The Demise of “Advocacy Planning” in Community Design? A Content Analysis of the Mission Statements of Community Design Centers (CDCs) in the United States

Abstract

Spanish

Chinese

This paper investigates the role(s) of contemporary community design centers (CDC) in the United States. Based on a content analysis of CDCs’ mission statements and semi-structured interviews with selected CDC leaders, I identify seven roles these organizations perform. The results indicate that current CDCs do not exclusively focus on assisting underserved communities. They perform a more diverse set of roles for various socioeconomic communities. These different roles suggest that CDCs can, and should, be thought of as a diverse category of planning organization. In conclusion, I suggest three implications for planning education and future research and practice related to community design.

Keywords

community design community design center role taxonomy advocacy planning mission statement content analysis

Introduction

Scholars in urban design have made continuous efforts to maintain and strengthen the connection between the discourse of urban design and planning (see Gunder 2011; Linovski and Loukaitou-Sideris 2012; Madanipour 2014). One of the core ideas that these scholars have emphasized is the value of inclusive physical design processes to attain social justice. In the United States, one type of design practice, so-called “community design,” aims to achieve social goals through participatory approaches, and community design centers (CDC¹) represent the organizational infrastructure for providing community design services (Blake 2014; Sanoff 2000). Since the 1960s, these organizations have provided technical assistance in planning and design, especially to low-income and underserved communities (Blake 2014; Comerio 1984; Sanoff 2000). Despite their long history and relevance, CDCs and their work have rarely been examined in the scholarly planning literature.

Inspired by the advocacy planning movement in the 1960s, the early practices of CDCs, like the Architecture Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) and the Neighborhood Renewal Corps, focused on assisting and engaging marginalized groups in the local planning and design process (Finn and Brody 2014; Sachner 1983). Today, the number of CDCs has increased dramatically, and many have integrated new approaches and services into their practice. Accordingly, the definition of “community design” has become broad and blurred so that now it incorporates relatively more recent concepts, such as “New Urbanism” and “sustainability” (Sanoff 2000; Toker 2007; Toker and Toker 2006). The scope of work between different CDCs has become more diverse, and their clients are no longer limited to low-income communities (Finn and Brody 2014; Tural 2017).

The increase in the number of CDCs and the widening scope of their activities invite the question of whether the first CDCs’ purpose is still embedded in the contemporary CDCs’ organizational missions. This study seeks to address two sets of related research questions. What are the roles that current CDCs aim to perform? Are their variations related to specific organizational characteristics, such as organization type, founding year, and geographic location? These descriptive questions lead to a more theoretical discussion about the meaning of “community design” today. If CDCs are, by definition, practicing community design, what do these organizations’ current roles tell us about community design today? To answer these questions, I completed a content analysis of the mission statements of existing CDCs to elicit each organization’s role. Based on the list of 232 CDCs in the “Community design directory (2014),” I identified 113 CDCs and programs in the United States, which have publicly available mission statements. Informed by the literature about CDCs’ increasingly diverse roles (e.g., Blake 2014; Comerio 1984; Vogel 2014), I identified seven roles that CDCs perform through qualitative data coding. Following this analysis, I conducted semi-structured interviews with leaders from 12 different CDCs, who together represent various organizational characteristics.

The findings of this study demonstrate that contemporary CDC roles are no longer best understood primarily in the context of advocacy planning; instead, these organizations perform a host of diverse roles. More broadly, almost half of the CDCs analyzed in the study have language that indicates more than one role in their mission statement. This result shows that various roles and approaches exist within CDCs in the United States. Furthermore, I found variations in CDCs’ roles connected to some of their organizational characteristics. Specifically, university-affiliated CDCs tend to describe a broader set of roles in their mission statements than independent, not-for-profit CDCs. Another key finding is that CDCs created since 2008 often describe their role in relatively narrow terms, suggesting a potential trend that many new(er) CDCs appear to be returning to the traditional role of these organizations as envisioned within the advocacy planning movement of the 1960s. Based on these findings, I explore further implications for planning education and future research focusing on CDCs and the role of planning and design experts more broadly.

Studying the various roles of designers and planners is not new in either the planning or design disciplines (see Fox-Rogers and Murphy 2016; Howe and Kaufman 1979; Johnson 2012; Melcher 2013). Recent studies identified several different roles of planners based on interviews with individual planning practitioners (Fox-Rogers and Murphy 2016) and surveys (Johnson 2012). Compared to the previous scholarship, this research adopts two distinctive approaches. First, this research focuses on planning and design professionals’ role(s) in a specific type of practice: community design. Second, this study combines naturalistic data, an organization’s mission statement, with semi-structured interviews with key informants. The following section describes relevant scholarship and provides details of CDCs’ historical context and discourse on their role.

