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Download the report "Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools" from the Lincoln website.
Having come off of a really great APA 2012 in Los Angeles, I’m very excited about the energy and momentum building for some of the topics I’ve devoted a lot of my professional and personal energy to.  One of my main roles at PlaceMatters is to open up the tools available in planning by supporting and building a community around tool development, use and experimentation.
While we’ll still build and experiment with tools at PlaceMatters in our on the ground work, we are turning things inside-out here and making tool development an exploratory and collaborative process as much as we can.  We’ve started this through our involvement with the Open Source Planning Tools group, which has regular monthly calls and, so far, 2 annual workshops [join our discussion on Google Groups] supported by a joint partnership of the Lincoln Institute and Sonoran Institute.  While I am excited about the tools we can build together as a community, my ultimate passion lies in the possibility for paradigm shifts and transformations about how we think of planning and the mechanisms we have for implementation.  The scenario tools that we want to open access to are a means and not just an end for me.
You can see a little preview of where all this is heading in the Lincoln Policy Focus Report Opening Access to Scenario Planning Tools [download] [and read more about the report here, here and here].  The final recommendation addresses “advancing new concepts to address future challenges.”  Maybe a bit vague and open ended at this point, but this is where the exciting transformations could occur if we move this conversation.  This recommendation speaks to the conundrum we have if we are successful at making scenario planning tools more adaptive and flexible and yet have static implementation mechanisms like zoning and subdivision ordinances that do not reflect emerging realities captured in our explorations of many possible futures.  Tools and ways of thinking are now catching up to the pace of change in our dynamic world.  We stand at a milestone in a conversation that arguably traces back to Christopher Alexander and early systems thinking, where technology, research and policy can converge to give us a regulatory system that is more adaptive and responsive to the needs and challenges of modern cities [see also: earlier blog post on a Pattern Language].
We haven’t formalized this discussion yet, but you can track it at ScenarioPlanningTools.org.  Ray Quay, who has many more intelligent insights into this topic, will help us shepherd this conversation into something more robust over the coming years and I’ll be prodding us along as much as I can in my role at PlaceMatters.  This is an important and exciting conversation to have and I think it will bring a number of folks together from many fields and interests.  It will also bring about a number of challenges we’ll have to figure out together as a community and profession like:

1. What does a planning education look like in the future?
2. What does the planning profession look like in the future? How should it change?  What are the unwavering core skills of the profession?
3. What’s the right amount of flexibility in planning regulations (for example, some of the inflexibility is by design to save us from externalities of rapid and overwhelming development; what inflexibility can we cede if we have better systems for tracking change?)
4. What are the challenges in fitting this into a democratic, representative decision-making process?
5. How do we keep the process of planning and city-making human in light of these new tools and vast amounts of data?  Can we or should we avoid positivist approaches to planning and how can tool design keep us from marching down the path of metrics and data without human context?
6. And many more…including more insight from Rob Goodspeed in this past blog post referencing E.S Savas’s 1970 Science Article Cybernetics in City Hall

Would you like to join us in the conversation and community building?  What other questions do we need to consider in this possible future?  Who are the early predecessors of this movement that we should bring out into the light again?  Help us shape the conversation.
Cross-posted on ScenarioPlanningTools.org

Whatever your role in spatial planning the Planning Convention is this year’s most important planning event! The brand new one day format brings together big picture plenaries and special interests sessions to ensure you focus your specific professional needs. Leading edge speakers will tackle some of the most grappling issues including, the new planning agenda in England, cities in the UK, national infrastructure planning and Royal Town Planning Institute's (RTPI) new “Map for England”. This event will change your perspective, refresh your knowledge, extend your contacts and equip you with the tools you need to make it work in 2012.

