A few weeks ago, NCI Executive Director Bill Lennertz was featured on the Smart City Radio program. Bill discussed the maturing role that charrettes are playing in the planning and design of communities. To hear the archived show, visit this link.

This is not the first time Bill has been featured on Smart City. In July of 2003, Bill was interviewed for a Smart City Radio show entitled, “Citizen Decision Makers.” For more information on that program, visit this link.

Smart City™ is a weekly, hour-long public radio talk show that takes an in-depth look at urban life, the people, places, ideas and trends shaping cities. Host Carol Coletta talks with national and international public policy experts, elected officials, economists, business leaders, artists, developers, planners and others for a penetrating discussion of urban issues. The program airs online every Saturday and can be heard on public radio stations across the U.S. and Canada.

For more information on Smart City, please visit their website.

The uncertainties of our current economy call for smarter ways to plan. Today, project resources and budgets are being cut, resulting in less work for everyone. How can a project sponsor carry on project work with a reduced budget? How can a consultant sharpen their competitive advantage in a shrinking market? One answer is to use charrettes. When conducted properly, charrettes have been proven to reduce project costs by accelerating timelines and reducing rework.

The NCI Dynamic Planning process is a three-phased project management process that includes a charrette. One important goal of Dynamic Planning is to reduce costly project rework. This is accomplished through the ongoing collaboration between a multi-disciplinary project team and key stakeholders. In a project using NCI Dynamic Planning, and particularly during the charrette phase, the design evolves with the frequent input of all relevant specialties and any person or group who might approve, use, promote or block the project. By including these viewpoints early and often, the design moves forward without the usual backtracking that occurs when unexpected information emerges and/or when someone throws a wrench in the works late in the game. The groundwork for this process is laid during Dynamic Planning phase one, Research, Education and Charrette preparation. It is in this phase that the project team creates a strategy for when and how to integrate the information and people resources critical to running a smooth project. The result is a process that costs less money, takes less time and results in a plan that has a better chance for implementation.

We recently received an inquiry from Ralph Kurtz, AIA. He writes: How is your charrette process different from the CRS “squatters” process? Or is it simply old wine in new bottles?

Perhaps not old wine, but rather the latest vintage with complexities reflective of the current environment. The planning environment that produced the 1948 CRS vintage squatter was far simpler than today’s environment in terms of the numbers of variables, the required specialties and stakeholders. 1948 was a great year for squatters but the model has gone through considerable change since then.

When we began NCI, one of our first tasks was to define the charrette process in clear terms. We knew that preparation and follow through were key to a successful project and began talking about the entire project process as “Dynamic Planning” with the charrette as the central, pivotal event. NCI charrettes and NCI Dynamic Planning have roots in a variety of projects and processes that evolved over time. We made a point to research this to the best of our abilities while writing The Charrette Handbook and include a history of the charrette process including relevant projects in chapter two. Indeed, one of the earliest processes of relevance that we found in the United States was the first Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) Squatter in 1948. That first project in Blackwell, OK and its origin are described on page 18 of The Charrette Handbook. The squatter approach continues to be used today as do a number of processes, many by architects, which may be called charrettes, workshops or other names. The key features common to all of these successful processes are collaboration, working on-site for multiple days, and the use of multi-disciplinary teams. NCI has defined our Dynamic Planning process in terms of ten strategies, including these, which we believe are essential to successful projects. For more on our strategies and process definition see our NCI Dynamic Planning page and What is a Charrette? page.

Learn from the Leaders in Charrettes and Sustainable Urbanism
Bill Lennertz and Doug Farr present two important seminars back-to-back in Austin on April 2

NCI Charrette Certificate Module One: Introduction to NCI Dynamic Planning
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
9:00am - 12:30pm
AIA and AICP accredited

Take the first step toward your NCI certificate. Introduction to NCI Dynamic Planning is a stand-alone course that describes how a charrette works within the context of NCI Dynamic Planning. Learn all of the 45 tools involved in the three phases of charrette planning, management and follow-up and participate in a simulated charrette workshop exercise. Upon the completion of this course you will be eligible to complete your certificate by taking just one additional NCI module.

For more details and to register, please visit this page.

The Techniques and Metrics of Sustainable Urbanism
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
1:00pm - 5:30pm

Sustainable urbanism, the integration of walkable, transit-served urbanism with high performance buildings and infrastructure, needs to become the preferred pattern of growth over the next generation. Using Doug Farr’s newly published Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature, participants will learn the techniques and metrics of this emerging area of practice.

