Design Empowerment

Abstract

Empowering community residents to participate in neighborhood design may help overcome the tension between the urban densification requirements of climate change planning and the political infeasibility of rapid change. This research employed accessible visualization media in public workshops to test the capacity of the media to enable empowerment. In a community facing imminent development we found processes of mitigated empowerment through which residents accessed and generated information, were inspired to act in the face of complex problems, and expressed their ideas. The media did not enable design empowerment in the areas of community inclusion or integration into the design process.