About

In 2021, Jean Chisholm and Laura Kozak began to form a Place-Based Collective as an informal way for students and faculty to collaborate and share in learning and  project-making around a series of place-based propositions:

How do we recognize, honour, and make good on the relationships we already have to a community, and to a place?

How do we learn to listen to and interpret signals from more-than-human beings, and support people already demanding and working towards transformative change?

In what ways do we need to radically re-imagine our ways of working and collaborating as designers?

The work of this Collective has included a hosting series of roundtables, a Social Practice course, a Place-Based Field School, sharing circles, site visits, walks and the making of a series of publications.

Emphasis is placed on processes that support relationships with community and place. These approaches to collaboration:

Connect to and support place-based knowledge holders, recognizing their expertise and knowledge of place from their own perspectives and ways of living;

Engage in flexible methods of being “led by” and consensual opting-in, valuing self-determination for people impacted by social conditions;

Develop projects from within relational networks, working towards shared values, ethics, and goals, resisting the impulse to participate in reactionary design solutions, instead understanding and building shared intentions and futures;

Ground projects and research within notions of mutual aid, asking how to help and finding ways to support each other, through methods and actions both simple and complex.