Community Design and CDCs in the United States

The term “community design” in this study refers to a broad movement of neighborhood planning and design practices that emphasize the involvement of local people in the decision-making process of shaping their physical and social environments (Comerio 1984; Hester 1989; Sanoff 2000). This movement was started by a distinct group of planners and designers in the 1960s who opposed the scientific rational comprehensive planning model and top-down approaches in urban planning and design (Blake 2014; Hall 2014). Early activists within this movement, like Karl Linn and J. Max Bond Jr., believed that professional knowledge and competence alone could not provide more effective solutions to communities (Fox 2005; Goldstein 2016; Goodman 2020). Some of these professionals from architecture, landscape architecture, and planning adopted Paul Davidoff’s (1965) advocacy planning model that urges technical experts to represent the interests of poor neighborhoods (Sanoff 2000).

Activists within this movement founded CDC in the early 1960s as organizational vehicles for practicing community design (Nordhaus 2001; Sanoff 2006). Therefore, the early practices of CDCs in the 1960s and 1970s aimed to support the rights of poor citizens and disenfranchised communities whose lives were affected by urban redevelopment projects (Blake 2014; Curry 2004). These organizations were devoted to providing planning, architecture, and development services previously unavailable to civic organizations or Community-Based Development Organizations (CBDOs), including Community Development Corporations (Sanoff 2006). For instance, one of the first CDCs, the Architects Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), was established in New York in 1964 to fight against constructing a proposed freeway in Upper Manhattan and other unwanted developments (Dean 1976; Sachner 1983). ARCH mainly worked with neighborhood associations to democratize the state’s top-down urban renewal methods and create design proposals that met the needs of Harlem’s residents (Charitonidou 2021; Goldstein 2016; Matlin 2018).

In the decade or so following the creation of the first CDCs, the number of CDCs in the United States increased to over eighty (Nordhaus 2001). The popularity of CDCs led to forming of an association of CDC directors, which became the Association for Community Design (ACD) in 1977. This organization’s goal was to facilitate the exchange of information and ideas among CDCs and other community design professionals. In the 1980s, however, the number of CDCs fell dramatically. Researchers point to reduced funding opportunities from the federal government and charitable foundations as key causes for this decline (Blake 2014; Comerio 1984). By 1987, the ACD could find only sixteen active centers in the United States (Cary 2000).

During the 1990s, the number of CDCs saw a resurgence. A survey sponsored by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and ACD in 2000 identified more than seventy CDCs and programs across the United States. Some scholars have attributed this renewed growth to the attention of universities (Blake 2003, 2014; Finn and Brody 2014). Specifically, these scholars find that the CDC’s educational value, combined with the creation of government funding initiatives, such as the Office of University Partnerships (OUP) in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), encouraged numerous universities to create or support CDCs in the 1990s.

The growth in the number of CDCs that commenced in the 1990s has continued and even accelerated in recent decades. The most recent survey of CDCs (ACSA 2014) identified 228 CDCs and programs operating in the United States (Figure 1). In particular, 2006 (fourteen), 2008 (thirteen), and 2009 (thirteen) were the years in which more than ten CDCs were established. While many of them are concentrated in big cities, such as New York (fifteeen), San Francisco (eight), and Boston (seven), there are also CDCs located in small towns and rural areas. Further survey results show that current CDCs have become more diverse and varied in size, expertise, clientele, funding sources, and other characteristics. This increasing diversity raises the question of whether serving underserved communities through planning and design assistance remains one of these centers’ core characteristics.

Figure 1.

Locations of 228 CDCs in the United States.

Diverging Roles and Values of CDCs

Starting from advocacy planning (Davidoff 1965) to community building (Kingsley, McNeely, and Gibson 1977), different theories in planning have informed and shaped various roles of CDCs over time (Blake 2014; Sanoff 2000). In order to analyze the diversity of roles performed by contemporary CDCs, this section provides a brief overview of the scholarly literature on the range and type of activities of CDCs in the United States.

CDC’s original role is to act as an advocacy planner, providing technical support to underserved communities, including planning and design assistance (Dean 1976; Sachner 1983). CDCs, as advocacy planners, distinguished their work from traditional architects and planners by directly engaging community members in the design and planning process. In their projects, clients were generally members of low-income communities, urban minorities, and nonprofit organizations without access to professional services. Until the early 1980s, many professionals considered this type of work to be the very definition of community design: “providing design and planning services for poor clients” and “architecture for the poor” (Hatch 1984; Hester 1989). Over the decades, some CDCs have broadened their focus to address other emerging issues, such as environmental justice, multiculturalism, and gender (Nordhaus 2001).

A related role of CDCs, which is similarly rooted in the advocacy planning approach, is to be an educator who trains communities to increase their awareness of good design and public policy. This educator role can be specified into two categories depending on its target groups. One is a public educator who aims to serve community residents and practitioners in public and private sectors (Goodman 2020; Sachner 1983; Tural 2017). For instance, one of the CDC directors in the 1980s explained that their work was to “increase awareness and sensitivity for design by demystifying it through community education” (Sachner 1983). For CDCs affiliated with universities, this educator role can broaden to include university students in design and planning disciplines. Those CDCs have come to operate as a part of a university department or center that provides training opportunities for students in collaboration with local communities and CBDOs (Blake 2014; Tural 2017).

