Between tower and street

Abstract

This paper presents the outcomes of a multi-year community design project undertaken by the Temple University School of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Horticulture in collaboration with a neighbourhood in post-industrial North Philadelphia. The process revealed the environmental design disciplines to be well suited to initiate the important work of community building. It sought to engage the imagination and creative drive of non-academics, and to energize and more deeply inform the forum of professional education. In doing so, the project redefined the academic audience, its locus and pedagogic goals to reach beyond, and more deeply within, the institutional framework. Both process and outcomes have depended critically on the negotiations between the panoptic vision of a designer's map-world and ephemeral, labyrinthine experience of the real lived-world: between domains of the 'tower' and the 'street'. Through this exchange of realities, both worlds were able to inform and participate in an authentic sustainable process of design thinking.