Digital platforms provide new tools for public engagement during pandemic.

Image: 2019 Mike Belleme

In 2020, many of us have been forced to fully embrace digital life. The Covid-19 pandemic has forced us to rethink how we work and how we engage with one another. When it comes to moving urban planning/design projects forward during these uncertain times, teams are increasingly turning to digital tools to interface with the public out of necessity. Yet, even prior to the normalization of social distancing, public engagement in its traditional sense had its fraught moments. Large public meetings, often held at days and times inconvenient to many working people, also tended to be dominated by groups with specific agendas who, more often than not, hijacked the conversation. With poor attendance and lack of diversity in the feedback, engagement tactics were ripe for new strategies and technology.

Today, there are a plethora of new software platforms on the market, and in most cases these tools are not designed to supplant in-person meetings but complement a suite of traditional efforts. Engagement tools include things like project websites, social media, virtual meeting platforms, and web platforms designed for information sharing, gathering feedback, and facilitating interaction with community members. This virtual interaction can be static or interactive and according to the APA, “include virtual meetings and events, online surveys and polls, project visualizations, interactive maps, and crowdsourcing”.

However, these tools have their own caveats. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, 15% of households do not use the internet at all, and 9% use it outside the home but do not have a home connection. This highlights why teams cannot rely on digital tools alone, especially when striving to seek input from all generations and a diverse socio-economic and cultural constituency. Several best practices have emerged in the engagement arena, and more specifically in the use of digital tools for public engagement including;

• Map networks of people with whom you wish to engage, critically looking for under-represented communities.

• Assemble a diverse sample of the community-at-large, as a critical mass for your efforts.

• Involve people in one-on-one or small-group discussions, then mix in larger forums for amplifying bigger ideas and moving the discussions forward.

• Give participants the opportunity to share values and stories by creating shared work and ideation spaces.

• Allow citizens to mutually consider a range of options, to understand priorities, trade-offs and choices inherent in the process.

• Determine project metrics, measure often to gauge the success or failure of campaigns. Learn from your findings.

• Create conversations that appeal directly to people’s core interests and find ways to propel that dialogue.

• Add tools like Wikis, polls, surveys, mapping and crowdsourcing functions that promote direct involvement.

• Gamify the engagement process in ways that produce hard data.

Our team has shifted rapidly into virtual online formats, in some cases partnering with organizations who have robust digital outlets. On our Moakley Park project in Boston, we are working with with Boston Harbor Now for virtual community forums as a way to update the community and seek additional feedback. For a project in Downtown St. Louis, our collective team lead by Interface Studio, has launched a robust and interactive community open house that is achieving some press coverage!

In the past few years, new software tools have continually come on the market and are evolving quickly into easy-to-use graphic platforms that have a wide array of tools and functionality. We’ve compiled 9 platforms (none of which we endorse) as a quick snapshot of what is available right now.

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Digital Platforms

METROQUEST

-multi-platform online surveys
-micro-learning and mini-games embedded

MINDMIXER

-community collaboration platform
-surveys, idea submission, idea refinement, idea voting, interactive budgeting, and community challenges

BANGTHETABLE

-Listen. Use a combination of forums, polls, and other tools to better understand your community’s perspectives and needs.
-Inform. Communicate initiatives through newsletters, blogs and social media to keep your residents informed.
-Measure. Advanced analytics and reporting deliver actionable insights and data-driven evidence for better decisions.
-Build community. Capture participant information, develop resident profiles and target communications

COURBANIZE

-provides communication and reporting tools for developers and planners
-project background & updates
-forum moderated by coUrbanize
-timelines and schedules
-share files, presentations, and images

SOCIALPINPOINT

-surveys, forums, interactive mapping, ideation tools, participatory budgeting, pages, stakeholder management

76ENGAGE

-customizable discussion forums, comments, surveys & polls, alerts, voting

THEHIVE

-customizable social mapping, gather input, discussion forums, surveys & polls, Q&A, participatory budgeting

INSIGHTS

-civic engagement facilitation
-digital advisory boards

SPIGIT

-innovation or idea management
-crowdsource and track ideas

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Digital engagement tools can certainly foster a faster, easier and less intimidating way for the public to participate in helping to shape their civic life. Project teams can reach a more diverse group of people and these tools have a longer shelf-life than traditional outreach, collecting data continuously through the life-cycle of a project. That being said, the overall community engagement strategy for any project should include a robust mix of online and in-person channels which in tandem will reach a diverse and representative sample of the community.

