At last night’s PlanningTech workshop, we diagrammed out planning processes to see where the insertion of technology might have been helpful.  The processes we looked at ranged from seemingly simple (getting a bike rack installed on your street) to massively complex (advocating for funding for MTA’s capital plan). Keep an eye out for digitized versions of the diagrams, as well as the opportunity to help expand them.

One idea that stood out, and that solicited some good discussion, was the notion of a “living plan” — a planning document that, rather than being static and falling out-of-date quickly, would evolve as a community’s context, needs, and priorities evolved.  Of course, such a plan would be unthinkable in an analog world, and seems  ridiculously obvious in a wikipedia world.

But that’s not to say it would be easy to implement.  Last night’s group raised a handful of questions, including: “what about dealing with large, complex expensive projects? (e.g., transit expansion)” and “what about blowback from early participants when the plan changes over time?”, and “what about ‘planning fatigue?’”.  All important questions to ask, and I won’t try to answer them here.  But the gist of the idea was that given a set of guiding principles (a constitution, if you will), a “living plan” might allow for more flexible planning and easier decisionmaking down the line.

It was good timing, then, that I came across this post on Streetsblog, covering some potential street design changes around Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.  There’s debate over a DOT proposal to remove eastbound parking on Union Street and add a traffic lane, in order to reduce traffic buildup entering the plaza.  Community advocates are concerned that such a proposal won’t solve the fundamental “traffic vortex” problem, and doesn’t take into account the broader goals of creating a more livable and “world class” public space at GAP.

One section by the Grand Army Plaza coalition’s Robert Witherwax stood out to me:

All the tweaks to the plaza, so far, have been consistent with the planning principles GAPCo and its partners have promoted. The problem, says Witherwax, is the city’s piecemeal approach, which the Union Street proposal has cast into sharp relief. “DOT has been an excellent partner,” he said. “It’s not so much that what they have done, or are proposing, is bad — it’s that they aren’t going far enough.”

Witherwax is calling for a “buildable master plan” — a blueprint that would help guide planning and transportation decisions throughout the plaza area according to consistent goals. “Once you have that structure in place, you can say what happens if you do X, Y, and Z over here,” he said. But to date, he added, DOT has resisted the idea of a comprehensive plan.

Perhaps a “living plan” is somewhere in between the current, incremental planning that DOT is practicing an Witherwax’s notion of a “buildable master plan” — something that nurtures the development of guiding principles and longer-term projects, while still allowing for short-term experiments and responsive design.

This whole discussion makes me wonder how technology, in the form of a living plan or otherwise, might inform the debate here.  I can think of a few ways, to start:

• A website that visualizes competing plans or visions for the future of GAP, where each idea could be discussed, analyzed, and tweaked.
• An online traffic simulator (for all of Brooklyn?!) that lets anyone make tweaks and see the impacts, in a sim-city sort of way.
• A tool that explains, via an interactive diagram, the planning process as it’s currently laid out.  Who the decision makers are, where the input points are, and what the schedule is.
• Anything that generally increase sthe “touchability” of the proposed changes, moving them away from the abstract, wonky world. Perhaps this is something that our friends at the Environmental Simulation Center would be able to help with.
• (insert your idea here)

<shameless-plugs>
If you dig this kind of thing, head over to the PlanningTech google group and come to one of our upcoming meetups.  If you want to help TOPP and others build tools like these in the near future, check out the (as yet vaporware) Cosm project.
</shameless-plugs>

At the recent Technology for Participatory Planning workshop, one of the suggestions for follow-up was to look back at a completed planning process, map it out step-by-step, and find places where inserting technology might have improved things.  Frank from RPA blogged it out here.  Even just the first step, mapping out a planning process, is certainly a useful exercise.  (In fact, Rob Goodspeed and I were recently dreaming of a website that does just that for past and current projects, but that’s a subject for another post).

So, in the spirit of keeping the momentum and discussion going, RPA will be hosting an event next week, where we’ll choose a project (or a series of projects), map out the process as it happened, and then insert opportunities for technology.  Kind of a planning project autopsy.  Here are the details:

When: Wednesday 12/2, 6:30pm.
Where: RPA’s Union Square office, 4 Irving Place (the ConEd building).
Please RSVP: http://bit.ly/5aQw16

If you like this kind of thing and want to join the ongoing conversation, head on over to the #planningtech Google Group.

