Community Engagement: Beyond the Survey
A 2-Way Street and the paragraphs that go with that heading
What is your view about community participation in public space design?
Community design approaches are evolving through best-practice methodologies, including pilots, research, and hands-on co-creation.
Lighting designers, learning from outreach program specialists, are transforming the predominant view that involving community or space-users results in mediocre design.
We believe that real involvement is a reciprocal knowledge transfer. Designers provide active learning scenarios to elicit local insights. Residents, workers and stakeholders inform designers about place-keeping legacies, priorities, and geographic/socially based genius loci with which designers can develop the best public spaces even after dark!
Water above Water, a Sublime Floating Landscape (Glasgow, Scotland)
An early, temporal, community-engaged project
In 1999 Leni was offered an opportunity to blend environmental artwork and social engagement. Site specificity is an approach that landscape architects and public artists use to make a space into a place. Design factors include the site's histories, the culture, geography, and other threads.
Leni's background as a community organizer and lighting designer merged for Water Above Water.
"A sea of luminous blue, green and aquamarine floodlighting dissolved and animated
the stern, hand-hewn stone of the aqueduct's buttresses and arches." — Architectural Review (UK)
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