Other Resources:

Interesting interactive lab: https://elab.emerson.edu/
Good resource for best practices: http://www.futurewise.org/assets/reports/CET.pdf

Engaging artists to help choreograph open space design can transform project outcomes.

image ©2019 Mike Belleme

While site specific art has always played a role in landscape architecture, the parameters of public art are expanding; ephemeral, temporal and performance-based art is now regularly integrated into sites. Until recently, art has largely served to cultivate a sense of identity within a public space or to highlight the unique stories, histories and culture of a place. Communal and accessible outdoor art is generally embraced by the profession and revered by the community, but the reality is, public space is not always welcoming for all.

In many ways, acknowledging the emotional potency of public art, and it’s ability to create transformational change within communities, has opened our eyes to the potential for artists to collaborate on landscape projects—not just as creators but as innovators, communicators, instigators and liaisons. Early on in the Chouteau Greenway Competition (2016), the project team realized the power that artists could play in thinking creatively, pushing the boundaries if you will, but also in engaging and facilitating sensitive dialogue with communities.

Early on, the competition team worked with renowned artist and architect, Amanda Williams, to help shape the submission. Her project, Color(ed) Theory, was acclaimed for its confrontational look at race and space in the South Side of Chicago. As an artist, she is not just interested in art for arts’ sake, but as means to shift the narrative and explore ways that art can impact the landscape as a whole, transforming it, educating people, bringing them together and starting a dialog. Ms. Williams describes her intent as a way to, “spark conversations, that lead to ideas, that lead to solutions… to set the table, or the canvas if you will… for what the future could be.”

At the inception of the Chouteau Greenway project (now the Brickline Greenway), the team advocated for the inclusion of local St. Louis artists of color to actively inform, craft, and participate in the planning and design process. Artists; Mallory Nezam, an entrepreneurial civic artist, cultural producer, writer, and communications strategist; De Nichols, a social activist focused on addressing civic and social challenges within communities; and Damon Davis, who uses his art to empower the disenfranchised and powerless, became integral members of the 13 member project team helping to shape both the process and outcome. Their unique perspectives and insight helped to frame the explicit goals for the project—a 22 mile greenway through 17 St. Louis neighborhoods—which ultimately became unearth, connect, heal, provoke, cultivate and envision. 

The Brickline Greenway framework plan, released in late 2019, crucially addressed how to equitably reinvest in the city, to increase walkability and vibrancy through neighborhoods, to bridge geographical and cultural divides, to incentivize greater social and economic equity, and to deeply engage, reflect and connect the diversity of cultures that exist in the city. Art became embedded in every aspect of the project, solidified by the formation of the ‘Artists of Color Council’. Embedding art in catalyst sites such as the Griot Museum of Black History and the historic Mill Creek Valley, a vibrant African American community erased in the creation of a freeway overpass, as well as under the 601 freeway, became explicit opportunities to bring public art into marginalized communities. 

Under trestle art park.

Kings highway art park.

Ideas like the “stoop”, an architectural element that celebrates the residential stoop where generations have gathered to share stories, and temporary art installations on vacant lots, became grounding elements that emerged from community dialogue facilitated by the artists. And, when the Council described the dire need for a welcoming, large-scale, public sculpture park accessible for all within the inner city, the idea for the Kings highway overpass was born—a cloverleaf design that winds through a new art park, then launches across the roadway to connect with Forest Park. 

Griot Museum vacant lot activation.

The boundary pushing, creative thinking, community dialogue, and social activism that the art community brought to the vision, was key to the vibrant and inclusive plan that emerged. This project is a prime example of how the role of art and the artist can be expanded, by embedding people like Ms. Nezam in the discovery and design process. She highlights the team’s contribution as, “forefronting the experiential components of the greenway (how do we want people to feel when they are on it?), integrating cultural nuance into the framework plan, and leaning into the storytelling of forgotten histories.” Their understanding that, “the greenway is more than a linear path, that has to be built from the history of a place, react to and reflect its inhabitants' lived experiences, and nod towards a better shared future,” provided a strong foundation from which to build.

St. Louis Improv Anywhere pop-up performance, 2011, St. Louis, MO - Mallory Nezam

With that being said, different artists will have different ways that they approach working in the public realm. Nezam suggests, “artists with a community or collaborative practice can be incredibly integral to helping forefront community culture, needs & wants. Yet, there are other artists who bring the strength of creative problem solving, dreaming outside of the traditional ways of operating and pushing teams to take risks. I'm also personally really interested in how artists can collaborate to reimagine the systems themselves of design, construction, implementation and governance of public projects. How we, as inherently creative and imaginative practitioners, re-conjure and build new systems in which the folks we are designing for can become the folks we are designing with.” 

