Good community engagement means drawing folks out to be heard – before putting pencil to paper. Using fun and effective tools in addition to lightly facilitated open dialogue yields great results.
Each planning process differs, but here’s one recent example of Caddis’s approach to community engagement.
For a project we’re designing for Boulder Housing Partners, we engaged kids and adults in play-like exercises where they moved wood blocks and colorful baubles around on a site plan to explore options and to understand the spatial context.
We used simple dot-voting exercises to establish priorities, identify visual preferences, and express programmatic desires. We put up two 4’ x 8’ sheets of chalkboard-painted plywood to allow people to quickly catalog ideas in a way that was visible to their peers.
When we heard from neighbors with different perspectives, we brought them together to promote mutual understanding and to provide clearer direction to the future project. The design team spent little time talking – just enough to provide regulatory context, to set up the exercises, and to answer questions in the open dialogue sessions. Mostly we listened.
Good community engagement does not guarantee that everyone gets what they want. But it does allow people to be heard, to hear each other, to inform outcomes, and to collaborate in how our cities are formed.
