Participatory urbanism is incremental, but at it’s core is holistic - a kind of design strategy that emphasizes part-whole relations and the inter-connectedness of users by prioritizing their voice in the design process. Here is a review I wrote for MONU magazine about their issue on Participatory Urbanism. Reproduced here in full with permission of the publisher.

This deposit is over 300 million years old from when the Great Lakes region and much of upper North America were covered in the shallows of a Silurian tropical sea. The coral reefs at the floor of this shallow sea fossilized and turned to limestone which formed a solid basin for the salt deposit to form over time as the waters evaporated. Time passed, glaciers came and went, and the salt deposit was covered with glacial till and rock. Here are some study shots I took of the salt deposit inside the mine. I used these during the production of the salt chamber that we installed in the vault at SPACES. Take a peek:

I recently wrote this review of Binational Urbanism (by Bernd Upmeyer), an interesting book that I think presents a great model of what qualitative research methods can do for enhancing urban design and spatial and architectural practices. It's a masterclass, really, and Upmeyer's book is worth reading twice because it will overhaul how you approach user-centered design in your practice.

The tree circle offers an interface between the biological and the architectural. This typology of tree circles in a photo-essay format documents a walk taken one day in Waikīkī near my old neighborhood (I lived in Ala Moana)... Tree circles are an element of civic heritage because they are a mood-crafting element of the landscape image of the street. They pattern in ways that mark the passage of time in a place with continuity, discontinuity, salience and backgrounding. Take a look…

Cities and landscapes tell a multifaceted story that invites us to participate and spectate. This is a story of relationship and a story of agency, where mountains and valleys and rivers act like characters in the same way that buildings and streets and neighborhoods have a life of their own. Both cities and the geographies that support them converge in a story of identity and imageability, making geographical urbanism a sort of autobiographical tale of this hybrid place. Here is the full text of an article I wrote for the Rotterdam-based MONU, a Magazine ON Urbanism...