Design Charrette Research Articles

Everyday Landscapes and Urban DIYism in Sanzihou, Taipei

Sanzihou is the site of a former American military housing compound in Taipei. As a peri-urban neighborhood mixed with an iconic Cold War landscape developed during the Korean War, Sanzihou is a contested site at multiple levels. On one hand, preservationists and developers have battled over plans to redevelop or preserve the area. On the other hand, residents and students engage in a different kind of contestation as they battle over the lack of adequate housing and other public amenities. In 2007, an advocacy organization in Taipei put together a design charrette to envision the future of the area with a focus on reconciling preservation and the everyday life of the local residents. This article examines how the outcomes of the charrette overcome the limitation of the discourses of preservation and development by improvising and uncovering the possibilities of the everyday. The focus on the everyday, the article argues, provides an alternative spatial discourse and practice that addresses the needs and assets of the community and unleashes the social and spatial possibilities in the landscapes of the contemporary city.

Living City: community mobilization to build active transport policies and programs in Santiago, Chile

Although the usefulness of walking and cycling to promote health is increasingly recognized, the importance of civil society leadership in developing new policies and activities is often overlooked. This case study, of Living City (Ciudad Viva) a community-based organization in Santiago, Chile, examines how several communities used knowledge about transport’s impact on the environment and health, gained through opposition to a major highway project, to build effective sustainable urban transport initiatives. Inspired by urban reforms in Bogot´a, Living City now focuses mainly on “active transport” (formerly nonmotorized), building the policies, attitudes and infrastructure necessary to encourage walking and cycling, and the inclusion of the differently abled. It has won two major awards for innovation and now partners with NGOs in The Netherlands and elsewhere in Chile and Latin America. Moreover, Living City now organizes cycling-inclusive training programs, design charrettes and participatory processes in cooperation with Santiago’s regional and national authorities. Its publication, La Voz de La Chimba, distributed free throughout the city by volunteers, has helped to open people’s eyes to the implications of active transport for social equality and health, and provided support to other citizens’ initiatives, struggling to get off the ground. This experience illustrates how citizens’ and community organizations acquire important knowledge and practical experience in learning by doing situations, and how they can learn to reach out to ordinary people and key policymakers, building bridges across the citizen-policy divide to produce innovative, win-win programs that simultaneously bring change at micro- and macro-levels.

Comparing Rural and Urban Children's Perceptions of an Ideal Community

While there is research on children's participation, what is needed are investigations on how children perceive community design and whether the geographic location in which the children live has an effect on their perceptions of an ideal community. The objectives of this study are to (1) identify children's ideal community elements and (2) determine if there are any differences in rural and urban children's perceptions. Models of an ideal community are created by ninety-three rural children and fifty urban children in a design charrette. Model content is analyzed using multivariate statistics to identify element and pattern preferences. Principal component analysis of the resultant thirty-eight models reveals that for the rural children, six components are considered significant dimensions and explain 67 percent of the variance, with the first component accounting for nearly 27 percent of the variance. For the urban children, four components are significant and explain 51 percent of the variance, with the first component accounting for nearly 15 percent of the variance. Spatial diagrams indicate that there is a difference between the rural and urban models. Furthermore, discriminant analysis reveals that there is a statistical difference between the content of the urban and rural models at a significance level of .007.

Using GIS in community design charrettes: Lessons from a Japan–U.S. collaboration in earthquake recovery and mitigation planning for Kobe

Charrettes have become popular in the urban design field, especially for use among multidisciplinary teams of professionals and non-professional community stakeholders seeking to incorporate a rich array of expertise in short visioning activities. Geographic Information Systems are among the technologies with potential to provide sophisticated spatial information to charrette participants efficiently. This article reports on a charrette carried out jointly by teams from Kobe University and the University of Washington, Seattle, USA, using GIS to inform urban design in three neighborhoods affected by the Great Hanshin–Awaji Earthquake of 1995 in Kobe, Japan. The article describes the charrette itself, and discusses the utility of GIS, given the challenges of disaster recovery in a context of undeveloped institutions for public participation, and with participants of different linguistic and educational backgrounds. In combination with electronically storable drawing technology, GIS proved useful in enlarging the multidisciplinary and cross-cultural reach of urban design; in incorporating new layers of pre-prepared expert data, and in combining such data with dynamically-generated “advice maps” and design ideas. For GIS-based charrettes to become more widely useful in community-scale design in Japan, however, additional property-scale data need to be available.

