University-affiliated community design and engagement centers in the 21st century: Re-evaluating mission and values against key contemporary ‘wicked’ problems

Community design centers (CDCs) have maintained a consistent presence within design and planning practice and education since their beginnings in the 1960s. However, there is limited research on their missions and values. In particular, given the emergence of CDCs from the social justice movements of the 1960s, there in insufficient scholarly attention paid to how contemporary CDCs are addressing some of today’s key “wicked” problems. As well, there is surprisingly little understanding of how university-based CDCs contribute to educational goals. Through a systematic review and analysis of active CDC websites, this research finds that although social justice and climate change are well-recognized challenges by practitioners and scholars within community design and engagement, these values are not as explicit within CDC mission statements. Our research also identifies several particularities of CDCs that are affiliated with universities, including that they may have more organizational longevity than unassociated CDCs.