Peter Aeschbacher holds a joint appointment in the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of Architecture. He is also the Director of Design at Penn State’s Hamer Center for Community Design. Trained as an architect, urban planner and graphic designer, he has extensive national and international experience in design and community development. Mr. Aeschbacher has worked with arts-based non-profit organizations, undertaken numerous community revitalization and affordable housing projects, and been an activist and advocate for social & environmental justice issues. He has also worked closely in and with underserved communities and marginal populations, including community-based projects involving at-risk youth in Los Angeles. These projects include the design and construction of community gardens, local parks and environmental education initiatives.
He is a former Frederick P. Rose Architectural Fellow (2000-2003) with the Los Angeles Community Design Center. He is a founding member of CityWorksLA and is a board member of the Association for Community Design. Mr. Aeschbacher has lived and traveled widely, including working as a graphic designer in Switzerland, where he also learned to bake bread. He worked in South Africa on community development projects during the transition from apartheid and got there by riding a motorbike across Africa.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
My work addresses a central dilemma of contemporary urbanism: the tension between Modernist planning and design and the emergent dynamics of the communities who are subject to them. This friction occurs as a result of a mismatch between the agendas of top-down systems and the needs and rights asserted by self-organizing communities. It is critical to understand this aspect of post-modern urbanism, as well as the emergent modes and forms of resistance and entrepreneurial action, in order to develop more effective applications of planning, architecture and landscape architecture.
Through my research, teaching and publications, I am seeking to contribute to this effort by developing a body of scholarship around several interrelated lines of inquiry: how practitioners and educational institutions engage design in the public interest; how entrepreneurial action in the public realm by groups at the margins of formal structures creates citizenship and is evidenced in the built environment; the history and current state of the Community Design Movement; and the role of inquiry in design, particularly the development of tools and methods to increase the agency of public interest designers.
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