Innovative Public Involvement Techniques for Comprehensive and Regional Planning: Lessons from Every Scale

January 30, 10-11:30 AM PST (1-2:30 PM EST)

Note: after live webinar date a recording will be available

Overview

• How do you achieve broad community inclusion across the scales of town, city and region?

• How is social media and web-based participation used to increase participation?

• At what scale do you need to conduct multiple charrettes?

• Creating a public process that builds local capacity and sets the framework for near-term implementation.

Comp Plans and Regional Plans have been reinvented using the charrette and online engagement. This session will compare and contrast the stories of three very different sized projects: The Comprehensive Plan for Hammond, Louisiana (pop. 20,000); Plan El Paso the Comprehensive Plan for El Paso, Texas (pop. 800,000); and Seven50, the Southeast Florida Prosperity Plan funded by the US Office of SustainableHousing and Communities (seven counties, pop. 6 million).  Project leaders will discuss the strategies and tools for achieving broad demographic and socioeconomic representation throughout these projects. Use of social media, online newsletters, virtual town halls, online polling, and smartphone apps are discussed. Hear how online participation, in-person meetings, local charrettes and regional summits were combined in different ways for maximum public participation.

Presenters

• Carlos Gallinar, AICP, Deputy Director for City Development, Planning, El Paso, Texas

• Marcela Camblor, AICP, Project Director, Sustainable Communities Initiative, Southeast Florida Regional Partnership, Stuart, Florida

• Frank Saxton, Northshore Community Foundation (formerly), Baton Rouge, Louisiana

• Jason King, AICP, CNU-A, Project Director, Dover Kohl and Partners

Moderator

• Bill Lennertz, AIA, Executive Director, National Charrette Institute

For more information and to register see here.

This live webinar is accredited with the AIA for 1.5 continuing education system (CES) units, the AICP for 1.5 certification maintenance (CM) credits, and ASLA for LA CES for 1.5 professional development hours (PDH).

The next time you initiate a project, try making it a team effort. All too often project scopes and tight budgets are developed in a silo or a vacuum. This can result in insufficient time and money to complete the project without serious difficulties.

The NCI Charrette System™ prescribes using a Project Start-up Intensive workshop as a collaborative team approach to scoping and budgeting. During this 1.5-day workshop, project sponsors and key partners collectively create project guiding principles, objectives and measures, and a stakeholder analysis. This sets the shared approach for the process. Next, they create an actual plan for the project process by completing a process roadmap and charrette schedule. These documents are then used to create a project budget. Very importantly, the resulting scope and budget are realistic and owned by the members of the project management team. This collaborative project start-up creates a focused team approach to project management that increases design quality while guiding it through the inevitable hurdles that the project will face during implementation.

For another view on charrette budgets, here is a quote from the new NCI publication,Duany on Charrettes: Notes from the Field, available now to all NCI members.

NCI is pleased to announce a new exclusive membership benefit available to NCI members at all donation levels.

“Don’t let misinformation or falsehoods stand for even five seconds. The charrette leaders should always correct inaccuracies and misstatements immediately. Interrupt the speaker and set it straight. The murk created by misstatements can destroy a charrette. Do not be afraid to be ruthless in your corrections.” – Andrés Duany

Note: This article is published in the October-November 2012 issue of Better! Cities & Towns 

It’s very likely that most people reading this piece already drank the urbanist Kool-Aid: We believe in placemaking, walkability, and better urban design.

Some among us understood its implications and embraced the livability movement earlier than others, but here we are, all together now in the “new” economy—the one in which most Americans prefer walkable communities, in which Millennials are delaying getting their driver’s licenses and would prefer Internet access over owning a car, and in which a home’s Zestimate is now packaged with its Walk Score. We have arrived, right? Well, not quite.

Read the rest of the article on the Better! Cities & Towns here.

A charrette is a lot like a big wedding. It can take a full year or more to plan a wonderfully successful wedding attended by hundreds of people. Some of the biggest challenges to planning a wedding of this scale are the invitation list and seating arrangements. Many traditional weddings have a number of events and parties before and after the actual wedding ceremony. Some people attended every event while others attended just the wedding itself. The fact that everyone is happy about his or her particular level of participation is a testament to a well-conceived involvement plan. Have you ever been to a wedding where someone was grumbling about not being invited to the shower or rehearsal dinner? Family feuds have been born from this issue. Much like a successful charrette, a conflict-free wedding is planned such that everyone is satisfied with their role in the events to which they were invited.

