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GreaterPlaces is a crowdsourced "How-To" manual for creating great communities - cities, suburbs and rural areas.   Think of a Pinterest or Houzz for community design. WHAT IS COMMUNITY DESIGN? Community design is about people, the places we live, and the spaces we share.  Community design is also about how we come together and make decisions that affect our communities and neighbors: from crossroads in the country to homeowners' associations in the suburbs to new apartments in the city.

The Democracy Collaborative was established in 2000 to advance a new understanding of democracy for the 21st century and to promote new strategies and innovations in community development that enhance democratic life. Our goal is to change the prevailing paradigm of community economic development-and of the economy as a whole-in the United States toward a new emphasis and system based on: Broadening ownership and stewardship over capital Democracy at the workplace Stabilizing community and emphasizing locality Equitable and inclusive growth Environmental, social, and institutional sustainability The Collaborative is a national leader in the field of community development through our Community Wealth Building Initiative. The Initiative sustains a wide range of projects involving research, training, policy development, and community-focused work designed to promote an asset-based paradigm and increase support for the field across-the-board.

WHO WE ARE Design Impact is a non-profit social innovation firm made up of designers, community development practitioners, social entrepreneurs, and educators. We collaborate with passionate people, bring design and innovation practice to the table, and work together to design a better world. Our mission is to: * INCUBATE projects that transform communities, * EQUIP leaders with social innovation tools, and * ADVANCE methods of creative community change.

Advancing a new understanding of democracy for the 21st century and promoting new strategies and innovations in community development that enhance democratic life. Promoting new strategies and innovations in community development that enhance democratic life. The Collaborative is a national leader in the field of community development through our Community Wealth Building Initiative. The Initiative sustains a wide range of projects involving research, training, policy development, and community-focused work designed to promote an asset-based paradigm and increase support for the field across-the-board.

Community Heart & SoulTM reconnects people with what they love most about their town and translates those personal and emotional connections into a blueprint that serves as the foundation for future community decisions. It's a barn-raising approach to community planning and development designed to increase participation in local decision-making and empower residents to shape the future of their communities in a way that upholds the unique character of each place.

LocalData is a new digital toolkit designed to help community groups, professional planners and government agencies modernize community-led data collection of place-based information. THE NEED Across the country, community groups, planners and government agencies collect parcel-level information about communities. Typically, the process for collecting, transcribing and cleaning this data can be confusing, lengthy and disempowering. LocalData transforms this process with technology. LocalData began as a 2012 Code for America project with the City of Detroit. Three Code for America fellows (Matt, Alicia and Prashant) identified a need for local data in Detroit. Though community groups were actively surveying neighborhoods and using this data - neighborhood level surveys took a long time and further stressed the under-resourced technical assistance providers that were assisting this effort. Additionally, comprehensive city-wide surveys were taken infrequently, often involving multiple partners, with months of surveying and transcription.

The Guide shows how to get your school working with Participatory Budgeting (PB). The PB process creates an experiential learning environment for community engagement at a local level. Students are challenged to think about community needs and issues, exploring their environment. They are then empowered to design and implement a solution, taking shared ownership of their school community. They will gain a new attachment to their community; a sense of pride that comes with civic contribution. And they will build a stronger, more collaborative relationship with school administration, one another, and the community at large.

The Center for Active Design is a nonprofit resource for design professionals, policy makers, real estate developers and community advocates, committed to promoting and expanding the Active Design Guidelines published by New York City in 2010. We maintain a multi-disciplinary perspective in the translation of health research into design solutions that amplify the role of architecture and urban planning in improving public health and well-being.

"The e-learning programme consists of four dimensions: Social Design, Ecological Design, Economic Design and Worldview., each contained in an eight-week period.  You will learn skills and effective methods to collaborate with others in regenerative design for societal transformation and the creation of thriving communities within vibrant regional economies. The course will explore case studies and best process examples that demonstrate how regenerative cultures use energy and materials with greater efficiency, distribute wealth more fairly and strive to eliminate the concept of waste, in order to regenerate the material, energy and social resources they depend upon as much as possible at the local and regional scale. "

This toolkit can help planners, public health professionals, and the general public include health in the community planning process. Developed in partnership between the American Planning Association's Planning and Community Health Research Center and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Healthy Community Design Initiative, the toolkit is composed of four elements that work together to achieve this goal:

The mission of the Governors' Institute on Community Design is to assist governors and their cabinets and staffs as they seek to guide growth and development in their states. A central goal of the Institute is to give governors practical solutions to the issues they face and a better understanding of how community design can be used to increase the social and economic well being of their states and citizens.

Design@Darden is an online community that helps educators teach design, especially in settings where design is not traditionally taught, such as business schools. The resources and conversations taking place at Design@Darden aim to create community and advance knowledge. By sharing inspirations, thoughts, tools and challenges, Design@Darden hopes to facilitate a vibrant community of educators who are innovating the future of design.

Resident-Centered Community Building - What Makes It Different? In June 2012, forty-one leaders of community building efforts came together to share strategies and discuss lessons they have learned about how to improve conditions in disadvantaged communities. While gatherings like these happen regularly, this one was unusual; it was designed by and for community residents.

Purpose The Delaware Complete Communities Planning Toolbox aims to help build local government capacity to develop: complete-communities planning approaches, community-design tools, and public engagement strategies.

We are a team of civil engineers, planners, and sustainability specialists with expertise in land use planning and zoning, municipal finance, transportation planning and design, stormwater management and green infrastructure implementation, and urban design and placemaking. But, design of elaborate, expensive infrastructure projects is not what we do. The leaders of our organization spent the majority of our careers with large firms designing complex, expensive projects, only to later realize we were making things more economically fragile and unsustainable. We acknowledged that before we could do more of the types of projects our communities need, we'd have to change how people think about the way we have been planning and building our cities and neighborhoods. Rather than sit back and wait, we started VERDUNITY to help lead this change.

At IDEO, we're often asked to share what we know about design thinking. We've developed this website in response to that request. Here, we introduce design thinking, how it came to be, how it is being used, and steps and tools for mastering it. You'll find our particular take on design thinking, as well as the perspectives of others. Everything on this site is free for you to use and share with proper attribution.

The Loughborough Junction Action Group, or LJAG, is an independent group of people who live or work in Loughborough Junction in south-east London. We share the common aim of regenerating and improving the area and the lives of the people who live there. We are embedded in our diverse and vibrant neighbourhood and hold festivals, street parties and monthly gatherings, literary and film events and organise arts activities in local schools. Our members work with many local organisations, such as tenants' and residents' associations, community initiatives such as Building Communities in Coldharbour and the Big Local, which are working on projects designed to empower local people, improve community cohesion and enhance neighbourhood facilities.

Design with Dialogue (DwD) is an open Toronto-based community of practice for dialogue as co-creation. DwD has the ultimate purpose of facilitating change and meaningful action in our organizations, communities, collaborative projects and as individuals. We learn and play together through participatory design, strategic dialogue, creative arts and emerging facilitation methods.

P2PU is a grassroots network of individuals who seek to create an equitable, empowering, and liberating alternative to mainstream higher education. We work towards this vision by creating and sustaining learning communities in public spaces around the world. As librarians and community organizers, we bring neighborhoods together to learn with one another. As educators, we train facilitators to organize their own networks and we develop/curate open educational resources. As developers and designers, we build open source software tools that support flourishing learning communities. And as learners, we work together to improve upon and disseminate methods and practices for peer learning to flourish.