Creating Built Environments: Bridging Knowledge and Practice Divides (Review)

At first sight, the title of this book seems to make an impossible promise: to bridge the divide between knowledge and practice in creating built environments seems like an altogether unreachable promise, lacking in academic restraint, in view of the complexity and vastness of the task. But Lawrence’s book is a major intellectual and organizational undertaking that delivers. The bridge of the title is carefully laid out for the reader, who quickly understands that the author is in fact claiming for a more democratic, inclusive, and collaborative planning and design practice that embraces diverse ways of knowing and breaks free from disciplinary boundaries to understand the built environment and its social and natural relationships in all their complexity.