Community engagement in planning and design

Effective community engagement is essential for shaping spaces that reflect a community's diverse needs. When thoughtfully integrated as a core part of the planning and design process, it is consistently proven to strengthen public trust and yield more successful outcomes.

But where to begin? This article will equip you with all the essentials to get started. In addition to public participation fundamentals, we'll share how and why built environment professionals—such as planners, landscape architects, architects, and engineers—use community engagement to inform their work and create better places for people.

What is community engagement?

Community engagement is the process of involving a community in decision-making, including urban planning decisions. 

Community includes not only key stakeholders but anyone with legitimate interest in the site, city, or region being planned. Community often refers broadly to an area's residents, workers, visitors, and general public–and public engagement also works in these cases. Community can sometimes refer to a portion of the public, like citizens (in citizen engagement), or even project-specific groups, like public transit users or university students. 

Stakeholders or key stakeholders likewise bring different perspectives to the planning process. They are usually select community members, like decision-makers, interest groups, and community leaders. Focused stakeholder engagement often goes hand-in-hand with broader community engagement. 

Engagement, like participation, aims to sufficiently represent a broad range of people and groups in a decision-making process. Consultation also falls under this definition, although mostly in the context of formal, government-led projects. Outreach (i.e. informing and educating) is an important kind of participation, but it certainly doesn't describe all of the different types of community engagement. 

Types of community engagement in planning

Participation cannot be mentioned without acknowledging the influential work of Sherry Arnstein, who first classified eight levels of community engagement in the Ladder of Citizen Participation. Arnstein's ladder highlights the critical difference between "the empty ritual of participation" and "the real power needed to affect the outcome of the process" (Arnstein, 1969). Long story short, engagement must be meaningful.

Of course, Arnstein's work was just the beginning. More recent research has led to updated and field-specific classifications that guide professionals toward meaningful community engagement in their respective realms. One such classification emerged from the dissertation research of Maarit Kahila, Ph.D and co-founder of Maptionnaire. The Three Types of Community Engagement in Urban Planning describe the kinds of partnership, collaboration, and communication between planners, officials, and community members.

In informative community engagement, planners keep the community informed of upcoming changes, procedures, and decisions related to planning. This type of community engagement isn't asking for feedback or seeking active participation. Nevertheless, it is a core element of engagement that gives the public a solid understanding of development projects. 

In preparatory community engagement, participants contribute ideas and feedback regarding development projects. This type of community engagement often happens early when planners prepare plans and designs (e.g., engaging via community mapping) or later when weighing alternatives. The community members aren't decision-makers, but they collaborate and contribute to the planning process. 

In decision-making community engagement, participants hold power to make decisions about their community, its future, and its use of resources. This type of community engagement is rare in urban planning and design because elected officials usually make final decisions. However, one way to nurture community decision-making is with participatory budgeting, where participants can propose and vote for projects.

 A project that balances all three types of community engagement will yield the best results, as each offers unique benefits. Discover how you can leverage each type of engagement in the full article, Three Types of Community Engagement in Urban Planning Projects.

Why is community engagement important?

In a world of accelerated urbanization and globalization, urban planning is an increasingly complex challenge. Mitigating climate change, providing affordable housing, expanding public transportation services, and nurturing social sustainability are among the countless interrelated issues that need careful attention in the planning process. 

Today's urban planners must invest considerably into communication and collaboration with communities to strike a balance among competing interests and values. To employ problem-solving that serves the needs of communities, it is essential to utilize local insights and offer context-specific solutions that reflect local identities. This has brought community engagement into the core of decision-making, and particularly in the domain of urban planning.

