In March, community designers from around the country gathered at the Harvard University Design School to discuss the current and future practice of community design.

Sponsored by the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston and other organizations, the three-day Community Design: Now or Never symposium brought together some of the most recognized practitioners, theorists, advocates, and funders of community design.

"The goal of the symposium was to inform architects and developers of design issues within a community context," says David P. Parish, senior vice president / housing and community investment at the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston.

Community designers embrace a holistic approach to design that takes into account political, financial, social, technical, and community concerns in the building of livable neighborhoods. A key principle of community design is the participation of residents in the design process.

"Community design was a response among practitioners to work going on in the 1960s," says Kathleen Dorgan, an architect, urban planner, and fellow in the Loeb Fellowship Program at the Harvard University Design School. "The feeling was that mistakes in city planning were leading to problems such as increased segregation of communities or highways cutting off inner cities. Activists felt that a more democratic process would lead to better planning and community design."

A critical component of the movement was the development of design centers to serve low-income communities around the country.

"A community-design center is a nonprofit practice of architects, planners, landscape architects, and other associated professionals," says Ms. Dorgan. "Its clients are communities, as opposed to developers, hospitals, educational institutions, or individual homeowners."

Community designers seek to match project designs with community needs. For example, a design center associated with the University of Massachusetts worked with Holyoke residents to develop a park that included patterned pavement and other features appropriate to their cultural background.

"Many of the residents of the vicinity of the park were from Puerto Rico, and they had a different experience of the physical way parks were set out and the materials they felt comfortable with," says Ms. Dorgan.

Communities outside the large urban areas are also enlisting community-design principles in planning their communities. An offshoot of the Harvard symposium was a recent workshop for community development corporations (CDCs) in Vermont. The Role of Design in High-Quality Affordable Housing workshop was given by Ms. Dorgan and Deane Evans, director of research for the New Jersey Institute of Technology's architectural program and a developer of the Affordable Housing Design Advisor (www.designadvisor.org). The Design Advisor is a Web site developed in cooperation with the Bank and other organizations to provide information on affordable-housing design.

Workshop participants used the Design Advisor as a resource to explore examples of some of the nation's best affordable housing. They also explored strategies being used by affordable-housing developers in Vermont to respond to higher land and development costs.

"I really believe that good design helps lenders over the long term because it improves the quality of their investments," says Mr. Parish. "Well-built structures hold up better over time."

Community-design principles may also provide an antidote to NIMBYism (a community's "not in my backyard" response to proposed affordable developments). "People are more willing to accept affordable housing if it is well designed," notes Mr. Parish.

"Both the Vermont workshop and the symposium are part of a growing effort by practitioners, funders, and policymakers to improve the quality of planning and design in affordable housing," adds Ms. Dorgan. "There is a recognition that the lack of such efforts has led to the failure of some earlier investments."

This article originally appeared in the Bank's Tools for Housing and Community Economic Development newsletter (issue 18, Summer 2002).