Carl DiSalvo gives us a satisfying book that describes his multi-disciplinary design teams’ experiences in local communities, deepened by well-sourced reading and references in several fields. DiSalvo is Associate Professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the projects he describes took place from 2014 to 2019 in Atlanta.
Design experiments in civics “blend imaginative making into politics,” melding specialists’ processes with the involvement of various citizens, inside and outside formal institutions. The public space, the citizenry, politics in all its interactions … these are historically too often ignored and discounted by elites (and their designers) in patrician, thoughtless, or even racist ways. DiSalvo is attentive to the complexity and history of Atlanta, its Black and White populations, its traditions of interactions between government and folks. American history—from Jane Addams’ Hull House in nineteenth-century Chicago to the Tuskeegee Experiment to Philadelphia’s Black Quantum Futurism—offer lessons, pro and con, while various...