Here’s someone who speaks my language!

In Creativity Will Change the Model, Bill Roper calls for new ways to engage people in re-imaging their communities, specifically to engage creative practices in how community planning gets done!

Just as quickly as we have young people – and people of all ages – paint images or make collages representing their vision (and I’ve done it many times), we also need Facebook, and other social media tools to spark discussions and the exchange of images representing spaces and activities that are important to people. These tools can get more people to engage in face-to-face community engagement, and enrich it, not replace it.

Until we have more experience with these tools, we won’t fully know all they can do for us, but we need to experiment.

I’m presently leading a major cultural corridor planning project in Minneapolis where one of the deliverables expected by the city is a pedestrian study. While they may balk at something other than a report from the same pedestrian consultant they’ve hired 20 times before, we’re crowdsourcing the study using Facebook.

Employees of some of the 59 arts, cultural, and educational organizations on this two-mile urban corridor are walking after work, on their lunch hours, and on their way to the bus, commenting on their experiences and posting photos. We also ask them for pictures and comments on experiences in other cities where they’ve found great pedestrian spaces and walking conditions.

We’re in the midst of this experiment and excited by the prospects – but if we have to fall back on the same-ole pedestrian consultant if it doesn’t work out, we haven’t spent much money and we’ve gotten a whole lot of people out walking together and paying attention to street design in ways they never did before!