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, some CDCs shifted their focus to providing different services and engaging other types of clients to become more financially self-sufficient due to reduced funding opportunities (Blake 2014; Comerio 1984). During this period, some CDCs began to play a different role, namely “technical assistance provider,” providing planning and design services to a broader range of clients. Some of these CDCs focused more on actual design and development projects than general planning and design services (Comerio 1984). Their clients were no longer limited to low-income communities, CBDOs, and other local nonprofit organizations. Some expanded their clientele to engage in fee-for-service projects for small businesses, business improvement districts, schools, regional coalitions, neighborhoods, and municipalities of all income levels (Finn and Brody 2014; Sanoff 2000).

CDCs affiliated with universities have also frequently adopted new services and engaged new audiences to maintain financial stability. In addition to planning and design assistance, they researched and consulted for community organizations, public agencies, and municipalities (Blake 2014; Comerio 1984; Tural 2017). According to Comerio (1984), CDCs’ role as “professional researchers” was distinctive even among university-affiliated design centers. Specifically, older, well-established design centers during the 1980s sought to become partners in some redevelopment schemes that could share their profits. Relatively young or more teaching-oriented university design centers also conducted research supported by their universities, local cities, and contracted work.

Since the turn of the century, many CDCs have adopted several new roles. This development has both informed and been informed by recent theoretical and practical developments in public participation. For example, recent scholarship in community design has found that some CDCs are working in a way that is best understood as community collaborators (Blake 2014; Sanoff 2000). Based on the idea of consensus-building (Avery et al. 1981; Godschalk et al. 1994), community collaborators create a two-way relationship between CDCs and community residents (Sanoff 2000; Vogel 2014). During collaborative decision-making processes, the CDC’s professional staff facilitates discussions among community residents to reach mutual agreements (Sanoff 2000). In addition to collaborating with residents and CBDOs, design centers create partnerships with a range of practitioners in both the public and private sectors (Blake 2014).

Finally, being a capacity builder for community building is also one of the contemporary CDCs’ roles (Blake 2014; Melcher 2013; Sanoff 2000). This role encourages community residents to be more proactive and ultimately take a central role in decision-making (Blake 2014; Sanoff 2000). Compared to the foundational literature on advocacy planners in community design, the capacity builder role primarily emphasizes empowerment and the ideal of community control rather than the end goals of equity (Juarez and Brown 2008; Melcher 2013). Therefore, these CDCs provide skills and knowledge during decision-making, especially in the visual dimension, that strengthen local capacity (Cephas 2014; Moomaw 2016).

The following table summarizes the varying roles of CDCs mentioned above and the relevant literature (Table 1). Based on the insights from this body of scholarship, I seek to contribute to a better understanding of the contemporary landscape of CDCs in the United States by investigating their mission statements and conducting semi-structured interviews with CDC directors. The following section describes details about the data collection and research methods.

Table 1.

Categories and Descriptions of Each Role of CDCs.

CDC role	Description	Authors
Advocacy planner	Provide general planning and preliminary design services to underserved communities, such as low-income communities and minorities, and nonprofit organizations	Hester (1989), Melcher (2013), Sachner (1983)
Public educator	Educate and train community residents and professionals in relevant fields	Dean (1976), Sachner (1983), Vogel (2014)
Professional educator	Provide service-learning opportunities (or real-world experiences) for university students in art, architecture, landscape architecture, and planning programs	Blake (2014), Tural (2017)
Technical assistance provider	Provide a range of planning and design services to various clients, including communities and municipalities in all income-level, small business owners, municipalities	Comerio (1984), Finn and Brody (2014)
Professional researcher	Research policy, program, and projects and provide consulting services to various communities	Blake (2014), Comerio (1984), Tural (2017)
Community collaborator	Collaborate with various local stakeholders, including communities, government organizations, and practitioners	Sanoff (2000), Toker (2007), Vogel (2014)
Capacity builder	Support the idea of a community-driven process and provide relevant assistance to empower community members for community building	Blake (2014), Melcher (2013), Sanoff (2000)

Note: CDC = community design center.

Data and Research Methods

To investigate the roles of contemporary CDCs, I conducted a content analysis (Smith 2000) of 113 mission statements of CDCs operating in the United States and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with twelve CDC leaders. Using mission statements as empirical data is an established method, especially among nonprofit organization (NPO) researchers (see Kirk and Nolan 2010; Pandey, Kim, and Pandey 2017; Waters 2007). Previous studies on NPOs showed that their mission statements provide significant evidence of their services and beneficiaries, although they may possess some practical limitations (Berlan 2018; Moore 2000). According to the most recent survey of CDCs (ACSA 2014), most current CDCs are either independent NPOs or a part of NPOs such as academic institutions. In this regard, I focused only on CDCs that fall into either of these two organization types.

The initial list of CDCs was derived from a single source, the ACSA’s “Community Design Directory (2014),” given its thorough use of relevant archival data and online sources. Among 228 CDCs and programs in the United States, I compiled a database of 113 CDCs’ up-to-date mission statements that are publicly available. These were retrieved from two publicly accessible sources, namely the CDC’s Form 990 (or 990EZ)² as part of their tax filing in either 2019 or 2020 (forty-eight) or their website (sixty-five). If a CDC did not submit Form 990, for example, because of their university affiliation, I collected the mission statement from their website. If a specific statement had a clear title of “mission” or included a similar word³ to “mission” in its introduction, I considered such a statement a mission. The website-based mission statements were retrieved between November 2021 and January 2022.

