Content about Guides

It seems that cities known for their successful public transportation programs have done a bit of listening to residents to make improvements, plan, and respond to citizen needs. In a city like Chicago where each day thousands of people rely on the Chicago Transit Authority to get to their destination, a good transit experience seems to make or break their day. And how do we know this? Search for the Twitter hashtag #cta and you’ll discover a multitude of statements from the Chicagoland populace.

We recently stumbled across what might be one of Cyburbia’s oldest and richest resources, “A Citizen Planner’s Toolbox”. This forum was created a while back as a gathering place for the kinds of complimentary, affordable, and alternative resources that are desperately needed by citizen planners. Since its inception, there have been quite a few ideas and links posted by peers thoughout ther planning field, that we think our readers will find valuable; especially those who often have little or no budget to work with in communicating their projects’ development plans.

The American Planning Association (APA) is gearing up for it’s 2012 National Planning Conference in Los Angeles next month (April 14-17), and the Technology and Planning Division have some great sessions set for this year. From what we’ve heard, this year’s program calls for sessions on 3-D simulation, performance measurement tools, as well as citizen engagement programs and GIS applications. Here is a list of sessions which intrigued us, and we wanted to share with you...

Can you imagine today’s world without location-based technology? It’s everywhere—in augmented reality apps for smartphones, GPS systems in our cars, urban transportation systems, and with public participation (ie. Gov 2.0) and visualisation web portals. In the past year, EngagingCities alone has dedicated over twenty posts to the subject of GIS in planning, with a 2012 location-based article series in the works as we speak. This being said, getting a handle on the multitude of planning related geospacial platforms and tools out there isn't easy, especially considering the rapid rate at which this technology is evolving.

We’ve been keeping our eye on "Community Engagement", a LinkedIn group that encompasses discussion on community building, education, public participation, participative democracy and working in partnership. One of the most popular ongoing discussions has revealed some of the group members’ go-to websites for community engagement in terms of urban planning, support for citizen dialogue, and innovation. Here’s a list of the highlights:

An entry level planner approaches his manager and asks if the department should be considering creating a Facebook page to get the word out about current projects. Says he knows a planner in the Bay Area that has recently done this for his community. The manager is skeptical. His only experience with Facebook in this context is work-related questions that would come in directly to him from residents, which foiled his attempts to have a personal life in the small town he managed. So, is this a good idea? Or a bad one - to have a Facebook page dedicated to your community and managed by your city department? What about controversial projects you are working on?

Open Government Initiative is a collaborative project which was established by a familiar group of passionate advocates of open government, including CityCamp, Colorado Smart Communities, Code for America, the Sunlight Foundation, OpenPlans, in late 2010. Guided by their commitment to transparency, participation and accessibility in government, the group has made significant progress in the movement to build the public’s trust and satisfaction by creating new opportunities for innovation. Recently, Open Government Initiative published their Candidate Open Government Pledge and Declaration of Open Government Principles, in an effort to make it easier for local governments to better implement open government policies. The sample templates, highlighted below, echo President Obama’s collective call for open government, in his address to the United Nations in September 2010. 

Excited by the possibilities, you may have embraced web 2.0 technology with open arms to engage residents in your community. But what if your sites aren’t drawing the quantities of visitors you had anticipated?  A commonly overlooked aspect of building an online community, is appreciating the one you already have.

I’ve heard the same question a couple of times this week in a couple of different contexts, so I thought I’d offer some thoughts here. “How do we effectively manage large volumes of responses to consultations with limited resources, especially when these volumes are likely to increase as a result of more accessible online engagements”? It’s a great question. The growth of the internet as a means for spreading our ‘engagement net’ ever wider brings with it the potential for a much greater degree of community participation. Unfortunately, this is a double edged sword.

Now that many planning projects have launched their social media campaigns and are moving in the direction of actively managing a web presence to maintain open online dialogue platforms for public engagement, its time to evaluate what can be done to effectively measure their success rates. It is difficult to benchmark respective activity in the social media realm, as performance is measured differently. This is especially true due to the fact that social media is so versatile, diverse, complex and multi-faceted, spanning many disparate objectives and many different platforms.

At some point in time, planners might have had the option to create their plans without including the public and to simply present the final product at a workshop. And we know how that goes, duck and cover. With the ease of publishing and sharing news, information and commentary on the Internet today, planners and decision-makers do not have that option any longer. Your residents are talking about your plans or proposed changes, whether you like it or not. Worse, if you’re not careful, they might gain broad support quickly and public opinion about your project is about to get negative.