Using GIS as an Urban Design Charrette Support System

Using GIS as an Urban Design Charrette Support System

Utilizing the design charrette for teaching sustainability

PurposeThis paper aims to investigate the design charrette as a method for teaching sustainability.Design/methodology/approachThe paper utilizes a student‐based design charrette for the Mississippi Gulf Coast comprising a framework for teaching sustainability. An assessment of the charrette's role in promoting sustainability in higher education was ascertained through respondents completing pre‐ and post‐charrette surveys.FindingsThe paper provides survey results that shed light on the effectiveness of the charrette as an approach for teaching sustainability in higher education.Research limitations/implicationsThis research indicates that a charrette framed with criteria for teaching sustainability is viable. However, the study has limitations owing to the project's scope and its being a single‐case sample.Practical implicationsThe paper shows that actively engaging students in interdisciplinary, service‐oriented projects is of value in teaching concepts of sustainability in higher education.Originality/valueThe paper addresses the need for sustainability in higher education, focusing on disciplines of design, by assessing the effectiveness of a well‐accepted design teaching approach, the charrette.

Youth Design Participation to Support Ecological Literacy: Reflections on Charrettes for an Outdoor Learning Laboratory

Childhood experiences in nature have been found to hold myriad developmental values, yet opportunities for such experiences have diminished greatly. If children are to regain these values, firsthand experiences to learn from and care about and for such natural places are essential. Such experiences, and the resulting knowledge, caring and competence to act, serve as the foundation of what David Orr defines as “ecological literacy.” A meaningful context for such experiences and literacy building is that of formal education, where youth may undertake hands-on studies outdoors. These studies could occur in nearby open space, such as urban parks, provided the parks were appropriately designed. This paper describes youths' participation in design charrettes for a park's “outdoor learning laboratory,” reflects on the process and outcomes, and suggests potentials to support ecological literacy through both the charrette process and the designed learning environment.

Integrating Social Science and Design Inquiry Through Interdisciplinary Design Charrettes: An Approach to Participatory Community Problem Solving

Interdisciplinary collaborations that aim to facilitate meaningful community outcomes require both the right mix of disciplinary knowledge and effective community participation, which together can deepen collective knowledge and the capacity to take action. This article explores three interdisciplinary design charrettes, intensive participatory workshops that addressed specific community problems and provided a context for integrating design and social science inquiry with local community knowledge. Evaluation data from the charrettes shed light on how students from the design and social science disciplines experienced the charrettes, and on their interactions with community members. Key advantages to this interdisciplinary, community-based collaboration included expanded knowledge derived from the use of multiple modes of inquiry, particularly the resulting visualization tools that helped community members understand local issues and envision novel solutions. Key drawbacks included difficulties in balancing the two disciplines, the tendency for social scientists to feel out of place on designers' turf, and the increased disciplinary and interpersonal conflicts arising from a more diverse pool of participants.

Landscape Planning Education: Utilizing a Design Charrette for Rural Children

Landscape Planning Education: Utilizing a Design Charrette for Rural Children

A lifestyle-based scenario for US buildings: implications for energy use

Can lifestyle-based scenarios provide insight into the nature of energy use in our future buildings? Participants in a design charrette brainstormed ideas about the future of US homes and workplaces. The teams started from several descriptions of daily lifestyles, and developed specific building characteristics as the place settings for these narratives. In addition to characterizing the physical environment, the teams also identified the forces that would be influential in making these changes. Further reflection was made on the possible unintended consequences of these changes. The energy implications of these changes were characterized with respect to magnitude and direction. While acknowledging the speculative nature of the exercise, the rationale was to broaden the discussion on future energy use by looking at future scenarios in the context of everyday life.

