Landscape Architecture Commons^™

Community Partnership As A Foundation For Scholarship, Pedagogy, And Research—An Interactive Session, Nadia Anderson, Carl A. Rogers, Lynn Paxson, Kristin Nelson, Courtney Long, Julia Badenhope

Nadia M. Anderson

In Good Deeds Good Design, Roberta Feldman states that empowering community design facilitates effective, informed decision-making by “people who have traditionally had minimal say” (Feldman, 2003, 110). Doing this requires designers to consider communities as partners rather than clients and see their work as a collective endeavor rather than a professional gift. At Iowa State University, faculty in multiple departments are using partnership-based outreach methods to generate disciplinary and trans-disciplinary projects engaging studio teaching, research, and scholarship. Critical to these projects is the idea that partnership inverts the traditional power relationship between designers and underserved communities by valuing local knowledge …