|
I'm a planner, urban designer, architect, and teacher who has practiced mainly in the public sector over the last 40 years. I have come to believe that ordinary citizens can and will be the ones who make a difference in improving the shape of our urban environment. Every development initiative involves the government, the private sector and the citizenry. It's a struggle sometimes, but worth it, to assure community leaders fair representation at the table where the plans get approved. Citizens in the end are the judge of whether we're making our places better or not. We live in a time when citizens' knowledge and access to knowledge - not to mention commonsense - about the shape and condition of their communities is rapidly revving up - and the truisms of experts are unraveling. I dedicate my book and my work to assist this transformation.(google urbandesign.pro for blog)
I have directed planning and urban design agencies in New York City (Staten Island planning), New Orleans (technical director of the Comprehensive River Area Study), Birmimgham (planning director), UC Berkeley (campus planning director), and Atlanta (commissioner of planning, development and neighborhood conservation). Presently, I am a professor of practice in the schools of architecture and city and regional planning at the Georgia Tech College of Architecture.
My wife, Peggy Powell Dobbins, http://www.peggydobbins.net, who originated this site and occasionally shares in its content, is an urban sociologist turned artist, who produces installation/performance art based in civic rituals, writes, engages in and supports progressive initiatives, and has taught from the university to the GED levels. Together, we want to:
1) to engage debate on whether Urban Design is a new discipline marking a break with the history of places and cities planned and built FOR people but not WITH them, and
2) to investigate developments within other disciplines and countries, arts and sciences, where people like us may be having success in molding and modeling their practice into a cooperative tool to "make capital work for the people."
URBAN DESIGN WITH PEOPLE was the original title of my text, written for students, professionals, and as a handbook for citizen activists. Peggy noted, however, that it was listed pre-publication on Amazon as Urban Design FOR People. But for that, she says she would not have not recognized the paradigm shift Urban Design represents, as proposed on this site and as I have practiced.
Peggy further observed: "After all, people have been designing cities FOR people since the pharoahs and the viziers. Maybe in their minds with the noblest of altruistic intentions. Architects to soviet socialist and modernist capitalist patrons alike produced what they knew best for "the people." Now icons like Corbusier are knocked off pedestals as if their architecture of repetitive towers spaced between windswept plazas is to blame for rioting unemployed grandchildren of those recruited to industrial jobs, now gone."
We settled with Wiley on the title: Urban Design And People.
|
|
|