For the purpose of this paper, a CDC’s role is defined as the intersection of one or more “types of work” it self-reports as central to its practice and one or more “communities of interest” with which it does that work. Using MAXQDA qualitative analysis software, I coded all 113 mission statements based on “types of work” and “communities of interest.” For a complete list of all categories and codes, see Appendix A. I sorted initial codes into seven discrete roles identified based on the literature review. The list of roles and their corresponding codes in types of work and communities of interest are in Table 2. For instance, in the case of the advocacy planning role, this is assigned when a CDC’s type of work is coded as “provide planning/design services,” and its community of interest is either “underserved communities” or “NPOs/CBDOs/civic groups.” The sorting process for the other six roles followed the same approach based on corresponding codes. If I identified multiple “types of work” and/or “communities of interest” that belong to distinctive roles in a particular CDC’s mission statement, more than one role is assigned to such a CDC.

Table 2.

Code Combinations for Each Role of the CDC.

CDC role	Categories and codes		Mission statement example
CDC role	Types of work	Communities of interest	Mission statement example
Advocacy planner	Provide planning/ design services	• Underserved communities • NPOs/CBDOs/ civic groups	To improve the quality of life for all by providing sustainable design, planning and development services to low and moderate-income individuals, families and neighborhoods. (Community Powered Workshop, Austin, TX)
Technical assistance provider	Provide planning/ design services	• Individuals/ neighborhoods/ communities in general • Officials/ organizations in the public sector • Professionals/ organizations in the private sector • Miscellaneous • Not stated	To improve the quality of life in Wisconsin through physical change to the environment and refinement of decision making processes effecting the environment. (Community Design Solutions, Milwaukee, WI)
Professional educator	Educate/ train/ provide learning experiences	• University students in art, architecture, landscape architecture, and planning	Provide education to architectural students for designing & construction of innovative energy efficient buildings. (Studio 804, Lawrence, KS)
Public educator	Educate/ train/ provide learning experiences	• Individuals/ neighborhoods/ communities in general • Officials/ organizations in the public sector • Professionals/ organizations in the private sector	Yestermorrow Design/Build School inspires people to create a better, more sustainable world by providing hands-on education that integrates design and craft as a creative, interactive process. (Yestermorrow Design/Build School, Waitsfield, VT)
Professional researcher	Conduct/ support research and consulting	• Individuals/ neighborhoods/ communities in general • Not stated	We conduct community-engaged research to understand the problems and identify solutions around pressing housing, land use, and urban sustainability issues. (Center for Community Innovation, Berkeley, CA)
Capacity builder	Empower local capacity & encourage the community-driven process	• Individuals/ neighborhoods/ communities in general • NPOs/CBDOs/ civic groups • Officials/ organizations in the public sector	Rebuild foundation is a nonprofit organization that endeavors to rebuild the cultural foundations of underinvested neighborhoods and incite movements of community revitalization that are culture based, artist led, and neighborhood driven. (Rebuild Foundations, Chicago, IL)
Community Collaborator	Collaborate/partner with	• Individuals/ neighborhoods/ communities in general • Officials/ organizations in the public sector • Professionals/ organizations in the private sector • Miscellaneous	our Mission: WORKING collaboratively with community partners to define, develop, and apply transformative design strategies that bring us closer to a more just and equitable city, at every scale. (Community Design Resource Center, Charlottesville, VA)

Note: CDC = community design center; NPO = nonprofit organization; CBDOs = Community-Based Development Organizations.

Additional data were collected from the “Community Design Directory” to analyze the type and number of CDC roles by the following organizational characteristics: organization type (independent or university-affiliated), establishment year, and location⁴. These characteristics were noticed by prior scholarship as potential factors affecting CDCs’ work and communities of interest (Curry 2004; Finn and Brody 2014; Tural 2017). Finally, I classify 113 CDCs by each organizational characteristic⁵ to find meaningful differences among CDCs. Table 3 shows the number of CDCs in each classification.

Table 3.

Descriptive Statistics of Investigated CDCs.

	Count
Total	113
Organization type
University-affiliated	53
Independent nonprofit	60
Geographic location
Northeast	32
Midwest	27
South	28
West	26
Establishment year
Before the 1990s	28
From 1991 to 2007	52
Since 2008	29

Note: In “Establishment year,” four CDCs that do not have available information are missing (n = 109). CDC = community design center.

In particular, the establishment year was broken into three categories because of the following considerations. First, all CDCs established before the 1990s were categorized into one group because of their small number and the renewed interest in CDCs in the 1990s noted by prior scholarship (Blake 2003, 2014; Finn and Brody 2014). Second, two other categories used 2008 as a dividing year because the number of current CDCs, particularly independent nonprofits, established between 2008 and 2009 (twenty-six) is notably higher than in any other year. This observation is informed by my assumption that relevant events around 2008, such as the Great Recession, could motivate the establishment of CDCs and affect their role(s).