Hope to see you there!

We were blown away by the great turnout at last Friday’s Tech for Participatory Planning workshop.  Thanks to RPA for hosting with us, and to everyone who came out for a great afternoon of lightning talks, brainstorming, and discussion.  It’s clear that we just scratched the surface here, and we raised way more questions than answers.

The questions we closed with were: what was your “a-ha moment?”  about technology and city planning, and, more importantly, what should we do next to dig deeper into these issues?   Scanning the Blogosphere, Frank from RPA has already written up two concrete ideas: Tech / planner speed dating and Mapping the state of collaborative planning.  Both a are worth a read, and we’ll be posting other ideas here as they surface.

For follow-up, we’ve joined forces with Christian Madera, host of the excellent City Planning, Civic Engagement and the Internet Summit at Princeton last spring, and will be conversing over at the PlanningTech Google Group that came out of that event.  The raw notes from Friday’s workshop have been posted there already.

Looking forward to what’s next…

On their blog today, Mobile Commons explains how AARP used text-to-voice to mobilize senior citizens around health care reform.

It’s not news that mobile (and particularly phone and sms) are the tech tools that connect with the widest audience, but I’m continually impressed by the way that Mobile Commons has built a platform that makes it super-easy to mix modes (text/phone/photo) using custom built workflows.  There’s so much opportunity for civic hacking here it makes my head hurt.

Here at TOPP Labs, we’re thinking about how projects like Community Almanac or FixCity could benefit from richer mobile experiences, and we’re planning to work more mobile into nearly all of our future civic engagement projects.  The Mobile Commons feature of using a text message to prompt a voice reply is particularly interesting to me, and could make for some really interesting public-space survey type apps.

So, what are the best examples you’ve seen of using mobile to leverage civic engagement?  What tools are you using?

Dear friend / planner / city staffer / community organizer / software engineer / entrepreneur / planning geek:

The Open Planning Project and the Regional Plan Association would like to invite you to an upcoming workshop to brainstorm new technology for participatory city planning.

When: Friday, November 13th, 12:30 – 5:30pm  (followed by a happy hour on our roof).

Where: The Open Planning Project, 148 Lafayette St, NY, NY

What: An afternoon of discussion, brainstorming, and collaborative product designing.

RSVP: http://planningtechworkshop.eventbrite.com/ (please RSVP by 11/6, attendance is limited)

Why:

Everyday social computing, mobile technology, and the adoption of web 2.0 approaches by governments have laid the groundwork for far wider citizen involvement in civic life.  Citizens can now be involved earlier on, more frequently, and in more meaningful ways than was ever possible before.  How can these opportunities be leveraged for use in the city planning space? What are the technologies that will make this possible?  What are the bureaucratic, logistical, or social issues that need to be addressed in considering these ideas?  What tools could we build — today — that would be the most impactful?

The Open Planning Project is interested in developing free, open source tools to support citizen engagement in planning.  To that end, we are reaching out to the planning, government, nonprofit, citizen and tech communities to help us explore opportunities and share ideas.  This event should be the first of many, and will be a hands-on workshop aiming to bring together many diverse perspectives.

How:

The workshop will follow the unconference, or BarCamp, format, where sessions and talks are proposed and led by the participants of the workshop.  Please visit the workshop wiki at http://etherpad.com/GfjsHfnoGi to see the agenda, an overview of the format, and a list of proposed talks & sessions.  Please feel free to add your ideas directly to the wiki — we’ll also be reaching out to attendees in advance to prepare some talks & sessions.

Pass it along:

Please pass on this invitation to anyone who might be interested.  Attendance will be capped at 60 people, on a first-come, first-served basis, and we’re hoping for a mix of sectors and perspectives.  Please RSVP by 11/6 at http://planningtechworkshop.eventbrite.com/ We realize this is somewhat short notice, so we hope you are able to make it.

Thanks, and we’re looking forward to seeing you on the 13th!

Photo by Ivan Walsh on Flickr