CHILDREN AS PARTNERS IN NEIGHBORHOOD PLACEMAKING: LESSONS FROM INTERGENERATIONAL DESIGN CHARRETTES

This paper investigates how children can be engaged as active participants in neighborhood placemaking through the use of a design charrette, an intensive, hands-on workshop in which designers and citizens collaborate to solve a community design problem. The charrette methodology has been reconceptualized through the lens of new theoretical perspectives on children, social justice, and spatiality to encompass intergene- rational, interskill, and inter-institutional participation. A formative evaluation of two design charrettes provides lessons on the benefits of and barriers to bringing 4th–5th and 9th–12th graders into a partnership with university students, design professionals, and community constituents. Benefits to younger participants included indications of social and environmental awareness, evidence of environmental competence, and opportunities to influence public decision-making. Barriers included the difficulties all parties experienced in taking new social roles, realizing new learning modes (including the design process), and overcoming institutional hierarchies. A six-level scaffold of interdependent adult and institutional support is proposed to facilitate children's neighborhood placemaking.

Asking Transit Users About Transit-Oriented Design

Visual-preference surveys are becoming popular in “visioning” projects, design charrettes, and other physical planning activities in which intensive public involvement is desired. In a survey, transit users, nonusers, and professionals were shown a series of paired slides of bus stops, asked to choose the stop from each pair at which they would prefer to wait, and asked to rate each stop chosen as a place to wait. Slides then were analyzed for content, with 19 features of bus stops and surroundings measured and quantified. Subsequent analysis showed that transit-oriented design features most affecting both choices and ratings are a bus shelter at the stop, trees along the street leading to the stop, a vertical curb at the stop, the setback of the stop from the street edge, and a continuous sidewalk leading to the stop. Such a survey may help transit planners choose the best transit-stop locations and devote financial resources to the most promising transit-stop amenities, given the inevitable trade-offs involved.

Hands–On Approach to the Americans with Disabilities Act

ISSUE: Teaching, research, and practice were pursued for students and professionals who wanted to learn more about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). APPLICATION: A commonsense, hands–on approach is advocated. GOAL: An interior design program initiated the ADA workshop for program enrichment to stimulate firsthand understanding of the law. DESCRIPTION: Beginning with a three–day public workshop, professionals and students came together in an ADA field experience to identify barriers and prioritize the removal of architectural and communication barriers in specified places. The workshop began with a pretest, was followed by a design charrette format, and concluded with a post–test. Participants, armed with a systematic checklist, videocamera, and an ADA expert, to spent from 3–6 hours evaluating sites and preparing their reports. CONCLUSION: Workshop participants showed a 25% improvement based on test scores in overall understanding and application of ADA Accessibility Guidelines. This workshop led to increased program visibility, extension programming, community leadership, and professional opportunities for students.

Design Seminar: An Urban Site

During the first two weeks in March, 1982, a unique program convened in Washington, D.C. Design Seminar: An Urban Site was an innovation in professional continuing education for architects, landscape architects, and urban designers, which created a format for exploring design solutions for the revitalization and extension of our cities through an enlightened understanding of the formal urban relationships and historical allusions which can create a place of quality. As a vehicle for a new method of communication, its first purpose was to educate an unusual student body. This was a bold experiment in the introduction of the urban design process to non-designers working along with practicing professionals, students, and their faculty. A second purpose was to develop a working model for communities as a potentially effective tool to encourage thoughtful urbar design. With appropriate modification suited to each situation, this prototype could be useful to large and second tier cities, and even to rural and small towns. A distinguished group of design professionals, planners, educators, government officials, and local experts were brought together to contribute their expertise in exploring practical and theoretical issues of architecture and the urban landscape as applied to a specific site in downtown Washington. The interaction with interested community members who play a significant role in the day-to-day decisionmaking process added a dimension of reality to the exercise and contributed to the problem-solving methodology. This group consisted of zoning and housing lawyers, preservationists, representatives of arts and citizen-interest organizations, developers, realtors, transportation planners, and spokesmen for Chinatown and neighborhood churches. The seminar guided participants through a variety of approaches to the design process. The four-evening and oneday symposium involved speakers, participants, and team leaders (preceptors) in lectures, panels and open discussions, and workshops highlighted by a design studio/ charrette as the final activity. The topics of the evening lectures and discussions during the first week included design theory issues, site history, and analysis, and legal, financial, social, political, and neighborMount Vernon Square in Washington, DC, was the site for the Urban Design Charrette. The area centers around the Mount Vernon Square Library (top) and Washington's Chinatown at 8th and H Sts. (bottom and page 29).