Perspectives Planning

Practical planning for people. My work typically unfolds like this: An invitation for the full diversity of citizens to engage in meaningful ways as part of the interdisciplinary teams of professionals who tend to own the tasks of finding solutions to complex urban challenges. For example, housing is a primary element of community; core infrastructure needed to build a community. Conversations about community-building inform house-building. It's a broad 'coming to terms' with how and where we live, as individuals, families, and groups. As planners, we bring ideas and innovations together about housing from across the globe because we never stop reaching out, researching, learning, and reflecting. We synthesize this information for the city's context and present it with invitations to co-create a relevant concept of home, here. Then we listen. This allows us to address missing information that we don't know as professional planners but that we do know is a gap of knowledge we need in order to synthesize meaningful options to arrive at workable solutions. If we have gotten this far, there is a reasonable likelihood we are working from a privileged place in our community. Now we learn from those who need the housing; those who will be impacted by the housing. The Plan | Do | Check | Act / Adapt cycle works well as a practical approach to building results.