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Public Engagement
January 18, 2021 | 6:58 pm

Serpentine Maze: Pop-up parks in a time of pandemic

In this week’s post, PlaceMaker Hazel Borys walks us through a pop-up park that she and her friends built. And how it helps implement three of the 22 actions of the Pandemic Toolkit. Click below to launch.

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Category Environment | Sustainability, Health, Public Art, Public Engagement, Public Policy2 CommentsTags COVID-19, health, nature, parks, Resilience
May 18, 2020 | 12:33 pm

Public Participation, Part II: Equitable Outreach

This is Part II of a two-parter on community engagement strategies in a new era. Part I is here. This conversation is the third in our series addressing planning challenges for local governments in a post-pandemic future. The two previous topics can be found here and here.

Jennifer Hurley is President & CEO of Hurley-Franks & Associates, a planning consultancy firm, and a PhD candidate in Human and Organizational Development at Fielding Graduate University. She’s a current or past board member of a number of professional organizations, including The Congress for the New Urbanism, the National Charrette Institute, and the Form-Based Codes Steering Committee.

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Category Community Development, Public Engagement, Public PolicyLeave a CommentTags Ben Brown, community engagement, COVID-19, Jennifer Hurley
May 13, 2020 | 1:53 pm

Public Participation, Part I: Let’s Fix What’s Not Working

This is Part I of a two-parter on this topic. The conversation is the third in our series addressing planning challenges in an era likely to be reshaped by the COVID-19 pandemic. The two previous topics can be found here and here.

Jennifer Hurley is President & CEO of Hurley-Franks & Associates, a planning consultancy firm, and a PhD candidate in Human and Organizational Development at Fielding Graduate University. She’s a current or past board member of a number of professional organizations, including The Congress for the New Urbanism, the National Charrette Institute, and the Form-Based Codes Steering Committee.

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Category Public Engagement, Public Policy, Q&A1 CommentTags Ben Brown, community engagement, COVID-19, Jennifer Hurley
February 27, 2019 | 5:18 pm

Better Places for Changing Populations: AARP has some ideas

Between now and April 17, AARP, the largest advocacy organization for seniors, is inviting government entities and non-profits to apply for a Community Challenge grant. This program, now in its third year, is a good one. Not just for retirement-aged crowd, and not just for the support it provides for individual projects.

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Category Aging, Public Engagement, Public PolicyLeave a CommentTags Ben Brown
January 24, 2018 | 7:15 pm

Moving Beyond “Smart Growth” to a More Holistic City Agenda

Kaid-BenfieldOriginally published almost four years ago and every bit as relevant today.

I have spent most of the last twenty years working on an agenda grounded in, for lack of a better phrase, “smart growth.”  That agenda basically holds that our regions must replace suburban sprawl with more compact forms of growth and development; that neighborhoods must be walkable and convenient; that automobile dependence must be replaced with a system of mobility choices in which the automobile is only a part.  It is an environmental agenda first and foremost, but those of us who advocate it also believe it to be good for people.

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Category Community Development, Development, Environment | Sustainability, Planning and Design, Public Engagement, Public Policy, Resilience, Theory and Practice1 CommentTags environment, Kaid Benfield, Resilience
January 10, 2018 | 1:50 pm

Resolved for 2018: Fewer delusions, more reality-based planning

Okay, so we’re shaking off the shock therapy of 2017 and ready to move on, right?

Let’s start with admitting some of the stuff a lot of us got wrong about challenges and solutions in municipal and regional planning. Such as: Our misplaced overconfidence in the stability of basic institutions, especially those requiring democratic processes.

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Category Community Development, Demographics, Economic Development, Planning and Design, Public Engagement, Public Policy, ResilienceLeave a CommentTags Ben Brown, economic development, Resilience
December 13, 2017 | 4:25 pm

The Sidewalk to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions

Sometimes all the right people seem to be at the table, all singing from similar hymnals, and all seemingly focused on transcending growth-as-usual and yet, still, the results fall flat.

Today we look at one of those times.

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Category Economic Development, Planning and Design, Public Engagement, Theory and Practice1 CommentTags mixed-use, Scott Doyon
November 29, 2017 | 5:11 pm

Storytelling Part II: Getting to Getting Things Done

First a review:

In a post last month, I made a pitch for organizing community storytelling around getting stuff done. I acknowledged how hard it is to do that in the current political environment, which is increasingly an arena of competing tribal identities and mutually exclusive convictions:

A community that has struggled to identify and assert shared values and hopes for the future isn’t likely to provide a great context for storytelling, especially when it comes to big, ambitious ideas. Chances are, people with their own stories of disappointment and frustration, buttressed by the experience of past efforts, will have a hard time imagining their roles in a new story or see the ambitions it describes as realistic.

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Category Community Development, Planning and Design, Public Engagement, Public Policy, Theory and Practice2 CommentsTags Ben Brown, get things done, storytelling
November 8, 2017 | 3:05 pm

Watch Your Words: Building support for walking and biking infrastructure

In my last post, I looked at the difficulty of getting things — like walking and biking infrastructure — done and how the manner in which we measure our accomplishments makes all the difference. Not just towards building momentum but towards building community.

In short, it’s all about baby steps.

But let’s say you’ve now taken some of those baby steps. Using my previous example, let’s say you got a bike lane installed. My guess is that, among your most ardent champions and supporters, no one’s looking to stop there. You’re looking for more. More routes, more options.

That’s where things start to get tricky.

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Category Planning and Design, Public Engagement, Transportation1 CommentTags bike-ability, Scott Doyon, walkability
October 25, 2017 | 11:15 am

Corrosion of Community: Impossible standards as an excuse for inaction

In a coming post I’ll be addressing the long crawl towards walkability, and towards communities where the promise of meaningful transportation choice becomes increasingly realized. Long story short, the process, already difficult, can become harder rather than easier over time for reasons I’ll explain. But first, let’s revisit the struggles of just getting started with this post from several years back. Because before you can work your way into the deep end, you gotta get in the pool.

Community fascinates me. Not just the idea of it, but the dynamics, and how those dynamics end up stoking or choking our collective efforts to be together. Having worked in a lot of different places, I’ve had opportunity to study community in action, at both its strongest and weakest, in all different contexts — economic, political, cultural — and have tried to identify patterns that lead to results.

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Category Community Development, Public Engagement, Resilience1 CommentTags bike lanes, Resilience, Scott Doyon
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