NCI Director, Bill Lennertz, participated in a presentation three weeks ago at Greenbuild with former USGBC chair, Sandy Wiggins from Consilience LLC and Jennifer Rezeli from ReVision Architects, both NCI certificate holders. The session featured lessons from Sandy and Jenn’s sustainable charrette practice as well as content from the NCI Sustainable Charrette Summit held last [...]

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 NCI Executive Director, Bill Lennertz, will join Sandy Wiggins and Jennifer Rezeli in session PL08 called, Sustainability Immersion: Community Change through Sustainable Design Charrettes on November 21st at 9 AM. The session is based on work from the NCI Sustainable Neighborhood Charrette Curriculum Summit, held in Chicago last June, hosted by Farr Associates and sponsored [...]

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How can you concisely describe the NCI Charrette System™ to elected officials, commissioners or community members? Answer: Download and present the free NCI Charrette System™ scripted PowerPoint presentation. With the NCI Charrette System scripted PowerPoint, you can show the slides and read the script to describe the benefits of public involvement, what a charrette is [...]

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One of the most common questions we receive at NCI is how to convince a sponsoring agency or client to do a charrette for their project. Some sponsors are concerned that charrettes take too much time and/or are too expensive. Here are a few benefit statements for making the case to use a charrette.      Charrettes [...]

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“…we should use the time-tested, vernacular, pervasive, and virtuous Charrette as a sustainable planning process.”

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How can you concisely describe the NCI Charrette System to elected officials, commissioners or community members? Answer: Download and present the free NCI Charrette System scripted PowerPoint presentation. With the NCI Charrette System scripted PowerPoint, you can show the slides and read the script to describe the benefits of public involvement, what a charrette is [...]

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In response to shrinking project budgets, more and more planning agencies are developing the in-house capacity to conduct charrettes. Director of Fayetteville Long Range Planning, Karen Minkel, has assembled a staff of planners and designers who possess the diverse talents from both planning and design disciplines necessary to run a community charrette. Last year, Karen [...]

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For some time now we have been urging our students not to think of a charrette as a public involvement process but rather as an accelerated, collaborative design process. Although charrettes include a successful method for involving broad groups of stakeholders, the power of the charrette goes beyond its role as a design-based public involvement [...]

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We live in an age of multi-tasking. As I write this piece I am distracted by the multiple windows open on my computer. My email program alerts me every time a new message arrives, the phone rings as people try to reach me with unrelated issues, colleagues stop by with questions. Computers and the Internet [...]

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One of the case studies in The Charrette Handbook takes place in Hercules, California. It chronicles a charrette that took place in 2000 to plan an urban center for the suburban town. Dover, Kohl and Partners created a form-based code that has successfully guided development under the charrette vision of a traditional town center. Since [...]

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