Unpacking Engagement: Strategies for Context-Specific Community-Driven Design

For the past 27 years, the Detroit Collaborative Design Center (DCDC) based at the University of Detroit Mercy has worked with community organizations and nonprofit partners across the city of Detroit to envision neighborhood spaces resulting from community-engaged design processes. For the past decade, since co-leading a broad and deep citywide civic engagement effort, DCDC has expanded its methods and tools of engagement with intention and in collaboration with partners and in the context of diverse projects in distinct neighborhoods. Engagement methods aim to enable community-driven design of spaces for and with local communities. Central to the mission and methods of DCDC is the belief that the best design solutions merge discipline and community expertise, which results from relationship-building, two-way exchange of information, and meaningful partnerships. This approach relates to design processes on projects ranging from building rehab and pocket parks to neighborhood plans and citywide infrastructure. This paper will situate DCDC’s work in a broad history of community-engaged design, call out lessons for effective engagement from decades of practice, highlight lessons from recent projects, and situate the work in light of recent challenges. A discussion of principles and methods will unpack strategies that draw a direct line from community conversations to design decisions at a variety of scales. This work recognizes shifts in strategies to be responsive to scale, cultural and community context, and capacity, and considers influencing variables such as trust-building required, project pace, participating partners, and COVID constraints. In turn, this paper articulates lessons for community engagement practice at DCDC as well as the broader field.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.110.82

Volume Editors
Robert Gonzalez, Milton Curry & Monica Ponce de Leon

ISBN
978-1-944214-40-1