Building Commons and Community - Tapa dura

Karl Linn's compassion, humanity and insight into what makes good community design--and what, in fact, makes community itself--is exactly what much of the world needs to develop if we are to evolve beyond our current frightful state of affairs. He saw the need for space and safety, beauty and joy in people's lives--especially the lives of poor children--and he filled it by the truckload. His was a quietly heroic life, lived close to the root of what really matters: an understanding that the happiness and peace we create for others is, delightfully, our own.
--Alice Walker, author, The Color Purple

There was only one Karl Linn--a master at using design to create community and empower people.
--Chester Hartman, founder, Poverty & Race Research Action Council

Seeing latent beauty and potentials in blighted urban spaces, Karl Linn took actions to realize his vision through gardening, farming and restoring environment. Through the process, he inspired people, built communities, and transformed many public spaces. He made use feel our heart.
--Lily Yeh, founder, Village of Arts and Humanities, Barefoot Artists

We stand on the shoulders of Karl Linn, each of us who acts to creatively reclaim the commons for each and all communities. Karl Linn understood the greatest revolutionary secrets of all: not to fight but to create, not to be alone but to be together, and to recreate our common life beginning with the very ground under our feet!
--Mark Lakeman, founder, City Repair

Foreword by Joanna Macy, Epilogue by Carl Anthony

Building Commons and Community documents half a century of Karl Linn's work helping to create neighborhood commons, such as community gardens, playgrounds and parks. Linn's philosophies and practical wisdom show people how to use the resources that they find in their own surroundings to create welcoming shared spaces. This book features more than a dozen case studies, illustrated with 376 photographs that cover urban, grassroots projects from the 1960s to the present. These projects cross boundaries between professional design and activism, offering an inspirational and practical guide for anyone who wishes to strengthen neighborhoods.

Landscape architect and child psychologist, Karl Linn (1923-2005) was a beloved visionary leader of grassroots community building, who brought life to economically disenfranchised neighborhoods in nine American cities from Boston to Berkeley.

Karl Linn built communities from the bottom up, working alongside citizens of working-class neighborhoods. He pioneered community design centers and community gardening movements across the United States.

Linn grew up on his mother's fruit tree farm in rural Germany and fled in 1934 to Palestine, where he studied agriculture, started an elementary-school gardening program, and helped create a kibbutz. Linn later earned a degree in applied psychology in Switzerland. From there he went on to New York and worked as a child psychologist, co-founding a school for emotionally disturbed children. Eventually Linn returned to horticulture and rose to prominence as a landscape architect on the East Coast.

Karl Linn taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and the University of Pennsylvania, taking his students into local neighborhoods to begin the seminal work of helping citizens create shared spaces using materials at hand.

As an activist for peace and social justice, Linn also co-founded two organizations--Urban Habitat and Architects/Designers/Planners for Social Responsibility. He spent his last years spearheading commons projects in his own Berkeley neighborhood.