The Origins of Community Engagement and its Role in Urban Planning

Several years ago, the small, but vibrant, Texas Hill Country town of Wimberley was embroiled in a planning dispute about the management of their downtown green space, the Cypress Creek Nature Preserve. Adjacent land owners, allied with the Mayor, wanted the preserve to be gated from public use, citing environmental impacts. However, the vast majority of the public, most members of the City Council, and the local land trust wanted the preserve to remain publicly accessible. The land trust hired my consultancy to collaborate with the adjacent land owners, the public, and the City to craft a master plan for the preserve that would alleviate the concerns of the local landowners – while demonstrating to the City that public access is vital to the character of downtown. What was discovered during the community engagement process is that both sides wanted more or less the same outcome: that Cypress Creek is protected from overuse and pollution. Once the two sides were together in the same room, it became clear that the public stakeholders were more than willing to sponsor the necessary improvements to the preserve to mediate the impacts of public access. Equally, it became clear to the adjacent landowners how important access to the preserve was to the very identity of downtown Wimberley. Even more telling, a novel solution emerged as a result of the public engagement process that neither party had considered. The engagement process revealed that many residents were using the park as a cut-through to access downtown because the road leading from their homes lacked sidewalks. We determined that sidewalks on a major road downtown could significantly reduce impacts on the preserve. This created a win-win situation for both parties, and the City Council adopted the plan, ending the dispute. While the details of this anecdote are specific to the Town of Wimberley, the process and outcome of the community engagement are typical of successful engagement strategies – the stakeholders were involved using a variety of engagement methods, and the final plan provided benefits for all parties. Through collaboration and transparency – despite some awkward and tense moments – the public, surrounding landowners, and the City came to a mutually beneficial solution that neither party would have been able to identify on their own.

What is Community Engagement?

So what is Community Engagement, and why do we do it, exactly? At the broadest level, one might define Community Engagement as a strategic process of working with groups of stakeholders to determine what their needs and interests are, and how those needs and interests can be met within the scope of a particular project. In the American urban planning context, "Community Engagement" developed as a reaction to major urban renewal projects spearheaded by government agencies that reshaped American cities with little to no input from the "renewed" communities. Public opposition to projects such as the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have used eminent domain to demolish Washington Square Park and much of Greenwich Village in New York City, sparked a wave of grassroots community organizing that demanded greater citizen control over the planning process. In 1969, the canonical model of Community Engagement was developed by Sherry Arnstein, a public policy leader and part of the Johnson Administration, known as Arnstein's Ladder.

Arnstein's Ladder posits that Community Engagement can be classified by its value according to the amount of influence it affords citizens using the "ladder" model as shown below:Under Arnstein's model, the clear implication is that a process that citizens have power over is the highest value. At the bottom of the ladder, citizens are actively misled or left out of a process entirely. As you move up the ladder, engagement gives lip service to citizens' concerns but does not give them any power over the project outcome. At the top of the ladder, citizens are directly involved in decision-making, with full citizen control occupying the highest rung. While the ladder continues to be a useful shorthand for effective community engagement, it has been criticized for oversimplifying the engagement process as a simple us vs. them scenario. In practice, engagement often involves several competing citizen groups, all of which have different leverage points and agendas. Simply lumping all citizens together into a single interest group, ignores the fact that not all citizens have the same goals and influence over the planning process. For instance, in Wimberley, the citizens included both the neighboring land owners, the public at large, and the land trust, all of whom had varying goals and influence over the outcome.

Are there different types of community engagement?

Generally speaking, Community Engagement practice can be categorized into either Formal Engagement or Informal Engagement. In the United States, most jurisdictions require some level of Formal Engagement that is mandated by City, State, or Federal law, depending on the context and scope of a proposed project. Types of Formal Engagement include required public notifications, comment periods, public information meetings, and official hearings. There is a good chance you've received a mail notification from your city's planning department alerting you to a nearby development project that might impact your property, which is a type of formal engagement.

Informal Engagement, on the other hand, includes a wide variety of engagement practices that may or may not be required by a jurisdiction, and are meant to more comprehensively assess stakeholders' needs and interests. The facilitators will then use that assessment to inform the outcome of a project. Informal Engagement can take place in a variety of settings, such as drop-in exhibitions, focus groups, online surveys, public forums, and charette workshops. In these settings, facilitators may employ several different engagement methods, such as visioning exercises, scenario building, SWOT (Strength, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threat) analysis, etc. This type of engagement is commonly undertaken for major long-range planning projects, such as a city's comprehensive plan, or a large-scale development, such as a new waterfront entertainment district. As important to the engagement process as the events themselves is the reporting of the results of those events to both the public and the decision-making body. When crafted responsibly, the results should reflect the positions of a representative sample of the stakeholder groups and should impact the outcome of a project in a meaningful way.

What does effective community engagement look like?

However, in recent years, planners are increasingly coming to terms with the fact that the recommendations from traditional community engagement often produce results that reflect the positions of stakeholder groups who have disproportionate amounts of time, money, and understanding of the planning process. In response to this issue, engagement practitioners have developed outreach methods that specifically target under-represented groups. These methods include coupling traditional engagement opportunities with public events, such as a block party, that provides food and family-friendly entertainment to entice people who would typically be too busy or uninterested to attend a traditional public meeting. Another method is hiring paid ambassadors from the community that is being targeted for engagement. Paying the ambassadors ensures a certain level of commitment and attracts otherwise unlikely participants such as young, low-income, and minority individuals. Whether a planning process is part of a municipality, community organization, or private developer, Community Engagement is a key element that should not be ignored or simply given lip service. Instead of following the tempting route of "Decide-Announce-Defend", as some engagement practitioners have called it, by following the wise route of "Engage-Deliberate-Decide", organizations can avoid major conflict, political controversy, and possible failure by bringing a wide stakeholder group into the fold and meaningfully addressing their concerns. Doing so is not only an ethical choice but often leads to community buy-in that will ensure the long-term success of a project.