1st Edition
The Spacemaker's Guide to Big Change Design and Improvisation in Development Practice
Biography
Nabeel Hamdi is currently Emeritus Professor at Oxford Brookes University. After qualifying at the Architectural Association in 1968, Nabeel worked for the Greater London Council, where his award-winning housing projects established his reputation in participatory design and planning. From 1981 to 1990 he was Associate Professor of Housing at MIT, where he was later awarded a Ford International Career Development Professorship. Nabeel won the UN-Habitat Scroll of Honour for his work on Community Action Planning in 1997. He founded the Masters course in Development Practice at Oxford Brookes, which was awarded the Queen’s Anniversary Prize in 2001. Nabeel has consulted on participatory action planning and the upgrading of slums in cities to international development agencies, charities and NGOs worldwide.
Hamdi’s latest book The Spacemaker’s Guide to Big Change is a call for a new way of doing things. Hamdi’s work is relevant not only to planners and humanitarian workers but also artists and creative practitioners, who are looking for new ways to make a difference through their practice. Hamdi’s belief in and focus on the everyday and ordinary, and the particular in people’s lives, is a radical new starting point, that brings hope and empowers those of us who are ignored and overlooked. - Emma Chetcuti, Director, Multistory: a community arts organisation located in the Black Country in the West Midlands
Hamdi is interested in activism and results. In this book he shows us how participatory practice can be a speculative as well as an integrative instrument in an inequitable world. These ideas, modes of engagement and insights are as relevant for intervening in our existing built environments as for imagining the sustainable form for places of human habitation in the future.- Rahul Mehrotra, Professor and Chair Department of Urban Planning and Design, Harvard University
Both philosophical and practical, this reflective book contains insights that go beyond participatory practice. The collected cases, references, and wisdom unpack the challenge of making change in the face of complexity and competing voices, and give encouragement that we can start small, where it counts, now, to achieve desired futures. - Jamin Hegeman, Service Design Network
