Abstract
This paper examines how the Power+Place Collaborative — a participatory placeshaping design partnership — reflects, reinforces, and resists the dominant educational, political, and social systems it seeks to transform. Since 2018, the Collaborative has been working with historically and systematically marginalized communities to critically examine the power-laden place-design processes of a diverse, semi-urban county in the Southern United States. Through oral history interviews, digital and place-based storytelling, and community gatherings, the Collaborative aims to construct a more inclusive narrative of our county and cultivate opportunities for systemic transformation. Reflecting the call to consider the ethics of participation in systemic design, this paper is coauthored by community partners, students, and faculty. The paper begins by outlining the complex histories and interlocking crises the county is facing, documents our participatory approach, shares findings from a longitudinal research study highlighting systemic transformations from multiple perspectives, and concludes with a set of recommendations.
Keywords
participatory placeshaping, counterstorying, oral history, relational design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.358
Citation
Lake, D., Marshall, S., Sanchez-Rosaldo, B., and Shields, J. (2026) Participatory place-shaping through collaborative counterstorying, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.358
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Participatory place-shaping through collaborative counterstorying
This paper examines how the Power+Place Collaborative — a participatory placeshaping design partnership — reflects, reinforces, and resists the dominant educational, political, and social systems it seeks to transform. Since 2018, the Collaborative has been working with historically and systematically marginalized communities to critically examine the power-laden place-design processes of a diverse, semi-urban county in the Southern United States. Through oral history interviews, digital and place-based storytelling, and community gatherings, the Collaborative aims to construct a more inclusive narrative of our county and cultivate opportunities for systemic transformation. Reflecting the call to consider the ethics of participation in systemic design, this paper is coauthored by community partners, students, and faculty. The paper begins by outlining the complex histories and interlocking crises the county is facing, documents our participatory approach, shares findings from a longitudinal research study highlighting systemic transformations from multiple perspectives, and concludes with a set of recommendations.