Dynamics of power & participation: lessons from Cambodia and Thailand

Isaac Lyne, Istvan Rado

This chapter draws on two initiatives situated in Thailand and Cambodia, inspired by strength-based capacity building approaches known as ‘asset-based community development’ (ABCD) and ‘Appreciative inquiry’ (Ai). Our approach challenges western-centric conceptions of equality in participatory design and novelty in creative process. In Cambodia, a failed experiment with bamboo furniture led to the re-evaluation of welfare safety nets and sustainable social arrangements.

Cultivating the Habits of Coolth

Abby Mellick Lopes
Stephen Healy
Front cover of book

This chapter extends upon the book's discussions of habit to the process of adapting to anthropogenically induced global warming. We reveal the role of designed practices, products and infrastructures in habituating urban populations to a changing climate. Our central concern is the ‘world within the world’ design has helped to create. In the rapidly densifying city, atmospheric commons are shaped and reshaped by human design; climate change is lived and felt in hostile heat islands and polluted, particulate-laden city air.

Commons & community economies: entry points to design for eco-social justice?

Bianca Elzenbaumer, Fabio Franz

Many designers today (including ourselves) are experimenting with how their practice can engage in meaningful ways with the complexity of pressing social and environmental issues. Being very much concerned with the politics and power relations that run through such issues, in this paper we will explore what points of orientation the framework of the ‘commons’ and that of ‘community economies’ – seen from an autonomist and feminist Marxist perspective – can offer when working on socially and politically engaged projects.

Infrastructures of care: opening up ‘home’ as commons in a hot city

Abby Mellick Lopes
Stephen Healy
Emma Power
Louise Crabtree
Katherine Gibson

What does it mean to be at home in a hot city? One response is to shut our doors
and close ourselves in a cocoon of air-conditioned thermal comfort. As the climate
warms, indoor environments facilitated by technical infrastructures of cooling are
fast becoming the condition around which urban life is shaped. The price we pay for
this response is high: our bodies have become sedentary, patterns of consumption
individualized, and spaces of comfortable mobility and sociality in the city, termed