MIDTERM

Dynamic definition is - marked by usually continuous and

productive activity or change.
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process

1. Gather Up Information, Called Data, And Maps.

The first step in preparing neighborhood plansor any
other community planning process is collecting
information, including neighborhood demographics.

• Collect quantified data (pieces of information)

• crime and police report data,
• business license data, and
• utilities data if they will share.
• Utilities might have information on new connections and disconnections that help you
determine moving patterns.
• If you are doing the planning process yourselves without a paid professional, specialize in
the data you can collect yourselves.0
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process

1. Gather Up Information, Called Data, And Maps.

The first step in preparing neighborhood plansor any
other community planning process is collecting
information, including neighborhood demographics.

For example:
• walk up and down the blocks and count up the number of boarded up buildings;
• survey of park use on your own, if that's relevant, or even count the number of left-turn movements that are
causing traffic, however, make sure there's a purpose in how you use it if you're trying do-it-yourself data
collection;
• Maps are information too. Usually your local government or tax authority will help you by providing certain
kinds of maps, but consider inexpensive and free sources that are independent of government too.
• You can obtain quick, useful maps complete with aerial photos at varying scales using an Internet-based service
such as Google Earth.
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process

2. Analyze The Planning Information You Have Collected.

• If you're doing the plan yourself, this is the step where you need to consult anyone available to you
who understands the dynamics of cities or towns at a professional level.

• Take a first pass at what information seems significant to you, but then ask knowledgeable people what
else they see.

• Sometimes it's valuable to group the data into some sort of classification system. Especially if you have
a number of businesspeople who are active in your core group driving the plan, a SWOT analysis may
be comforting and familiar. This acronym stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process
Other good questions are:

• If money were no object, what would you recommend we do in our neighborhood? (A good follow-
up question is: what one intervention would you recommend that wouldn't cost any money?)

• If we could change one perception of our neighborhood by the outside world, which one would it
be?

• If you were re-planning our entire city from scratch, what would this neighborhood's specialty be?
(Or if you're in a city, try asking what the city's specialty should be within the country or region.)

• Do you see the economic situation of individual households in this community improving or
declining in the next 10 years? Why?

• If we could get wave a magic wand and get rid of one eyesore in our neighborhood, which one
would you choose? Why?

• Who needs to change for our area to be better?

 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process

3. Set Some Tentative Community Goals.

• This is where the community planning process begins to bring folks a real road map for the future.

• By this point, your community engagement strategy needs to well underway.

• Determine the general goals first before getting bogged down in the details of writing.

• If you have a consultant, ask them to state the goals in the first language that comes to mind, so
you can play with the ideas and see if you want to rally behind that goal.

• If someone writes goals for you and you don't buy them, it's not going to work. It's hard to see why
so many consultants think they can write inspirational goals for others.
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process

4. Generate Community Choices And Develop Alternative Scenarios.

• The alternatives step is hard for most do-it-yourself groups because by now, you think you know the
answers.
• See if you can discipline yourselves to spend about an hour thinking up alternative ways to reach your
goal or goals.
• If you have a situation where some real alternatives are apparent and you don't know which way to go,
spend some effort developing the concepts behind the alternatives into a coherent narrative, and then
involve your core group guiding the planning process in a discussion.
• If possible, hold a public forum, discussion, open house, or on-line survey where you ask the
neighborhood at large to comment on each alternative.
• Your aim should be a long list of pro's and con's for each alternative.
• Discuss and debate, but at some point, choose your direction. If you genuinely can combine two or more
desirable alternatives into one, do so.
• However, don't jam contradictory ideas together just to make everyone a winner in hopes they will support
the community planning process.
• At this stage of choosing an alternative, you may alienate some people. But be nice, and like other
situations in life, your attitude will mean everything about whether the "losers" stay in the game.
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process

5. Make A Written Plan!

• Solidify it with the description and analysis that led you to these conclusions, a description of the
community planning process you followed and who was involved, the alternatives you considered,
and why you chose the one you did.

• The elegance of plan documents has no correlation with the degree to which neighborhood, small
area, or city plans will be helpful or implemented.
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process

5. Make A Written Plan!

• Solidify it with the description and analysis that led you to these conclusions, a description of the
community planning process you followed and who was involved, the alternatives you considered,
and why you chose the one you did.

• The elegance of plan documents has no correlation with the degree to which neighborhood, small
area, or city plans will be helpful or implemented.
 COMMUNITY PROCESSES
 Sound Community Planning Process
6. Think Through The Plan Implementation And Whether It Should Be Divided Into Phases.

• Because too many plans just stop after reciting some data and a narrative, map, or rendering of the
future. Don't let this happen.

• Insist that professionals estimate how much implementing the plan will cost, what ordinances or state
laws have to be changed so you can implement the neighborhood plans, what new groups will have
to be created and governed in order to bring the plan to pass, and how you can implement the plan
step-by-step.

• If you don't know what to do first the moment the consultant walks away, you don't have a plan, even
if there are 400 meticulously assembled pages of argument, drawings, and GIS-generated maps.

• Even here, the community planning process is not finished. You need to monitor how the plan is
being implemented, updating it periodically, and continuously attempting to advance the plan.
Implementation is everything in determining whether neighborhood plans are worth the time and
effort, and usually consultant fees, required to prepare them.

• So get off this planning page and go elsewhere on this site to figure out how to actually DO things!
MIDTERM
PLANNING?
• SPATIAL: AN ISSUES IN COMMUNITY PLANNING
(SDG No. 11: “Making Cities and
Human Settlements Inclusive,
resilient, safe and sustainable)
 Universal design
• Developing sustainable neighbourhoods should be guided by the principle
of universal design.
• Universal design is the design of an environment so that
• it can be accessed, understood and used to the greatest extent possible by all people
regardless of their age, size, ability or disability.
• By considering people's diverse needs and abilities throughout the design process,
which reflects the life cycle approach, environments that meet the needs of all can
be achieved.
• In this way, sustainable design and universal design are linked and
incorporated from the early stage of planning integrated neighbourhoods,
will reduce the need for costly and wasteful retrofits over the medium to
long term.