This post, by guest bloggers Carissa Schively Slotterback and Cindy Zerger, is the seventh in a month-long series on the impressive diversity of participatory decision-making tools that communities can use for land use plans, transportation plans, sustainability plans, or any other type of community plan. Our guest bloggers are covering the gamut, from low-tech to high-tech, web-based to tactile, art-based to those based on scenario planning tools, and more. We welcome your feedback and would love to hear about the participatory design strategies that you’ve found to be the most useful.
Getting people involved in long range planning presents a significant challenge for planners and policymakers. Doing so can be especially difficult when the geographic scale is large. Consider the challenge for the Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) as it developed a public engagement process for its 50-Year Transportation Vision – Minnesota GO in the spring of 2011.
Motivated by an interest in enhancing public involvement in its long range planning, MnDOT worked with us through the University of Minnesota’s Center for Transportation Studies (CTS) to develop a comprehensive engagement strategy. A key aspect of this strategy was a creative participatory scenario planning process intended to foster public interest and help explore alternative futures that might influence future transportation decision making. The scenario planning exercise was developed for use in public workshops held across Minnesota and as part of a web-based scenario exercise available through the Citizens League’s (a local non-profit) Citizing online tool.
Focused 50 years in the future, the scenarios offered a narrative and visual description of various economic, social, environmental, and political conditions in 2061. The first step in developing the scenarios was to conduct a series of interviews with University of Minnesota and other experts around key topics that intersect with transportation, such as technology, economics, climate change, governance, health, and supply chains. High quality videos of the expert interviews were recorded and edited for public viewing online. The expert perspectives provided in the videos were central to developing the scenarios as we reviewed the raw video footage to identify (1) trends and (2) impacts that might be present in 2061. These trends and impacts were integrated into three (very Minnesotan) alternative scenarios:
You Betcha! (going from global to local). Middle-of-the road scenario. In this version of MN, the majority of goods and food are produced within 350 miles of where people live; some industries such as water exporting and wind energy are successful; technological innovations in communications and manufacturing occur; and small towns thrive as people move there from urban centers.
Uffda! (learning to succeed in a time of energy crisis). Most challenging scenario. In this version of MN, all forms of energy are in short supply, resulting in blackouts and fuel rationing; agriculture and manufacturing struggle to survive – though low energy bio-engineering crops and algae-based fuels make MN a national leader; and urban areas and regional centers grow but rural communities decline.
Lake Wobegon (where all Minnesota towns and neighborhoods are above average). Most positive of all scenarios. In this version of MN, there are many technological and medical breakthroughs to improve our lives, education, and environment; tourism increases; and population grows due to increased life expectancy and new residents attracted by the state’s high quality of life.
Nine public workshops were conducted across the state, with 233 people participating in meetings and another 3,490 unique visitors to the project website. In an effort to provide meeting participants with multiple ways of immersing themselves in the scenarios, we provided three pieces of information to each participant: a scenario narrative that verbally described what life would be like in 2061; an illustrative map visually communicating how some changes might play out on the landscape; and a scorecard that showed how 2061 would stack up against 2011 in various areas.

Each meeting kicked off with a presentation to get participants motivated for the meeting activities, including asking them to initially rewind to 1961 for a little perspective. For example, 1961 cost of living information was presented including the cost of a gallon of gas ($0.27), the cost of an average home ($12.5k), and the cost of a dozen eggs ($0.30), compared with today’s prices. In addition, cultural and historical information was presented, including the top song and movie of the year, as well as reminding participants that the first human went to space and the “Ken” doll was introduced in 1961.
At each of the workshops, small groups of participants were assigned to discuss one of the scenarios. To help immerse them in the 2061 scenario, participants filled out a “Day in the Life” worksheet, and were then asked to consider what transportation systems would be necessary to succeed in the future scenario and what principles should guide MnDOT’s decisions.
As the workshops concluded, a detailed summary of the findings was developed in effort to help MnDOT understand what Minnesotan saw as key components of a transportation system no matter what the future. This work helped lay the groundwork for the principles identified in the Minnesota GO 50-Year Transportation Vision.
Cindy Zerger Carissa Schively Slotterback This post was contributed by Carissa Schively Slotterback, PhD, AICP, an Associate Professor and the Director of the Urban and Regional Planning Program in the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, and Cindy Zerger, the Center Coordinator and Research Fellow in the Center for Changing Landscapes in the College of Design at the University of Minnesota and Founding Partner of Brainstorm Overload, a creative services firm.