After completing the content analysis, I reached out to executive directors or key staff members of CDCs to ask further questions based on the initial findings. By creating a matrix table consisting of three organizational characteristics (location, organization type, and founding year⁶), I selected interview participants to represent a range of such characteristics (see Appendix B). Interview questions focused on three major themes: (1) the validity of the collected data and coding results, (2) the relationship between their role(s) and mission statement, and (3) the rationale behind their current role(s). All interviews were video recorded, an average length of one hour, and they were transcribed and then analyzed by the author.

Results

Table 4 highlights the number of CDCs (or programs) representing particular roles in their mission statements. The first result based on this analysis is that the most frequently mentioned role is technical assistance provider (fifty-seven, 50.4%), followed by professional researcher (thirty-seven, 32.7%), advocacy planner (thirty four, 30.1%), and public educator (thirty-two, 28.3%). This result shows that CDCs’ mission statements, which contain a description of the advocacy planner role, are fewer than those that incorporate the technical assistance provider role. As CDCs have sought to diversify their revenue sources to increase financial sustainability (Blake 2014; Comerio 1984), the popularity of the technical assistance provider role, which aims to serve a broader range of communities, is not surprising. Most interview participants shared their concerns about financial resources, and some gave a specific account of how the organization started to expand its services and project partners due to a need for more stable and adequate funding:

In the past, we did a lot of neighborhood plans and contracted with the city. However, their payment, price for the contact versus our labor, we were spending more in labor to actually do the bottom-up approach, so we started to pull back from that. [. . .] We have come to the conclusion that we are going to hand off the plans and be more technical advisor in the mix of neighborhoods. (The interim director of the Center for Neighborhoods)

Table 4.

The Number and Percentage (in Parentheses) of CDCs by the Type of Role.

	Type of CDC role
	Technical service provider	Professional researcher	Advocacy planner	Public educator	Professional educator	Community collaborator	Capacity builder
All	57 (50.4)	37 (32.7)	34 (30.1)	32 (28.3)	22 (19.5)	17 (15.0)	17 (15.0)
Organization type
University-affiliated	32 (60.4)	31 (58.5)	7 (13.2)	15 (28.3)	20 (37.7)	10 (18.9)	8 (15.1)
Independent nonprofit	25 (41.7)	6 (10.0)	27 (45.0)	17 (28.3)	2 (3.3)	7 (11.7)	9 (15.0)
Geographic location
Northeast	18 (56.3)	9 (28.1)	10 (31.3)	8 (25.0)	5 (15.6)	4 (12.5)	3 (9.4)
Midwest	16 (59.3)	7 (25.9)	6 (22.2)	10 (37.0)	4 (14.8)	8 (29.6)	5 (18.5)
South	16 (57.1)	10 (35.7)	7 (25.0)	7 (25.0)	7 (25.0)	3 (10.7)	4 (14.3)
West	7 (26.9)	11 (42.3)	11 (42.3)	7 (26.9)	6 (23.1)	2 (7.7)	5 (19.2)
Establishment year
Before the 1990s	18 (64.3)	10 (35.7)	7 (25.0)	9 (32.1)	5 (17.9)	4 (14.3)	4 (14.3)
From 1991 to 2007	28 (53.8)	17 (32.7)	12 (23.1)	16 (30.8)	14 (26.9)	7 (13.5)	7 (13.5)
Since 2008	9 (31.0)	7 (24.1)	15 (51.7)	6 (20.7)	2 (6.9)	6 (20.7)	6 (20.7)

Note: The count in the table includes some CDCs’ multiple roles assigned by the author. CDC = community design center.

Prior scholarship on CDCs points to the importance of the distinction between independent and university-affiliated CDCs (Comerio 1984; Finn and Brody 2014; Tural 2017). The second major result based on this analysis reaffirms this observation, with some additional nuances, by showing the significant difference in the number of CDCs representing each role by organization type. For independent CDCs, the advocacy planner role is the most frequently observed in their mission statements (twenty-seven, 45.0%), followed by technical assistance provider (twenty-five, 41.7%). One of the leaders from a CDC organized as an independent nonprofit pointed out relevant dynamics related to their mission statement and work:

We have to stay within the mission to keep our 501(c)3 status. So we try to align our work in general. [. . .] We have to be really careful how we tread around that. (The executive director of Columbus Neighborhood Design Center)

This quote denotes that independent, not-for-profit CDCs with an advocacy mission aim to ensure they do not engage in projects that generate some form of revenue or surplus, as doing so may negatively affect their nonprofit status. As a result, these not-for-profit CDCs with advocacy-focused mission statements rarely have the ability to create significant financial reserves, potentially jeopardizing their ability to engage in long-term planning or withstand external shocks. The pressure to identify and obtain projects and funds that align with the mission is constant in many of these organizations, frequently limiting their ability to extract or communicate the lessons and implications of individual projects to broader audiences.

