Summary: The book Expanding Architecture: Design as Activism features 30 essays that embody community activism through design. In this podcast, Michael Crosbie, AIA, is joined by three of the book’s contributors: Katie Swenson, executive director and founding partner of the Charlottesville Community Design Center; Steve Badanes, Assoc. AIA, architecture professor at the University of Washington; and Sergio Palleroni, architecture professor at Portland State University.

Katie Swenson echoes a call for a new kind of architecture practice: “public interest architecture.” Far from simply diminishing the glossy, iconic design freedom that architects have enjoyed in the past, Swenson says such a re-orientation should stake a claim to the increased social and economic relevance of design and make an argument for how architects’ skills can improve everyone’s quality of life. Most fundamentally, such a transition towards increased social relevance will require architects to become involved in a wider spectrum of design and planning services so that they’ll be able to address social needs holistically and bring design interventions into people’s lives at a multitude of scales. Steve Badanes says his students today show increasing interest in the kind of practice that takes them beyond the top socio-economic tiers of people that architects typically work for, which harkens back to his own experiences as a student in the late ’60s when architectural community design initiatives began to develop along with the transformative counterculture of the day. Despite the weak design and construction economy, Swenson says, today’s design opportunities may lie in the $787 billion economic stimulus package signed into law in February. Here, she says, architects should look for opportunities to bring design solutions to underserved communities, like greening public housing and rehabilitating foreclosed properties.