Lynda Schneekloth

Biography

For four decades, Lynda H. Schneekloth has connected activism, design practice, applied research, teaching, scholarship, and academic service with deep theoretical work on the fundamental dynamics of professional and citizen engagement in the practice of “placemaking.” Schneekloth has thought deeply and strategically about working in the world even as she embraced the long-haul labor of healing that world. In the process she has helped expand the knowledge in our field, made a tangible impact on the “beloved places” she has cared about, and nurtured a generation of skillful and critical practitioners. One of the key themes throughout her work has been about how the expert knowledge of designers and other professionals is brought into democratic dialogue with the specific and situated knowledge of citizens who inhabit particular places to produce environments that support a more humane and healthy way of life. She has explored, in parallel, the role of the human imagination in the production of places and ways of life. The arc of Schneekloth’s career spans both methods of environmental design through programming, POE, empirical research, theoretical exploration, and planning/design practice, and subjects of engagement including children’s environments, urban regeneration, remediation of toxic sites and reuse of brownfields, protection of urban waterfronts and regional watersheds, rehabilitation and reuse of historic buildings, and most recently remaking our built environment and systems of energy production to blunt the advance of global climate change.

Research Interest

Architecture