In contrast, university-affiliated CDCs are less likely to show explicit and exclusive interest in underserved communities or NPOs in their mission. Their most frequently observed role is technical assistance provider (thirty-two, 60.4%), followed by professional researcher (thirty-one, 58.5%). Only seven of them illustrate the key characteristics of advocacy planner in their mission statements. This difference highlights that university-affiliated CDCs utilize distinctive considerations in choosing types of work and communities of interest.

The third major result is that, in addition to the organization type, CDC’s establishment year shows a close association with distinctive types of roles. The results in Table 4 indicate an apparent trend that mission statements of CDCs founded since 2008 are more likely to contain language that shows their exclusive interest in underserved communities (fifteen, 51.7%) compared to those established earlier. However, this difference by CDC’s establishment year is not as significant as those by the organization type.

Interviews with executive directors of CDCs established since 2008 revealed two possible reasons for the higher interest in the advocacy planning role. First, some of those CDCs’ primary source of income stems from one or more organization(s) that has/ve encouraged and funded this particular role from the start. Relevant CDC directors mentioned, for example, that they had received targeted grant funding from the local government to perform this role. This situation might suggest a return among some local governments to seeing the need for and having the ability to support advocacy planning through CDCs. Second, some directors of these more recently established CDCs said they do not yet have enough capacity to diversify their work and communities of interest or are in the process of doing so:

What we’re doing over the last few years is really diversifying, as you can see from some other CDCs, like they have a lot of people on their team. We have three people on our team, and we’ve never had more than that. (The executive director of Storefront for Community Design)

This quote suggests that the comparatively narrow focus of more recently established CDCs might be a temporary phenomenon that will dissipate as these organizations mature and diversify their activities.

The fourth key result from this analysis reveals some additional details about CDCs with multiple roles, namely that these are most often university-affiliated, and some specific combinations of roles are frequently found. Table 5 presents the number of roles I identified based on 113 CDCs’ mission statements. According to the results, more than half of current CDCs in the database have language in their mission statement relating to two or more roles (65, 57.5%). Among CDCs that indicate multiple roles, almost half present three or more roles (31, 27.4%), and five CDCs have their mission that more than three roles are observed. This result aligns with the previous literature, which points to the extension of the range of services and clients of contemporary CDCs (Finn and Brody 2014).

Table 5.

The Number and Percentage (in Parentheses) of CDCs by the Number of Roles.

	Number of roles
	Single	Two	Three	Four	Five
All	48 (42.5)	34 (30.1)	26 (23.0)	3 (2.7)	2 (1.8)
Organization type
University-affiliated	12 (22.6)	19 (35.8)	17 (32.1)	3 (5.7)	2 (3.8)
Independent nonprofit	36 (60.0)	15 (25.0)	9 (15.0)	0 (0)	0 (0)
Geographic location
Northeast	17 (53.1)	8 (25.0)	5 (15.6)	1 (3.1)	1 (3.1)
Midwest	10 (37.0)	9 (33.3)	5 (18.5)	2 (7.4)	1 (3.7)
South	12 (42.9)	6 (21.4)	10 (35.7)	0 (0)	0 (0)
West	9 (34.6)	11 (42.3)	6 (23.1)	0 (0)	0 (0)
Establishment year
Before the 1990s	9 (32.1)	12 (42.9)	5 (17.9)	1 (3.6)	1 (3.6)
From 1991 to 2007	22 (42.3)	15 (28.8)	12 (23.1)	2 (3.8)	1 (1.9)
Since 2008	15 (51.7)	6 (20.7)	8 (27.6)	0 (0)	0 (0)

Note: CDC = community design center.

Regarding the number of roles that CDCs stated in their mission, their university-affiliation status also directly relates to this. The results show that independent CDCs (thirty-six, 60.0%) are more likely to represent a single role in their mission statements than university-affiliated CDCs (twelve, 22.6%). It seems likely that this difference exists because the CDCs, by virtue of their university affiliation, provide planning, and design services to communities and deliver research and education services. The University of Memphis Design Collaborative’s director shared a story that exemplifies this result:

The original design center was an independent 501(c)3, and now the organization is part of a university department. [. . .] There’s been a lot more focus on education as a part of the mission and its implementation.

Table 6 shows the five most frequently observed role combinations among CDCs that include descriptions of multiple roles in their mission statements. The most common role combination is “technical assistance provider-professional researcher,” found in 23 mission statements. Most CDCs with this specific mix are affiliated with universities (twenty, 87.0%). Except for technical assistance provider-public educator, other common combinations are more frequently observed in university-affiliated CDCs’ mission statements than independent CDCs.

Table 6.

Top Five Role Combinations among CDCs and Their Number.

Rank	Role combination	Count
1	Technical assistance provider—Professional researcher	23
2	Technical assistance provider—Public educator	15
3	Technical assistance provider—Professional educator	14
4	Professional researcher—Professional educator	12
5	Professional researcher—Public educator	9

Note: CDC = Community Design Center.

This result implies two different trends related to contemporary CDCs’ role(s). First, it provides an empirical foundation for the assumption that the CDC’s affiliation with a university affects its role(s) and, more specifically, the combination of multiple roles. As previous studies noted, university-affiliated CDCs are more likely to append research and education to general planning and design services than independent centers (Finn and Brody 2014; Tural 2017). Second, the result indicates that the advocacy planning role is more likely to appear alone than other frequently observed roles. It demonstrates that some CDCs still define their work as benefiting underserved communities without expanding their types of work and communities of interest.

