Title: Who What Where

Bio: Daniel D'Oca is Associate Professor in Practice of Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Principal and Co-Founder of Interboro Partners, a New York City-based architecture, urban design, and urban planning firm.

Brief description of the talk

Designers and planners do community engagement for all kinds of reasons. For some, it’s a box to check off—a scope requirement that results in empty evening meetings and obligatory “dotmocracy” activities. At it's worst, it’s an act of coercion—an opportunity to sell a predetermined, independently-generated idea to an unwilling public whose support is needed for approval. Increasingly, community engagement events are PR platforms—photo ops staged to showcase a designer’s willingness to work with “the community” (but that actually objectify community members). Rarely is community engagement what it should be: an open-ended, inclusive, and meaningful dialogue that generates something unique and site-specific, and that gives community members an opportunity to significantly shape the built environment. In this talk, Dan will talk about some of Interboro's recent and not-so-recent adventures in co-design, which have resulted in neighborhood plans, zoning codes, open spaces, curricula, and other co-authored urban artifacts.