable service representatives; and a public design envisions homeowners as critical customers who trust in the retrofit technologies and products offered. This implies an important role for policy actors in realizing ways for scaling up and institutionalizing all three low-carbon retrofit customer-journey designs on a national level.

Parking Lot Design Contest

You are asked to participate in a contest to design a parking lot in the downtown area of your city. The space is limited, and the civic design department wants to maximize the number of cars that can be safely parked in the space. The required conditions are specified below.