Tools for community engagement and thinking about possible futures for our communities
“Integrated planning” practices can help local governments develop their communities in sustainable ways, because this type of planning involves thinking about how different plans, polices, and strategies link to multiple goals for humans and the environment.
Sophisticated models can be used as tools for supporting integrated planning, but these models are often very complex and difficult for certain community members and stakeholders to understand.
Read this open access paper on the FACETS website.
This is a significant problem because local planning must be inclusive to be effective, meaning that planning processes should involve community members through participation and engagement. Therefore, to best use sophisticated models as tools for effective planning, researchers and practitioners must find ways of communicating the information produced through the models to different types of people and (broadly speaking) the public.
Our study looked at ways of clearly communicating the information produced through a model created for integrated community planning to a wide range of different people and community members.
Our previous research developed the “integrated model”, which calculated a number of possible community outcomes (such as walkability, access to green space, local employment, wildlife habitat, etc.) of developing Squamish, British Columbia, Canada, in different ways (such as through low-, medium-, or high-density neighbourhood developments).
This paper discusses two tools for communicating the outcomes of the integrated model: (1) a “model explorer” for learning about the scenarios and how these different ways of developing may affect the community and (2) realistic 3-D visualizations that people can “walk through” and experience from a first-person perspective.
The model explorer was developed as an online, interactive tool. People can use a mouse to interact with the model explorer to learn about how the model was created, view community scenario maps, and explore possible outcomes of developing the community in different ways.
The visualizations were developed using a combination of mapping and video game development software. Users interact with the visualizations by digitally walking through virtual environments that look like local neighbourhoods and by pressing keys to turn different community scenarios on and off.
Two events were held to get people’s thoughts and opinions on the effectiveness of the model explorer and visualization tools: (1) a focus group that was attended by invited local government staff and community stakeholders and (2) an open house event that was open to the public.
The feedback given by the participants of these events indicated that the tools were useful for communicating complex information about the many possible outcomes of developing Squamish in different ways, and this was encouraging feedback as it showed that these could be potentially powerful tools for participatory planning and community engagement. The feedback also clearly indicated that the model explorer and visualizations had different strengths and weaknesses as communication tools; therefore, the tools are most effective when used together (i.e., one is not better than the other), and perhaps could be improved if combined (i.e., a single application for using both the model explorer and visualizations).
Read the paper — Communicating complexity: interactive model explorers and immersive visualizations as tools for local planning and community engagement by Robert Newell, Nate McCarthy, Ian Picketts, Fynn Davis, Grace Hovem, and Stefan Navarrete.
