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 * Participatory design**- There is a growing trend in both design schools and social science departments to make things in collaboration with imagined users or stakeholders. Champions of civil liberties and direct democracy generally see this as a positive development for both fields. Academics that have written about various participatory design practices (e.g. Critical technical practice, critical making, participatory action research) but have not considered long-term, sustained activist projects conducted by heterogeneous groups of citizens, activists, political organizers, and academics. This dissertation would focus heavily on the networks of people and resources that coalesce around a given project during its design and construction phase. The wide variety of case studies in the dissertation was selected so as to reveal common and frequent problems.


 * Public Space**- Since the rise of car-based urban design, public space has been in decline. Responses to this trend have come out of urban planning, geography, and urban sociology departments. While excellent work has been accomplished, few authors have given hard thought to public space’s relationship to either the rise of ubiquitous networking technology or declining global economies. The few popular and academic investigations of the topic seem to indicate that public space as we know it cannot survive, let alone grow or proliferate, in such an environment. This dissertation will survey the existing literature on public space and reassess it in light of new theories of self-organization, direct action, and digital communications technology. The result will be a new perspective on public space that not only clarifies what exactly pubic space is good for, but what makes for good public space in this new socioeconomic climate.