The Role Urban Planners Have in Fostering Community Initiatives
By Beth Rush
Cities are so much more than skyscrapers and sidewalks. They’re the heart of a region, so they’re also full of intricate planning that makes daily life possible. New urbanism fosters community engagement if civic strategists make strategic decisions. Read about how their choices pull communities together, even in the biggest cities.
What Are Urban Planners?
Urban planners are experts who design comprehensive programs and plans to benefit a city’s residents. They create both small- and large-scale projects for undeveloped land and currently active city areas. Their professional research and collaboration with local organizations, developers and public officials makes urban efforts possible in less-populated and metropolitan regions.
How Does New Urbanism Foster Community Engagement?
New urbanism is an urban planning design concept backed by the Congress for the New Urbanism. The organization’s charter explains that its urban planning efforts equally prioritize city architecture from the past few hundred years with human-centric design.
Walkable cities, community centers and public transit are just a few examples of what new urbanism projects focus on. It’s how new urbanism fosters community engagement. If there are more publicly available services within walking distance of where residents live, people can come together more easily to support each other and enjoy life more.
Ways Urban Planners Can Bring Communities Together
Urban planners can bring communities together with strategies like these. They utilize existing spaces and introduce new projects that give residents reasons to form deeper relationships with each other.
1. Create More Community Spaces
Urbanism fosters community engagement by directly creating extra spaces for people to gather. Residents could gain new public parks and buildings designated specifically for community events, but new construction isn’t the only option for urban planners.
Projects could also reform existing spaces for improved community engagement. Adjusting zoning rules would allow a city’s current layout to open for public events without relying on construction that takes months or years.
Downtown festivals and new walking trails in existing parks would foster more opportunities for things like walking, which decreases the risk of dementia for people in retirement. The specific urban planning projects would tailor the fine details to the community’s needs, like prioritizing walking opportunities in areas higher in retiree residents.
2. Restructure Zoning Laws
People encounter zoning laws when buying properties. The laws determine which types of properties are allowed within specific parts of a city, like designated shopping centers or residential neighborhoods.
Urban planners can reevaluate zoning laws and restructure them to foster community initiatives. They could better mix dense commercial and residential areas to create resources within walking distance of where residents live. Parks and plazas would make communities better places to live if more people could access them without requiring transportation.
3. Mix Market-Rate and Subsidized Housing
New urbanism fosters community engagement by bringing people together in residential regions. Instead of separating market-rate and subsidized housing across a city, urban planners might mix the two with zoning law updates. It would encourage more people to meet and thrive together. They might overcome social stigmas that prevent communities from engaging, like the distance between those two types of housing that are typically part of traditional city layouts.
Some people might think this move would hurt residential property prices based on the long-held stigma that low-income, subsidized housing devalues the homes around it. A recent study found that houses closest to low-income communities saw a statistically insignificant property value decrease when subsidized properties opened next to them.
If more regions brought people together with this kind of housing zoning restructuring, community initiatives could better address everyone’s needs closer to where they live. It would also give the residents a louder voice because they’d get to know each other and address their needs through urban planning project feedback.
4. Organize Efforts to Revitalize Sidewalks
Many urban projects focus on building shared spaces within walking distance of residential zones, but people can’t utilize those spaces if they can’t reach them on foot. Urban planners could better foster their initiatives by repaving or installing sidewalks throughout their community.
If residents can walk or bike without risking their safety on busy roads, they may get more active in their community. It would also make shared spaces more accessible to people using mobility aids or pushing strollers.
5. Encourage Community Feedback for Projects
Involving residents in upcoming projects is the best way to make the proposals better for each community’s specific needs. Unfortunately, many people don’t realize their feedback is crucial to the process. Urban planning teams could unite communities by reserving part of their time for public outreach.
Efforts like local commercials and social media campaigns could be the most effective ways to let people know how to learn about proposed projects and provide their feedback. Researchers found that projects with greater public input included more ideas from minority groups that didn’t have representation on those planning teams.
It’s a crucial opportunity for people to vocalize their specific needs and adjust upcoming projects to be more fair to all residents. This step in fostering initiatives can only happen if people know how to contact their local planning team and read about their proposals.
Foster More Community Engagement
New urbanism does foster community engagement when done thoughtfully. These steps are just a few ways urban planners bring people together to make their cities better places to live. When more residents learn how these proposals work and how to give feedback, you’ll see your city flourishing with public opportunities available and accessible to all residents.
About the author: Beth Rush is the green wellness editor at Body+Mind, where she covers topics like the power of climate consciousness at all stages of education. You can find Beth on Twitter @bodymindmag. Subscribe to Body+Mind for more posts by Beth!