The Evolution of Community Engagement- where are we now?

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)