Abstract
Our roles as citizens within our communities can sometimes be unknown and raises questions about our collective efforts. Are we doing the right thing to promote sustainable change and empowering the next generation with resilience? Humanity faces serious challenges in the coming decades: climate change, biodiversity loss, growing inequality, and more. In their current form, our systems seem to incentivise overconsumption, degrade communal bonds, and destroy natural wealth. The message is clear, we can use spaces within our communities better to become better citizens and help ecology thrive for future generations. We can do more to embed and encourage proactive change in our communities by using spaces and materials in a better way through thoughtful design. The researchers in this project believe that place-based approaches and community engagement around the theme of sustainability and ecology, can enable a growing network of ecological citizens. In this paper we explore how through creative practices, the sharing of ideas and thoughts, learning from best practices at a local, national, and international level from a variety of partners can create sustenance for a community-based network, which has the potential to include children and young people in the decision-making process. We consider how examples with embedded creative practice, such as community growers/larders/kitchens and forest schools support partnership working within place-based projects. We show how diverse groups of people can begin to make impactful change through community-focused approaches and community-led practices, activism and collective learning, advocacy, and design thinking in projects.
Presenters
Daniel KnoxLecture in Product Design, Faculty of Arts, Computing and Engineering, Wrexham University, Derbyshire, United Kingdom Alec Shepley
Professor of Art & Society / Associate Dean for Research, Faculty of Arts, Science and Technology, Wrexham University, Wrexham [Wrecsam GB-WRC], United Kingdom
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Architectonic, Spatial, and Environmental Design
KEYWORDS
Ecological Citizenship, Sustainable Communities, Transformative Design, Community Engagement, Sustainability
