Architecture, Participation and Society

by Paul Jenkins (Editor), Leslie Forsyth (Editor)

How can architects best increase their engagement with building users and wider society to provide better architecture? Since the mid 1990s government policy has promoted the idea of greater social participation in the production and management of the built environment but there has been limited direction to the practising architect. Reviewing international cases and past experiences to analyze what lessons have been learnt, this book argues for participation within other related disciplines, and makes a set of recommendations for architectural practices and other key actors.

240 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2009

About the author

Professor Paul Jenkins has 50 years of experience working with urban issues – initially as a practicing architect and planner and then engaging in teaching and research over more than half of the past five decades. Much of this was in the Global South (sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil), but also in the North where he started as an academic mid-career. He has direct experience of much of the post-WWII alternative approaches to urban design and planning in cities of the South, which underpins the critical analysis that he brings to the book. In this he also draws on his studies of the historical urban development of cities in the North and South, in which he has focused on locating normative design and planning aspects within their wider context (see, for example, Edwards and Jenkins 2005). His half-century of engagement with the discourse and praxis of urban development both North and South has led to his querying the basis for deliberate engagement in urban areas as argued in the book, particularly the negative implications of the concept of ‘informal’, instead of which he advocates the use of the term ‘non-formal’.