Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities

cover of Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities

A practical guidebook to involve all stakeholders in sustainble urban design.

A step-by-step guide to more synthetic, holistic, and integrated urban design strategies, Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities is a practical manual to accomplish complex community design decisions and create more green, clean, and equitable communities. + Full description

The design charrette has become an increasingly popular way to engage the public and stakeholders in public planning, and Design Charrettes for Sustainable Communities shows how citizens and officials can use this tool to change the way they make decisions, especially when addressing issues of the sustainable community.

Designed to build consensus and cooperation, a successful charrette produces a design that expresses the values and vision of the community. Patrick Condon outlines the key features of the charrette, an inclusive decision-making process that brings together citizens, designers, public officials and developers in several days of collaborative workshops.

Drawing on years of experience designing sustainable urban environments and bringing together communities for charrettes, Condon’s manual provides step-by-step instructions for making this process work to everyone’s benefit. He translates emerging sustainable development concepts and problem-solving theory into concrete principles in order to explain what a charrette is, how to organize one and how to make it work to produce sustainable urban design results.

- Short description

Authors

Patrick Condon is a professor in the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and holder of the UBC James Taylor Chair in Landscape and Livable Environments. Since 1994 he has organized and participated in over a score of design charrettes for sustainable communities. He is a senior researcher in the Design Center for Sustainable Communities at UBC, whose goal is to advance the practice sustainable community development in North America.