Equity, diversity & inclusion. How they differ but converge in the design of meaningful open space.

Joe Moakley Park 2018, Boston, MA | Image ©2018 Mike Belleme

Recently, I was privy to a lecture by Mitchell Silver, Commissioner of NYC Parks, where he shared his thoughts on the difference between equity, diversity, and inclusion and how it informs his team’s approach to public open space. Often, we casually interchange these words as we conceptualize and work on our projects, so it was helpful to take the time to look deeper at the meaning, differentiation and application of these distinct ideas. Increasingly, our work at Stoss is intensely focused on diversity, equity and inclusion in the public realm and it’s imperative that we deeply understand the terminology. 

Equity

Equity is defined as, “being fair or impartial” which of course can be applied in a myriad of ways. The example Silver gives is the distribution of funds for NYC Parks throughout the decades. While the City had a high walkability score (81.5%) at the onset of his tenure, what he found upon further investigation is that many of these parks, 215 in all, had received less than $250,000 over the course of 20 years—leaving them blighted, tattered and virtually unusable. And, of course, this disinvestment was primarily in lower income communities. Improving the equitable distribution of funding or making appropriate investments to meet the need where it exists today is one component. Yet, equity also includes the equal distribution of parks or open space throughout a city (ie) NYC has the goal of every citizen to be within a 10 minute walk to open space. Moreover, understanding how discrimination and historic cultural ramifications play into equity should also be a key consideration in the planning process.

Our work in St. Louis on the Chouteau Greenway Framework Plan is a prime example of making equity a priority. The overall concept was grounded in the team’s intention to not only connect St. Louis’ Forest Park with the Gateway Arch in predictable linear fashion through the central corridor, but to intentionally include spurs north/south connecting Fairground to Tower Grove Park. This involved an explicit focus on linking 20 city neighborhoods, specifically to include and celebrate those communities suffering from historic disinvestment.

Diversity

Diversity focuses on valuing and including different perspectives. Parks and open space provide critical physical and mental wellbeing for all people regardless of age, culture, socio and economic background. In fact, it is believed that 80-90% of our health is determined by social determinants like access to parks and open space. As we all know, demographics are changing in the US. Our population is aging, diversifying and changing perspectives. According to Pew, “the non-Hispanic white population will increase more slowly than other racial and ethnic groups; whites will become a minority (47%) by 2050. And, the nation’s elderly population will more than double in size from 2005 through 2050, as the baby boom generation enters the traditional retirement years.” The implications are vast. With 6 generations living at any one time, each is bound to value different types of things within an open space. 

Factor in race, culture, ability and economics and designing for diversity becomes a complex, even daunting, undertaking. Public open spaces must reflect multiple values and preferences as well as acknowledge and tackle overt and embedded discrimination. Rules and regulations once intended to protect may need to be rethought. In NYC for example, park signs that read, “no adults except in the company of a child”, were dismantled under Silver’s leadership as they excluded elderly patrons (or those without children) who want and deserve to sit on a bench, enjoy green, open space and be integrated into the community.

In redesigning Moakley Park, a 60 acre waterfront park in Boston, our team carefully considered how to transform a park that was largely geared towards organized sports, into one that was inclusive to a wide generational, cultural and ability range. Active recreational areas co-exist with adventure playgrounds, community gardens, and informal gathering spaces. Different types of programs have been distributed throughout the park and larger picnic and grilling areas have been added to allow for large family gatherings, spaces often used by Latino and other immigrant communities. In addition, the team considered park access to ensure that there were thoughtfully positioned pathways to and through the park as a means to introduce new areas of the park to different types of people and facilitate those accidental collisions that help people get to know one another.

Inclusion

Silver talks about inclusion as allowing people to participate in the process, essentially truly listening and incorporating their stories, feelings, history and dreams in the design of an open space. Understanding that every choice counts and incorporating a robust, open and diverse community process into any project is no longer optional but is critical to creating spaces that remain active all year long and are beloved by the community. Hearing these voices and internalizing the feedback is key to designing for diversity, programming for all constituents and creating spaces that are flexible, able to evolve over time and are used in all four seasons, day and night. In the case of the Chouteau Greenway, the project’s working groups were developed very carefully by Great Rivers Greenway to reflect the full demographics of the city in terms of age, race, socio-economic background and geography to ensure that all people had a voice in the process.

In 2020 and beyond, each of these terms—equity, diversity and inclusion—must be thoughtfully considered separately and in tandem when designing open space in the public realm. Parks and public spaces borne from inclusive processes that explicitly give value to these ideas result in spaces that are more welcome and more used by a wider cross-section of people; they are more successful in capturing the true spirit “public” space.