Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design

Questions of Access, Engagement and Creative Experience

Edited by Kelly L. Anderson, Monash University

'Participatory Practice in Space, Place, and Service Design' is premised on a belief in the importance of participatory practices in finding creative solutions to the plethora of problems we face today. It argues that engaging professions with the public in mutual exploration, analysis, and creative thinking is essential. It not only ensures better quality products, places, services, and a greater sense of civic agency but also facilitates fuller access to them and the life opportunities they can unleash. This book offers a uniquely varied perspective of the myriad ways in which participatory practices operate across disciplines and how they impact the worlds and communities we create and inhabit. This book suggests that participatory practices are multi-disciplinary and relevant in fields as diverse as design, architecture, education, health care, sustainability, and community activism, to name a few of those discussed here. How do designed objects and environments affect wellness, creativity, learning, and a sense of belonging? How do products and services affect everyday experience and attitudes towards issues such as sustainability? How does giving people a creative voice in their own education, services, and built environments open up their potential and strengthen identity and civic agency? Addressing these questions requires a rethinking of relations between people, objects, and environments; it demands attention to space, place, and services.

Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change

Edited by Celina Jeffery, University of Ottawa

'Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change' considers the ways that art can offer a means through which to discover, analyze, re-imagine and re-frame emotive discourses about the ecological and cultural transformations of the coastline. This edited anthology takes ephemerality as its central conceptual and methodological framework and presents a series of essays that create interconnections between environmental and social considerations of the coast, a succession of embodied creative practices, and shifting regional geographic identities. The book presents a series of specific case studies of artistic practices and strategies that seek to capture the rewriting of cartographic maps that are being reshaped by rising seas, coastal flooding and catastrophic weather. The essays in this edited volume engender creative strategies for understanding new and uncertain coastal ecologies and the loss, expulsion or destruction of their associated cultures, habitats, species and ecosystems. The anthology also looks at the historical, mnemonic and contemporary transitional conditions of ‘conflicted’ coastal spaces in which empire, modernity and globalization press on coastal erosion and incursions, proliferate it with trivial plastics, pollution and disposable attitudes, and bring vulnerable communities into uncertain futures.

Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change

Edited by Celina Jeffery, University of Ottawa

'Ephemeral Coast: Visualizing Coastal Climate Change' considers the ways that art can offer a means through which to discover, analyze, re-imagine and re-frame emotive discourses about the ecological and cultural transformations of the coastline. This edited anthology takes ephemerality as its central conceptual and methodological framework and presents a series of essays that create interconnections between environmental and social considerations of the coast, a succession of embodied creative practices, and shifting regional geographic identities. The book presents a series of specific case studies of artistic practices and strategies that seek to capture the rewriting of cartographic maps that are being reshaped by rising seas, coastal flooding and catastrophic weather. The essays in this edited volume engender creative strategies for understanding new and uncertain coastal ecologies and the loss, expulsion or destruction of their associated cultures, habitats, species and ecosystems. The anthology also looks at the historical, mnemonic and contemporary transitional conditions of ‘conflicted’ coastal spaces in which empire, modernity and globalization press on coastal erosion and incursions, proliferate it with trivial plastics, pollution and disposable attitudes, and bring vulnerable communities into uncertain futures.

The Rise of Awards in Architecture

Edited by Jean-Pierre Chupin, Université de Montréal et al.

This book is the first scientific study to focus on awards in architecture and the built environment investigating their exponential growth since the 1980s. The celebration of excellence in architecture and related fields remains a phenomenon on which there is strangely little scientific scrutiny. What is to be understood from the plethora of award-winning projects, award-winning buildings and awarded professional practices in the built environment, year after year? Glossy images partake in an intense ballet at every local, regional, national or international award ceremony and they are meant to embody proofs of architectural excellence. However, it is necessary to take a critical distance to question what awards are meant to embody, symbolize, and perhaps measure. Each of the 10 chapters in this volume is centered on one question related to themes as varied as the comparison of Pritzker and Nobel Prizes, the Prix de Rome, the redefinition of quality through awards, green awards and sustainability, the multiplication of sustainable awards, heritage awards, architecture book awards, the awarding of school architecture, awards as mediations and awards as pedagogical devices. Many fields, once consolidated, have featured a sharp increase in related prizes. The original data, compiled and summarized in 4 appendices cover more than 150 award-granting organizations in some 30 countries. Our inventory includes upwards of 24,000 prizes awarded at more than 3,100 events, the earliest of which is the first instance of Western architecture’s seminal Grand Prix de Rome in France in 1720. A history of contemporary architecture is thus written through press releases that praise the merits of the heroes as much as their works and achievements. And while awards can be vehicles that propel architecture forward, they can also be Trojan horses in an era that is constantly on the lookout for event-driven products, small and big news, and brand imaging.

Arquitectura Sostenible: Entre Medición y Significado

Edited by Carmela Cucuzzella, Concordia University and Sherif Goubran, The American University in Cairo, Egypt

Cada día, nuevos artículos, libros e informes presentan nuevos métodos, estándares y tecnologías para lograr la sostenibilidad en arquitectura. Además, los nuevos materiales, dispositivos tecnológicos y datos se consideran cada vez más los elementos básicos del futuro de la arquitectura. A medida que adoptamos cada vez más este avance tecnológico, debemos ser igualmente conscientes de que podemos estar empujando la arquitectura hacia una ciencia administrativa y alejándonos de sus preocupaciones centrales, como la expresión, la contextualidad, la funcionalidad y la estética. La arquitectura sostenible que se centra en las medidas abstractas de consumo, energía y emisiones pierde de vista el papel vital que tiene la arquitectura en nuestro mundo: es el campo que crea nuestros espacios públicos y nuestros lugares de vivienda, de negocio, de producción, del ocio y la creación. Además, no comprende la dimensión humana de los edificios, como elementos que están profundamente conectados con los contextos históricos de sus lugares, y que juegan un papel clave en la definición de nuestras relaciones sociales y nuestra conexión con los espacios que ocupamos y utilizamos. 'Arquitectura Sostenible: Entre Medición y Significado' da un paso atrás para reflexionar sobre cómo la sostenibilidad en el entorno construido puede teorizarse y practicarse críticamente. Este libro expone que la arquitectura sigue siendo una ciencia humana y social que se encuentra en la intersección de medidas y significados. Revela que la arquitectura sostenible todavía puede operar en un espacio dialéctico de expresión, en lugar de servir como un manifiesto de los extremos técnicos o socioculturales. Pretende que la intuición, los sentidos y las habilidades humanas todavía tienen la clave para desentrañar futuros alternativos de espacios construidos sostenibles. Y lo más importante es que los humanos todavía tienen un lugar en la arquitectura sostenible. Este libro será de interés para estudiantes, académicos que inician su carrera, investigadores establecidos y profesionales que estudian la sostenibilidad en el entorno construido. Puede usarse como referencia para aquellos en los campos del diseño, arquitectura, paisaje y diseño urbano, estudios urbanos, geografía, ciencias sociales e ingeniería.