Community Planning Books
For many years, my professional practice focused on creative community engagement, participatory planning, and social sustainability. The books below gather that work into practical handbooks for planners, activists, and community workers.
Creative Community Planning: Transformative Engagement Methods for Working at the Edge
Presents creative, often arts-based approaches to community engagement, storytelling, theatre, poetry, photography, and other embodied methods, for practitioners working "at the edge" in difficult or sensitive contexts. Offers examples and tools for more imaginative and transformative community engagement.
Available from Routledge
Kitchen Table Sustainability: Practical Recipes for Community Engagement with Sustainability
Shows how to bring sustainability "down to earth" through kitchen-table conversations and small-group work instead of only formal meetings and policy documents, offering practical "recipes" to involve ordinary people in exploring sustainable futures.
Available from Routledge and major online booksellers
SpeakOut: The Step-by-Step Guide to SpeakOuts and Community Workshops
Describes the SpeakOut method for open, informal, drop-in community workshops. Offers step-by-step guidance to design, run, and follow up participatory events that welcome diverse voices, manage conflict, and make community engagement more engaging and accessible.
Available from Routledge
Housing As If People Mattered: Site Planning Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing
By Clare Cooper Marcus and Wendy Sarkissian
Housing as if People Mattered is a practical, research-based guide to designing medium-density family housing so that everyday life for residents is safe, sociable, and supportive, rather than anonymous or stressful. This "evergreen" book is still in print after 40 years.
Includes: illustrated site-design guidelines, the two authors photographed together in 1986 and again in 2014, and a note that Clare Cooper Marcus died in January 2026.
Buy Now link through to the University of California Press.
Illustration from Housing as if People Mattered: “Windows and Overlooking”
The Two Authors, 1986
2014
Note: Clare Marcus died in January 2026.