Rural Design for the Future - Dewey Thorbeck

Design thinking and the problem-solving process of design is a strategic resource. Through creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship it can help communities optimize limited land and water resources in urban and rural landscapes. To address the problems facing communities, it connects human, animal, and environmental health through design for both urban and rural regions.

Rural Design for the Future provides a methodology for holistically crossing borders and connecting issues to nurture new design thinking and collaborative problem solving. It recognizes that human and natural systems are inextricably coupled and engaged in continuous cycles of mutual influence and response. It presents a process which provides an integrated system of human communities, plants, and animals that meet the needs of people, the economy, and the environment in the present, without compromising for the future. Following the author’s first book Rural Design, it discusses the development of community based rural design over the past decade, and expands on using the rural design process to cross national, state, county, township, and city borders in order to make connections for better urban and rural futures for everyone.

The book includes projects from around the world including many of the author’s sketches in black ink and watercolor of places that he and his wife have visited together. It will allow designers, architects, policymakers and citizens to envisage the solutions to some of the most pressing issues in rural design.