Introduction: Defining Community-Built | 7 | Community-Built | Barry L

Throughout history and around the world, community members have come together to build places, be it rural farmers raising a barn in North America, Malian villagers holding a festival to re-plaster their adobe mosque, or neighbors in New York City’s Lower East Side turning vacant lots into a community garden. What all these places have in common is that they are community-built; they “meet a set of criteria that stress participation and result in an environmental change” (Delgado 2000, 76); they bring community members together to construct projects in public and semi-public spaces.