For charrettes as well, it takes very careful planning, months in advance, to pull off a charrette at which everyone is fine with his or her level of participation. NCI defines three levels of project participation. Primary stakeholders are most often the project sponsors, partners, staff, and consultants. Secondary stakeholders may be associated agencies, non-governmental organizations, and key community members. General stakeholders are all others who are affected by the project outcome.
While these categories do roughly indicate the amount of involvement, they must not become an elite hierarchy. In order to make the best use of people’s expertise and time, primary stakeholders are involved in many more meetings than the general stakeholders. The key is that everyone is involved at key points of decision, like the wedding itself. Everyone is satisfied with their level of involvement because there are enough decisions remaining for them to have an impact on the outcome.

The NCI Charrette System™ prescribes a clear process for identifying the stakeholders and the appropriate level of involvement along with an engagement strategy. Next month in Vancouver is your next opportunity to practice and learn the entire three phases and 42 tools of the NCI Charrette System™ . The NCI Charrette System™ training can help assure that your project has the right level of involvement by the people that need to be there at the right time- just like a successful wedding.

This opportunity is through a grant from the EPA Office of Sustainable Communities’ Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program, the Livability Solutions coalition will be offering free technical assistance workshops for up to 12 communities around the U.S.; applications are due by Friday, November 2nd. 

Technical Assistance on Smart Growth and Sustainable Development
During one- to two-day workshops, Livability Solutions coalition members will work with selected communities to help them use tools and workshop approaches – such as street audits, green infrastructure valuation guides, and transit-oriented development planning – that will help achieve their goals of enhancing livability, creating lasting economic and environmental improvements, and improving public and social health of their residents. A short report will be prepared for each community following the technical assistance. This assistance is designed to serve local and/or tribal governments, but any local, regional, state, tribal government, or community-based organization working in close conjunction with any such division of government may apply.

To get started on your application, visit the Livability Solutions website today!

If you have questions about the program, or are interested in sponsoring additional technical assistance, please email livabilitysolutions@pps.org

Please note that there are also two other organizations currently offering free technical assistance through EPA’s Building Blocks for Sustainable Communities Program:

• Through a 3-day intensive visit and consultation, the technical experts on the Global Green team will evaluate how the sustainability of a specific neighborhood can be enhanced through an upcoming catalytic project by applying metrics from the LEED for Neighborhood Development rating system and developing actionable recommendations for our grant recipients.
• Each year, Smart Growth America offers free assistance to local communities interested in building stronger local economies and creating great neighborhoods. These workshops will be awarded to a limited number of qualifying communities.

Vancouver offers a beautiful and lively urban setting for our fall west coast training. During this week, you will earn the basic and advanced NCI Certificates. You will learn how to plan and manage a project from beginning to end using a charrette as the transformational moment. Included is a half-day intensive in public meeting facilitation skills. This course will feature a combination of Canadian and U.S. case studies. Thanks to TransLink for sponsoring our full week of trainings.

Once again both NCI Certificate trainings are being offered in London by the University of Hertfordshire’s Centre for Sustainable Communities. These trainings use UK based examples and case studies and are taught by experienced charrette practitioners from Parsons Brinckerhoff, Turnberry and the BRE.

NCI Charrette System™ Certificate Trainings
•    November 5-7 — Vancouver, BC
•    November 26-28 — London, UK

NCI Charrette Management and Facilitation™ Certificate Trainings
•    November 8-9 — Vancouver, BC
•    November 29 — London, UK

More about these trainings and registration here.

Why does NCI teach meeting planning in our NCI Charrette Management and Facilitation™ course? A well-run meeting can propel a charrette forward by building understanding and decisions that are supported by the participants. People should leave a charrette meeting excited and committed to return. To accomplish this takes careful planning, appropriate outreach, and skillful facilitation.

Meeting Planning
The foundation of any successful meeting is a clear meeting purpose with a set of desired outcomes that are understood and agreed upon by the meeting participants. A meeting purpose should speak to the values and interests of the participants. For example, an early charrette meeting purpose might be, “for participants to provide information about characteristics of their neighborhood to the charrette design team.” Desired outcomes should be concrete and measurable. In a charrette hands-on workshop, a desired outcome might be, “for participants to create a list of community vision elements.” Only after the meeting purpose and desired outcomes are developed, can an agenda to accomplish them be designed.

Stakeholder Outreach
Another important element of charrette meeting preparation is assuring participation by both the leadership and representative stakeholders. It can often take months of community outreach and engagement to make this happen. Holding a meeting that lacks this combination of decision makers and general community representation can cause costly time and rework revisiting the meeting content with those initially absent.

Facilitation
Once a meeting begins, competent facilitation is a key to success. The essential role of the facilitator is to protect the people and the process. A skillful facilitator creates a safe environment in which people can speak their minds. Professional facilitation combined with having all community and professional viewpoints in the room provides the right mix for false or misinformed information to be properly challenged.

Clear expectations of meeting purpose, having broad community representation, and skillful facilitation can build long-term community trust in the public meeting process. This trust is particularly crucial during a charrette, when success can be dependent on stakeholders returning to participate in multiple meetings and working in good faith toward a shared solution.