Balance of Dual Empowerments:An Analysis on Connotations of Community Design
In 2012,China embarked on a new stage of community governance,leading to an increasing focus on practices and studies of community design within the architectural and planning field.Based on the community governance policy,community design gives higher attention to public participation.There are diversified terminologies of community design concepts in China.However,the connotation of the community design concept in China is not yet clear.It is limited to physical space design due to the late development.Public participation often focuses more on form rather than content.Empowerment is the core challenge against effective public participation.Therefore,it is essential to understand community design from an empowerment perspective in order to achieve effective public participation.The professional concept of community design originated in the United Kingdom and the United States in the 1960s.It includes a systematic conceptual framework and a unified understanding of empowerment.Moreover,the community design concept was introduced into the Chinese academic community in the 1980s.The content and keywords of 512 English research articles about community design from 16 databases including ASCE,De Gruyter,EBSCO,Elsevier ScienceDirect,JSTOR,Kluwer,OUP,PQD,Project MUSE,ProQuest,SAGE,Scopus,Springer Link,Taylor&,Francis,Web of Science and Wiley were analyzed.The origins and evolutionary process of empowerment in practice and concepts of community design in the UK and USA were summarized by content analysis method from the"empowering-enabling"perspective.The origin of the concept and practice of community design was first traced.It indicated that community design is a form of social action,which discloses the action mode that empowers the subjects involved in community design and puts forward problems about early practices.The stage characteristics and evolutionary dynamics of empowerment goals,empowerment orientations and empowerment levels were then elucidated through action mode,action content,and action mechanism of community design,respectively.The evolution of the community design action mode in the 1970s shifted the empowerment goal from empowering subjects to technological enabling.The evolution of community design action content in the 1980s changed the empowerment orientation from a tangible result to an active process.The evolution of community design since the 1990s brought a change in empowerment layer from low to high.Moreover,origins and evolutions in connotations and extensions of the community design concept were analyzed from the perspective of terminologies and definitions.The inclusive nature of empowerment and its dual dimensions in community design actions were then disclosed.Finally,challenges of China's community design and the cognitive framework for community design in China were established while considering empowerment goals,empowerment orientation and empowerment level.Besides,the community design connotations of dual empowerment balance were proposed as:balance between subjective empowerment and technological enablement,balance between the decision-making process and design outcome,and balance of collaborative relationships among multi-stakeholder.It offers a cognitive method to assimilate diverse local perspectives on community design and consolidates these perspectives into a cognitive framework.Furthermore,it offers some theoretical knowledge on China's community design researches and practices to understand effective public participation while considering empowerment and enabling.
community designempowerment subjecttechnology enablingcognitive frameworkconnotative evolution
国家科技期刊平台
NSTL
万方数据
维普
