Noticeable Planning Notices and Engaging Community Engagements
I have been reflecting on Dan Hill’s Noticing Planning Notices for a while.
I too have a love for ineffective planning notices that shy away from being noticed. Unlike the whimsical A4 paper sealed in plastic, Canadian cities have decent-sized planning notices comparable to billboards. However, being big does not solve any of the problems.
Many development notices are placed at locations that are inconvenient for anyone in a car-centric environment to stop and read. Pictured below, one of these “primary interfaces” requires people to climb up a retaining wall to access the information. It is not necessarily the best way for such important information to be delivered to residents.
Some cities, like Ottawa and Toronto, have eye-catching and heavily designed planning notices that ask the residents to leave feedback and comments with assigned city staff members as part of community engagement. If you read deeper into these notices, the boards are often populated with outdated and vague information, leaving residents confused and inevitably angry. The community engagement results? Vocal and literate.
Planning notices only serves as an entryway to failed community engagement strategies. The residents are “notified”, but does it mean that the residents are “informed”? Furthermore, does being “informed” equates to being “engaged”?
Recently, I did a presentation at World Design Summit about the issue of information overload in the distribution of urban growth information and how this issue impacts community engagement efforts. It is essentially a bottleneck that prevents planning information to be accessed by residents, and residents opinion to be accessed by practitioners in planning and development.
I believe most architects and planners have at least been to one public consultation to fulfill the task of community engagement as outlined in their work orders. Personally, I have been to a few engagement sessions and the practice itself leaves me with mixed feelings. Sales pitches of community engagement consultants and community engagement platforms range from “engage thousands” to “drive actionable results”.
Although most of the time the participants are happy that their inputs are considered, the conversation rarely gets deep enough, and the success of engagement is mainly measured by the number of participants.
On the other hand, actionable results can be “actionable”, but not always acted upon.
Above is a good example: after a handful of public consultations followed by new developments being built in Little Italy, the neighbourhood is still a food desert. “A grocery store” remains an actionable item to be executed by future development projects.
What is the role of community engagement in urban planning if the actionable results this practice claims to drive cannot be executed in real life?
Another discovery that strikes me is the discontinuity in community engagement. Most urban projects take years and decades to implement, but community engagement only happens for a tiny sliver of time, scattered between initial design and construction phases. The end-to-end strategies are usually pointing to the timeframe of a community engagement project, not the entire project lifecycle. Data collected throughout this “end-to-end” process is usually used as a one-time information distilled into a report, drawing the conclusion to the study period — end of community engagement.
With or without community engagement, urban development projects are happening at rates faster than anyone can anticipate, but how are the development projects evaluated? How can the residents know that the new developments in their neighbourhood will bring better experiences? What defines a development as “wonderful” and what defines a development as “atrocious”?
Community engagement in urban planning can not start with putting planning notices around the city and ask people to “Let us know what you think.” However, community engagement can start with the intent of delivering better urban experiences to residents through design and ends with great research data that can be effectively used until actionable items are executed.
What if community engagement in urban development is more like design research to product development? What if community engagement can help practitioners in urban planning and development gain clarity on the “why” while balancing among the forces impacting how the service is delivered?
At the end, the number of community engagement participants has nothing to do with the success of a development project. Rather than measuring the outcome by the number of participants engaged, community engagement outcomes should be measured by the quality of data collected and used to inform a project’s viability, feasibility, and desirability.
When I first started learning about product design and management, I had a conversation with spydergrrl about the lack of user experience design in our built environment. I still remember her closing line:
All design is service design.
It is true.
Everything is service, including the environment people reside. People pay high prices to live in neighbourhoods they desire, they deserve good experiences in return. If the experience of living in a neighbourhood is a service, then how can community engagement enhance the delivery of this exact service?
Thank you for reading :)
I’m starting a new project for user experience research at urban scale. Send me a message on Twitter if you are interested in becoming a project collaborator!
