An Invitation To Join The Conversation
New tools for engagement bring more voices to the table
By Terry Minarik, Jane Reasoner, and PJ Novick
No two parks are alike—and that’s a good thing. The features that become beloved in one neighborhood might sit unused in another. The way people interact with spaces varies dramatically based on demographics, geography, and cultural factors. That’s why the process of soliciting broad community input during park planning and design is so important.
Photo: sigmund, unsplash
On most projects, there’s a finite window of time to obtain the input needed to inform a relevant design and keep a project on track. Last year presented an even greater challenge by limiting many of the traditional, in-person methods for seeking community input. However, across Confluence’s nine offices nationally, what difficulties landscape architects, planners, and designers encountered while working to shift engagement practices were not obstacles, but opportunities.
By thinking about community participation in new ways, the team was able to identify methods to increase engagement beyond even pre-pandemic levels, bringing new voices to the table and gathering more meaningful data for the design process.
Creating Space For More Voices
In-person sessions are typically the gold standard for engagement. They allow designers to build trust and create connections with residents, drawing out what is most important to the community. These sessions provide opportunities for parks teams and designers to brainstorm alongside residents, allowing them to see the results of their input in real time. Meeting residents where they are can also make it easier for people who may not have reliable technology skills or access to participate in the process.
That said, in-person workshops can also create barriers for some people—parents who don’t have access to childcare, for example, or people whose work schedules conflict with meeting times, or who simply aren’t comfortable raising their hand at a large public meeting. So, providing more than one option for engagement has always been important, if not the main priority.
That all changed in 2020. As engagement shifted online and more people became comfortable using new platforms for interaction in their daily lives, the volume and diversity of people willing to make their voices heard skyrocketed.
In February 2020, Confluence kicked off the master-planning process for L.W. Clapp Park in Wichita, Kan. With in-person meetings taken off the table, the team transitioned to a multi-pronged, online engagement strategy that included Facebook Live townhalls and live presentations, as well as online public-input surveys. Where an in-person workshop may have been attended by a few dozen people, there were more than 3,000 views of the Facebook Live presentation, and the team in Kansas City was able to answer questions from among hundreds of viewers in Wichita in real time via the design presentation. The city also received 981 individual survey responses—an extraordinary figure given what projects of similar size saw pre-pandemic.
Photo: aedrian, unsplash
What’s more encouraging is engagement online continues to draw larger numbers of people, even though in-person events are now back in the mix. There is a real opportunity to reach a much broader cross-section of constituents in the planning process, and online engagement strategies should be given at least equal weight with in-person tactics.
New Tech And Tools
Necessity became the mother of invention as companies were challenged with finding ways to replicate the in-person experience beyond Zoom or Teams. Where once online engagement tools were supplemental, they became essential to completing work. That meant more time and talent went into making them better.
For example, the Merriam Comprehensive Plan 2040 for Merriam, Kan., was in the middle of its visioning and engagement phase when COVID-19 hit. To keep the project on track, the design team sought out a digital-engagement platform, Social Pinpoint. This customized site allowed people to highlight things they liked (or didn’t), rank priorities, draw lines on maps for desired trails, move elements around, place notes on particular areas, and more. There were over 700 visits to the site, and around 150 map comments were submitted.
From this engagement, master-plan concepts for three sub-areas were posted to the website where constituents could provide additional feedback. An in-person meeting in Fall 2021 allowed architects to present the completed draft plan.
In Iowa, the South of Gray’s Lake Master Plan similarly began mid-pandemic. Designers hosted a virtual public workshop to provide information about the project and introduce people to a new interactive engagement website developed for the project. There were an initial 1,419 site visits, and hundreds of people provided input on the engagement site prior to the development of the three master-plan scenarios.
An in-person, public open house with about100 attendees was held in Fall 2021 to present the findings of the existing conditions analysis and public input received from the virtual workshop, website, and virtual stakeholder interviews. Three draft master-plan scenarios were presented to the attendees. These scenarios were then provided on the website for further input from folks who were unable to attend (or who preferred online engagement). The discussions from these two events were used to create a final, more detailed draft master plan for the project. The project is in the final stages now, right on track.
These online tools were often advertised at existing parks or future park sites through signage and QR codes, allowing parkgoers and passersby to use their phones right there and engage. With wider adoption of these new tools, it is anticipated they will only become more user-friendly in the future.
Strategic Local Partnerships
Providing the right platforms for engagement is an important piece of the puzzle. Understanding how to best reach people to invite them to the table is another.
While there’s no substitute for active promotion by city and parks leadership, Confluence has found success reaching out directly to community organizations, particularly those working with historically under-represented communities.
Working on the North and South Service Areas, the Minneapolis Parks & Recreation Board recognized the value of tapping into resources already present in the community. Through the Community Connectors program, the board asked residents not only to submit ideas for securing community input, but also to ask for their help in executing the outreach. Through the program, 11 people were selected from the community and paid a stipend to execute the ideas for outreach. From bike tours to community picnics and local festivals, these members had a direct role in helping Minneapolis Parks & Recreation and designers collect input at over 100 different events and activities during the master-planning process.
In the L.W. Clapp Park process, Confluence engaged local churches and universities. In Bloomington, Minn., outreach included community-housing authorities and ethnic and cultural organizations that serve the city’s large immigrant population. All of these relationships proved especially vital in reaching constituents during the pandemic when the more traditional methods of marketing public-input sessions were less viable. In the case of Bloomington, the design team was able to translate some of these relationships to online participation on the Social Pinpoint site, receiving 9,168 site visits, 711 map comments, and 526 survey responses.
From Minnesota to Iowa, from Kansas to dozens of other communities over the last 18 months, the combination of powerful online-engagement tools with community outreach and in-person events has proved essential in connecting with more people during key projects. Now that in-person capabilities have largely returned, this combination can—and should—remain part of the park planning and design toolbox as the new standard going forward.
Terry Minarik, PLA, ASLA, is a Principal/Shareholder at Confluence. He has an extensive background in urban planning, programming, and public space design, and collaborates with his clients to develop innovative and contextually sensitive design solutions. He has dedicated his career to creating meaningful spaces that challenge the conventional boundaries of landscape architecture.
PJ Novick, PLA, MArch, LEED GA, ASLA, is a Principal/Shareholder at Confluence. With over 34 years of professional experience, PJ has been responsible for the design and project management of a wide variety of parks and recreation, educational, and cultural facilities involving a multi-disciplinary approach to design through collaboration with planners, architects, and engineers.
Jane Reasoner, AICP, is a Planner II at Confluence. She brings an interest in the environment and sustainability to every project. She has worked on many comprehensive plans across the Midwest, designing interactive engagement strategies and providing population, environmental, parks, and economic analyses.