Ecologies Urban

WHAT ARE URBAN ECOLOGIES?
where environments often fail to
encourage healthy living. The Building
Health theme called for practices
that address this ecological paradox.
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Creating Community:
Fostering design partnerships
between grassroots and
professional communities
to co-create sustainable
urban places.
How can we make communities?
Are cities too complex to
involve the public?
How can design processes
accommodate an everincreasing
diversity of
perspectives?
Directly engaging stakeholders
in the design of cities dissolves
institutional and disciplinary boundaries,
and provides an alternative to
conventional processes. The Creating
Community theme called for design
experiences that are rooted in community
participation rather than in established
professional relationships.
categorization, allowing the work to
intermingle as it had at the conference.
Keynote speakers were asked
to elaborate in essay form on the
thoughts they had so eloquently provided
in person. Also featured are
contributions from local partners
exploring urban ecologies in professional
contexts: a student competition
focused on intelligent urban
transportation ideas, and from
our exhibition partner, Onsite [at]
OCAD U. In all cases, the practices
represented here are reimagining
the city as “as something radically
different and better” by proposing
innovative design activities that
are essential to our urban future.
Jesse Colin Jackson
May 2015
The themes provided provocations
through which otherwise independent
segments of the international
design community could be
engaged. An enduring lesson from
the conference, however, was that
once presented with the opportunity
to cross-pollinate, participants were
resistant to being circumscribed
by thematic containers. With this
in mind, conference contributors
were asked to expand on the content
presented at the conference for this
publication. The results have been
editorially released from thematic
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