Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

The Land That Could Be Project (LTCBP) began in 1997 with a modest request for students to participate in envisioning how to best support students on a university campus through design. The LTCBP has embraced its role through ten iterations to listen to and provide for community constituents by offering design expertise and vision. The program has worked with neighborhood revitalization projects, urban design groups, and city programs to improve the built environment via the maturing methods of public-interest design / live projects. Based in an ethical vision it frames public-interest design on three levels. 1. Self, aims at providing future professionals the opportunity to learn through striving to make a difference, engage communities by proposing possibilities about its physical, spatial, historical, and ecological future. 2. School, fulfills the responsibility of urban and regional Universities to foster local engagement, education, and benefit. 3. Community, seeks to expose future architects to community engagement on a professional, personal, and site-specific manner - that buildings and the landscape/context in which they are situated, are inextricably linked and must be understood socially, physically, and ecologically. Students learn to understand their role as future professionals not as experts but as participant/residents within communities. Secondarily, they learn how this revised role recast them as participant/resident/empathetic guide in the making of our shared, meaningful communal landscape. They share how the city/neighborhood/place might be better otherwise. The paper focuses on the methods of the LTCBP and its relation to public-interest design / live projects via consideration of ten iterations.