Join a discussion with the Sustainable Practice Network's panel of experts and thought leaders on the impacts of Environmental, Social and Governance measures on society and the way we conduct business.

It is often through art and cultural activities that community members find an outlet for expression, preserve their past, and enrich their future. Recently, a link has been found between levels of direct government funding for culture and levels of public engagement in culture.

The question of how to effectively and appropriately communicate with the public regarding department or organizational planning initiatives and achievements frequently comes up for us with clients. Although some planners may have fine tuned their project communication strategy, it became apparent to us recently, while browsing discussions on Cyburbia.com, that many are still struggling to find some fresh ideas on how to spread the word about what they are actually working on.

As demand for quality environments in our cities continues to increase, more attention is being paid to the opportunity presented by urban revitalisation as a sustainable alternative to broad scale urban renewal. Around the world urban revitalisation is being catalysed by housing, cultural, retail, infrastructure and city centre projects that spur on infill development, adaptive re-use and other local investment.

There is a little-known struggle going on right now over how a new series of “top level domains” (TLDs) on the Internet shall be used by cities of the world. TLDs are the suffixes at the end of Web addresses, such as .com, .org and .edu. The international body that oversees TLDs is expected to announce a new series of TLDs in 2012 that would give cities their own TLDs (e.g. .nyc or .paris). The new TLDs could make it easier for people in the same metropolitan areas to find each other and interconnect on the Internet and in physical spaces.

For the first time the Ted Prize has been awarded to an idea rather than a person. The 2012 Ted Prize has been awarded to “The City 2.0.” The Ted Prize winner receives $100,000 and also "One Wish to Change the World." The prize ties in with the TED community's assembly of expertise and resources, and works towards collaborative initiatives that will influence millions.

Solutions to the problems associated with over-spending, clutter, and mass consumption just may lie within our own neighborhoods. One easy way to explore exactly how we can share skills and services locally comes to us through the online collaboration platform for neighborhoods, OhSoWe.com.

In a blog post the other week, Code for America helped promote the White House’s most recent request for input, asking: How do you measure participation?
The post approaches this question with an understanding of “participation in its broadest sense”. Not to be too nit-picky, but that’s probably not the focused area of exploration I believe the White House has in mind.
With apologies for being a bit late (the deadline for submitting input ends tomorrow, January 3), here’s the comment I just left:
The White House is asking specifically for input on public participation, not participation in general.
The latter is fairly broad and may include all kinds of citizen activities (e.g. reporting an issue, building an app, doing cool things with data). The former, on the other hand, is a fixed term that’s very narrowly defined in that it always requires a decision making process and a decision maker willing to involve the public in that decision.
My preferred definition explains the term as follows:
“Public participation is the process by which an organization consults with interested or affected individuals, organizations, and government entities before making a decision. Public participation is two-way communication and collaborative problem solving with the goal of achieving better and more acceptable decisions. Public participation prevents or minimizes disputes by creating a process for resolving issues before they become polarized. Other terms sometimes used are ‘public involvement,’ ‘community involvement,’ or ‘stakeholder involvement.’” (James L. Creighton)
This is the specific area for which the White House is trying to identify best practices and metrics.
While public participation and civic engagement share some of the challenges regarding measuring and metrics (e.g. qualitative aspects, long-term impact), some issues matter more to one than the other (e.g. inclusiveness).
Various posts have previously tried to deal with the terminology issue, for example:

• What Is Public Participation? (March 24, 2008)
• Talking About Participation (October 30, 2009)
• Public Participation: Four Common Misconceptions (September 25, 2010)
• What Is Civic Engagement? (May 7, 2011)

Of the few public replies I’ve read so far, this one gets the focus on decision making mostly right: Outcomes First: Best Practices and Metrics for Public Participation
This is not a question about who owns the best terminology (public participation, public involvement, community engagement all work). It’s about being able to clearly understand the scope of the questions the White House is trying to answer. Otherwise, the input won’t be on target.

Each spring, the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group (PCRG) hosts an Annual Meeting and Awards Ceremony to celebrate the hard work of our membership and thank their partners for their continued commitment to neighborhoods.