Although there are thousands of community gardens across North America, only Seattle and a few other cities include them in their urban development plans. While the conditions and experiences in Seattle may be unique, the city's programs offer insights and lessons for other cities and communities. "Greening Cities, Growing Communities" examines:

-- Planning and design strategies that support the development of urban community gardens as sustainable places for education and recreation

-- Approaches to design processes, construction, and stewardship that utilize volunteer and community participation and create a sense of community

-- Programs that enable gardens to serve as a resource for social justice for low income and minority communities, immigrants, and seniors

-- Opportunities to develop active-living frameworks by strategically locating community gardens and linking them with other forms of recreation and open space as part of pedestrian-accessible networks

"Greening Cities, Growing Communities" focuses on six community gardens in Seattle where there has been a strong network of knowledge and resources. These case studies reveal the capacity of community gardens to serve larger community issues, such as food security; urban ecosystem health; demonstration of sustainable gardening and building practices; active living and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods; and equity concerns. The authors also examine how landscape architects, planners, and allied design professionals can better interact in the making of these unique urban open spaces, and how urban community gardens offer opportunities for professionals to have a more prominent role in community activism and urban sustainability.

Jeffrey Hou and Julie M. Johnson are associate professors of landscape architecture at the University of Washington. Laura J. Lawson is associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

How can we design places that fulfill urgent needs of the community, achieve environmental justice, and inspire long-term stewardship? By bringing community members to the table, we open up the possibility of exchanging ideas meaningfully and transforming places powerfully. Collaboration like this is hands-on democracy in action. It's up close. It's personal. For decades, participatory design practices have helped enliven neighborhoods and promote cultural understanding. Yet, many designers still rely on the same techniques that were developed in the 1950s and 60s. These approaches offer predictability, but hold waning promise for addressing current and future design challenges. Design as Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity is written to reinvigorate democratic design, providing inspiration, techniques, and case stories for a wide range of contexts. Edited by six leading practitioners and academics in the field of participatory design, with nearly 50 contributors from around the world, Design as Democracy shows how to design with communities in empowering and effective ways. The flow of the book's nine chapters reflects the general progression of community design process, while also encouraging readers to search for ways that best serve their distinct needs and the culture and geography of diverse places. Each chapter presents a series of techniques around a theme, from approaching the initial stages of a project, to getting to know a community, to provoking political change through strategic thinking. Readers may approach the book as they would a cookbook, with recipes open to improvisation, adaptation, and being created anew. Design as Democracy offers fresh insights for creating meaningful dialogue between designers and communities and for transforming places with justice and democracy in mind.