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Cultivating Communities investigates how to engage and enable local
communities to participate in designing future scenarios on how to
cope with issues regarding their living environment. In our research
cases these issues involve the lack of green in urban environments,
the decreasing biodiversity of fruit trees and the emission of dust
particles that impacts the local air quality. Design authors such as
John Thackara stress the importance of addressing these complex issues
in a participatory way. This requires input of experts from various
backgrounds, including politicians, scientists, and the local residents
as experts of their living environment. According to Jean Lave and
Etienne Wenger (1991), these different actors have to form a community
of practice during the design process to collectively build towards a
better living environment. Authors like Bleeker (2009) or Raijmakers
(2007) have described the engaging role of scenarios in participatory
processes. Building on their work, the challenge of this research is to
develop scenarios, which can be used as tool to enable different actors
to participate in a design process. Also, we will investigate how these
scenarios can be adopted and adapted by local communities to fit their
own needs. Based on our fieldwork we show that designing a participatory
scenario is not just a tool or method, but also involves creating the
right platform for collaboration.

http://cultivatingcommunities.wordpress.com/