During a series of interviews, some CDC leaders and staff shared their opinions about studying types of work and communities of interest with their mission statement. Most agreed it guides as reflected in their choices regarding new projects and shows their organizations’ core agenda. However, at the same time, several noted that mission statements change only once every few years at most, which might not reflect recent changes in their work and the services they currently provide:

I haven’t updated the mission statement in a while. We are currently revamping the website and rethinking. Our original mission statement was very vague and very broad, very purposely, so that we could have freedom to do pretty much whatever is being funded or whatever is needed. (The executive director of TAP Inc.)

This reality points to a significant limitation of the investigation of CDCs’ roles by analyzing mission statements, namely that mission statements are slow to change and never provide a complete picture of a CDC’s efforts. However, it also suggests that mission statements are meaningfully connected to the work of CDCs, as updates and revisions result from purposeful reflection and rethinking about the CDCs’ work.

Does “Community Design” Need a New Definition?

Recent scholarship in community design has pointed out the fuzzy nature of “community design” (Blake 2014; Finn and Brody 2014; Sanoff 2000; Toker 2007). According to Henry Sanoff (2000), an established scholar in the community design field, the representation of community design-related ideas and practices has changed and varied over the decades. This study analyzed the mission statements and conducted semi-structured interviews with CDC directors, allowing for an updated and empirically grounded reflection on contemporary community design. The findings in this study suggest more nuanced changes and variations in the definition of “community design” among contemporary CDCs based on what they do and whom they aim to serve. The remaining part discusses two main findings in detail.

The Type and Number of CDC Roles Have become Diversified

This study finds evidence of contemporary CDCs’ varying interests in different roles. At least seven distinct roles emerged from the prior scholarship on CDCs, and all of these were found in the mission statements analyzed for this study: advocacy planner, technical assistance provider, professional researcher, public educator, professional educator, community collaborator, and capacity builder. Among these roles, technical assistance provider is most commonly found in the CDCs’ mission statements. In addition, the findings indicate that more than half of the CDCs and programs in this study perform multiple roles. In other words, contemporary CDCs should not merely be understood as organizations with a singular focus but as dynamic entities operating at the intersection of different roles.

The semi-structured interviews with CDC leaders revealed several reasons why some had diversified their roles. The most common reason mentioned relates to the need to access resources to sustain the organization and support its operations. Particularly, those CDCs mainly supported by grants from the public sector and philanthropic foundations are consistently under pressure to seek new funding sources. Some of these CDCs respond to this pressure by incorporating fee-for-service projects that do not significantly deviate from their core mission. In addition, some other reasons for the diversification of the CDCs’ roles include, but are not limited to, change(s) in the organization’s leadership, varying demands of their local communities, and particular needs and opportunities, for example, related to developing a racially diverse workforce in planning and design at the youth level.

Diversification of Roles Is Prominent among University-Affiliated CDCs, and a Countertrend Appears among CDCs Established since 2008

The findings in this study point to a significant variety in type and number of role(s) among CDCs depending on their organizational characteristics. Such variation may indicate how CDCs understand and define “community design” differently based on organizational factors. The content analysis results show that these characteristics, such as university affiliation and establishment year, are associated with the type and number of CDC roles. In particular, the CDC’s university-affiliation status significantly affects the type and number of roles. Understandably, CDCs affiliated with a university frequently incorporate research and professional education interests into their mission statements. As a part of a university department or an independent research center, they are more likely to work on projects that provide learning opportunities for their students by engaging them in studio classes or hiring them as staff.

In addition, this study found that CDCs established since 2008 are more likely to include words in their mission statements that imply a renewed focus on types of work and communities of interest aligned with the classic advocacy planning model. Although their association with this type of role was not as significant as with organization type, interviews with some relevant CDC directors indicated two probable reasons. One is connected to specific restrictions on funding, and another is the organizational capacity that is still nascent. These findings from interviews with some selected CDCs connote that their higher interest in the advocacy planning role might result from a pattern in the early stage of CDCs. However, given the variety in their organizational conditions and the limited number of interview participants, a more in-depth study on this group is needed to understand this potential trend more deeply.

Conclusion and Implications

This research investigated different roles contemporary CDCs perform by analyzing their mission statements and interviewing several CDC leaders, based partly on the idea that a nonprofit organization’s mission statement explains its social raison d’être (Moore 2000). Mission statements and in-depth interviews with a limited number of CDC leaders provide clear but necessarily partial views of the activities of complex and dynamic organizations. While this study focused on CDCs’ mission statements to illuminate their various roles defined by the type of work and communities of interest, future research can delve more into the details of each category. These details may include, but are not limited to, specific types, scales, and geographic foci of their projects and project partners who worked with them. Analyzing such details could elicit specific mechanisms, even among the same type of organizations, as to how their particular organizational characteristics have enabled or constrained certain types of projects. Another potentially fruitful area for future research could lie in the finding that CDCs founded since 2008 frequently use mission statements that focus more narrowly on the advocacy planner role. Key questions here include whether or not this trend in mission statements can also be found by investigating their projects and practices in more detail. If that is the case, investigations into the reason(s) behind this shift will be meaningful research that shows any significant changes in the motivations for establishing CDCs and definitions of so-called “community design” projects.

