NCI recently had a chat with PR expert Ben Brown about working with social media in public projects and found his following advice and insights valuable.
Ben recommends that if there is a hot political climate surrounding your plan, perhaps you should avoid starting your own project blog. Rather, do some homework to seek out [...]

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The topic of social media’s role in public planning processes is a hot one. NCI continues to research and present on the topic as we did at the annual Congress for the New Urbanism in June where Bill Lennertz of NCI and Ken Snyder of PlaceMatters spoke on “Hi-Tech, Hi-Touch Public Meeting Facilitation Tools for [...]

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The participation of children in charrettes is a hot topic at our trainings these days. At ASU last week we discussed these major benefits.

Kids can add important content. They are, of course, brutally honest and also quite smart about planning issues.
Their presentations can change the whole tenor of the charrette. Kids very often speak [...]

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Changing project users mindsets and preconceptions about sustainability is a prerequisite to implementing sustainable design projects in which users take ownership. Charrettes create an immersive, shared-learning environment that promotes a shift in mindsets.
Sustainable projects have a complex set of environmental, economic, and social variables plus a large, diverse set of stakeholders. The NCI Charrette [...]

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I had an interesting discussion with the students at our D.C. training this month. We were debating the trade-offs of workshops in which a select group of stakeholders participate in virtually the entire event participating in the design sessions elbow to elbow with the professional design team.
We talked about the obvious advantages of having [...]

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Of all the arguments for using the charrette method, none comes into sharper focus in times like these than the bang-for-the-buck advantage. Well-planned, well-managed charrettes can save both public and private sector clients a ton of time and money. But here’s the hitch: To realize the savings, clients have to take on more responsibility in [...]

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The following piece of charrette history was excerpted from the National Charrette Institute’s publication, The Charrette Handbook, available this summer from the APA Planners Press. It represents a small portion of a chapter on the history and evolution of the charrette and Dynamic Planning processes that contains numerous such case examples.
The evolution of the collaborative, [...]

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Perhaps the most useful part of the stakeholder analysis is the identification of the “win” for each stakeholder viewpoint listed. Determining the win provides the information necessary to convince stakeholders that they should participate. Presenting the project as an opportunity for an individual to achieve his or her win is a way to create relevance [...]

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Do you often have a tough time convincing a project sponsor of the importance of a collaborative process? One of the most important benefits of true collaboration in community planning is ending up with a plan that minimizes costly rework and results in a built project. Everyone suffers when a project in which many people [...]

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One powerful method for verifying information is to conduct confidential stakeholder interviews. Confidential interviews conducted by a neutral/third party charrette team uncover information that people might not share in a public forum and that local staff cannot possibly know because of their closeness to the project and their history with the area and the people. [...]

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