For more details and to register, please visit this page.

Though we encourage you to attend CNU XVI, registration at the conference is not necessary to attend these sessions. For more information on CNU XVI, visit the CNU XVI website.

All public NCI trainings in the United States will qualify for AICP credit hours. NCI trainings also provide credits for AIA members.

Did you attend a NCI training in 2007 and need to log your AICP CM hours? All 2007 trainings have now been retroactively approved.

To view currently approved activities, visit the APA Events Calendar.

NCI offers a 10% discount on all public trainings in Portland to current members of the Congress for the New Urbanism and Oregon/Washington APA Chapters. Students, faculty and non-profit employees can attend “Introduction to NCI Dynamic Planning” at a reduced rate of $45 at trainings in Portland.

For more information on NCI’s certificate trainings, please visit our website.

NCI is currently translating some of our more basic educational resources into German, French and Russian, made possible through a partnership with a local college and the Federal Work Study program. Diversity of representation is integral to any stakeholder involvement process, and NCI works to increase public knowledge about charrettes, as well as eventually provide resources in other languages to charrette practitioners who seek to engage diverse groups. We would love to develop more of our materials in Spanish. If you are fluent in Russian or German and would like to assist in refining our materials, or are interested in offering your Spanish language skills towards translating our resources, please contact us at info@charretteinstitute.org.

Tips for presenting to large audiences:

1. Use a large screen

Have you ever been to a presentation where 60 or more people are forced to look at one of those wobbly 3-legged, 8-foot-wide screens? You know the ones that always have creases in them? If your presentation is worth showing then it is worth seeing and for your audience to see it you need a big screen - one that’s at least 12-feet across. Don’t leave it to chance. Demand a great screen for your next presentation.

2. Enlarge presentation drawings live

Another common presentation problem is when the presenter refers to a drawing that is too small for the audience to see. This can happen during mid-charrette reviews when there isn’t time to scan or photograph the drawings and import them into PowerPoint. The public hands-on workshop (The Charrette Handbook, p. 91) is a prime example of when charrette drawings are literally lifted off the desk for presentation in a large forum. A method perfected by Dover, Kohl and Partners is to use a video camera on a tripod to project the drawings onto a large screen. This should only be done with a skilled camera operator who knows lighting and can effectively zoom in on details without making everyone in the audience nauseated. Warning: Practice this method before going live.

3. Plan and rehearse team presentations

Have you ever had a team presentation take forever? Even (or especially) seasoned professionals have been known to blow a timed presentation by going too long. The success of team presentations depends on everyone staying on time. Be wary of someone who says they can present within 15 minutes when they have 60 slides. The best advice is to rehearse well ahead of time so that adjustments can be made. If time does not allow rehearsals, you should probably ask the presenter with 60 slides to cut it in half, just in case.

Take the first step toward your NCI certificates. This is a stand alone course that describes how a charrette works within the context of NCI Dynamic Planning, a comprehensive project management process that begins with the project vision and ends with the plan’s implementation. Upon the completion of this course you will be eligible to complete your NCI Charrette Planner® certificate by taking just one additional NCI module.

Participants include anyone who wants to know about this powerful collaborative planning process, from elected officials to planning staff, from developers to concerned citizens. You do not need to register for the CNU conference in order to attend this training. AICP and AIA credit hours will be awarded for this training.

Austin, TX · April 2
“Introduction to NCI Dynamic Planning” half-day module
In conjuction with CNU XVI
Click here for more information and to register.

NCI Charrette Planner® Certificate holder and Movement for Israeli Urbanism founder, Dror Gershon, said of the 5-day charrette: “Everyone who was involved in this process said that every municipal planning process in Israel should be done this way. Each of the people involved felt the final plan answered real needs – that it was his/her plan.”

Read more about the Kiryat Shmona charrette here, and on the project’s blog

A common fear of public participation in community development can be summed up in the phrase “designed by the mob.” In his article “The Wisdom of Communities,” James Suroweicki, author of the national bestseller The Wisdom of Crowds, reverses this misconception. He writes, “Collective intelligence is especially valuable when it comes to subjects like town and city planning and managing development, subjects where important information is not concentrated in the hands of a few people, but is diffused among myriad members of the community.”

Read the article, Speaking of Place The Wisdom of Communities on the Orton Family Foundation website.