Berkeley Planning Journal

As global ecological problems pose increasing risks to human well-being, design and planning can play an important role in developing solutions. However, there is a need for alternatives to centralized, hierarchical, inflexible, and exclusionary approaches that have contributed to problems in the past. We propose an “open source” practice, which links participatory development with networked planning and design, fostering collaboration between government, business, nonprofits, and individual citizens in addressing ecological problems at the local level.