Despite these limitations and the need for more research in this area, the overall results of this study still suggest at least three meaningful implications for future research and practice focusing on community design and planning education. First, these different roles suggest a new potential taxonomy for future CDC and community design research. Previous studies in community design have suggested three to six types of CDCs depending on their university affiliation, staff type, and profit structure (Blake 2003; Nordhaus 2001; Tural 2017). However, such typologies do not necessarily show how practitioners working in CDCs specifically support and empower community members in neighborhood-scale planning and design processes. This study identified seven roles with distinctive types of work and communities of interest. While there can be more roles than this study elicited, these different roles are intended to be a helpful framework for understanding the diversity of CDCs’ work and tracking their changes over time.

Second, understanding the range and types of contemporary CDCs’ roles can assist CDC leaders, like their directors and board members, as they seek to renew their strategic plans and mission statements. One of the most common challenges CDC leaders pointed out was establishing a stable annual budget to continue working for and with underserved communities. Therefore, information about the type(s) of work and communities of interest other CDCs currently provide and serve to sustain their organizations can help them as they assess options for the future of their organizations. Due to a relative lack of information related to CDCs and their variation, CDC leaders are likely to benefit from knowing potential areas of practice into which they could expand their services. While the Association for Community Design (ACD) has hosted annual conferences to connect community design practitioners, CDC leaders have expressed interest in additional opportunities for cross-organizational learning. Although more studies would be needed to provide additional relevant information, the seven different roles and their corresponding practices that this study elicited can give CDC leaders an idea of what and whom they can consider more in their future practice.

Finally, contemporary CDCs’ observed and diverse roles also invite pedagogical discussions on whether planning and design education needs to incorporate such roles’ necessary skills and knowledge. The outcomes of this study support the idea that the role of planners and designers, particularly community designers, is no longer exclusively about providing technical assistance, as prior scholarship has argued (Briggs 1998; Christensen 2015; Ozawa and Seltzer 1999). It involves training the general public and practitioners and collaborating with various actors across public and private sectors, among several others. Since most CDCs’ planning and design projects engage diverse communities, practical knowledge to organize and design public participation, such as stakeholder identification (Steiner and Butler 2007) and venue creation (Van Maasakkers and Oh 2020), would also be recommended. While planners and designers, in a realistic sense, cannot be and do not have to be experts in all these roles, relevant curricula might have to expand to prepare students for some of the new(er) roles within these organizations and beyond.

Footnotes

Appendix A

Types of Categories and Codes Used for the Content Analysis.

Category	Codes
Type of work	• Provide planning/design services • Educate/train/provide learning experiences • Conduct/support research and consulting • Empower local capacity and encourage the community-driven process • Collaborate/partner with
Communities of interest	• Not stated • Underserved communities (e.g., low-income people and neighborhoods, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities) • Individuals/ neighborhoods/ communities in general • NPOs, CBDOs, civic groups • Officials/organizations in the public sector • Professionals/organizations in the private sector • University students • Miscellaneous (e.g., small business owners, property owners)

Appendix B

List of Interviews.

Organization	Location	Establishment year	Organization type	Interview date
Design Center in Springfield	Springfield, MA	2009	UA	Aug. 30, 2022
Columbus Neighborhood Design Center	Columbus, OH	1982	IN	Aug. 30, 2022
Center for Neighborhoods	Louisville, KY	1972	IN	Aug. 30, 2022
Colorado Center for Community Development	Denver, CO	1967	UA	Aug. 31, 2022
Rural Communities Design Initiative	Pullman, WA	2009	UA	Aug. 31, 2022
TAP Inc.	Troy, NY	1969	IN	Aug. 31, 2022
Environmental Works Community Design Center	Seattle, WA	1997	IN	Aug. 31, 2022
University of Memphis Design Collaborative	Memphis, TN	2014	UA	Sept. 12, 2022
Design Impact	Cincinnati, OH	2009	IN	Sept. 13, 2022
Storefronts for Community Design	Richmond, VA	2011	IN	Sept. 15, 2022
Hester Street Collaborative	New York, NY	2002	IN	Sept. 15, 2022
Detroit Collaborative Design Center	Detroit, MI	1994	UA	Sept. 16, 2022

Note: UA = University-affiliated; IN = Independent nonprofit.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to my advisor, Dr. Mattijs van Maasakkers, for his thoughtful feedback in articulating this research. In addition, I am grateful to all CDC directors and staff members who participated in the interviews and showed their sincere interest and support. Lastly, I thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Donggyu Lee

Notes

Author Biography

Donggyu Lee is a Ph.D. candidate in City and Regional Planning at Ohio State University. His research interests include neighborhood-scale planning/design practices, especially in underserved communities, and their public participation processes.

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