Meaningful public engagement offers many practical benefits to planning and design, including a smoother process and better planning results. Research from the American Planning Association also underscores the importance of community engagement, finding that the best neighborhood plans come from informed residents collaborating with local authorities in a process designed and facilitated by neighborhood planners (APA Policy Guide on Neighborhood Collaborative Planning). Let's look more closely at the benefits of community engagement:

• Early engagement helps align goals between community members and planners. It can even reveal unexpected goals and inspiring direction from the community. Either way, the result is a plan that truly supports local values.
• Asking the right questions can yield valuable data from community members about what they want, plus where and why they want it. Good data will also open up insights for different demographics or neighborhoods. Relevant, detailed data is integral to functional and equitable plans.
• Actively engaging and communicating throughout the process increases buy-in for the whole plan. When communities and decision-makers are genuinely involved in a project from the beginning, there is much less room for surprise at the end.
• A transparent and secure engagement process builds trust with community members. People are more empowered to participate when they see their feedback put to its intended use: informing better plans and more lovable places.

Principles of community engagement

A thoughtfully planned community engagement process is important for successful planning outcomes. Without a clear set of principles, engagement efforts can fall short, leading to information gaps, limited participation, and missed opportunities for meaningful collaboration. As you start to plan out your process, methods, and tools for participation, let these principles serve as a foundation for impactful projects:

• Collect valuable data and align planning goals through an inclusive and user-centric approach. Inclusiveness is emphasized to avoid reinforcing existing participatory biases. This involves proactively reaching out to all demographics, particularly those less likely to engage through self-selection methods​. All participants should be able to share their perspectives in an accessible and respectful environment.
• Earn trust with secure and well-kept records. Good records of public engagement results help planners show their robust, accountable process. However, that data must be handled carefully to respect the privacy of participants. Personally identifiable information must be stored securely and only collected when truly needed.
• Boost project buy-in by showing the impact of community engagement. Do this by systematically measuring and communicating participation. For example, you can share metrics on the diversity of participants or show how the community's most-favored ideas were integrated into a plan.
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Discover how these principles address the risks and opportunities of today's digital society in our full article: The Three Principles of Public Participation.

Making a Community Engagement Plan

Despite broad support for public engagement, it is often reduced to a few small meetings or a single post on a website. Very few benefits are realized this way—in fact, more challenges may even arise. However, planners and public officials who choose a more robust approach can increase the impact of public participation. Start early and plan the most appropriate community engagement strategy for each stage of planning.

Preparation stage

In the early stages of the planning process, community members are often merely informed about the upcoming changes and not asked for any input. This is a missed opportunity. Use this initial stage to collect data about participants' experiences with the existing environment and their needs for change. Think about the kind of data and input you need and how you will use it in the drafting stage, then ask participants, for example, to mark a map with unsafe areas, recreational routes, or locations of future facilities—the options are endless.‍

Tools & methods may include: 

• PPGIS tools (Public Participation Geographic Information Systems)
• Map-based surveys
• Community workshops
• Hackathon
• Social media 
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Proposal stage 

Once proposals have been prepared, participants need to get acquainted with them—that is, to meaningfully understand the proposed changes, how they affect the existing environment, and how new facilities will affect their everyday lives. Publishing a bulky PDF with drafts and maps won’t do the job. Planning documents are notorious for being incomprehensible to the general public. To get the most out of the proposal stage, engage participants with maps and visual materials onto which they can directly leave comments, vote for their favorite options, and rank different alternatives. 

Tools & methods may include: 

• PPGIS tools
• Information sessions 
• Discussions on community engagement platforms 
• Voting and engagement surveys 
• Visualized development scenarios 
• In-person public consultation sessions
   

Approval stage

When the final proposal is ready, it is time for the final decision-making process. In public projects, this usually involves a public hearing—a lengthy bureaucratic process that can invite a lot of complaints and create mountains of extra work for the planners. However, when preceded by engagement during preparation and proposal, this process doesn't bring an avalanche of negative comments. Participants are familiar with the process and have already had several chances to influence the planning outcome. 

Tools & methods may include: 

• Online community engagement tools 
• Map-based surveys 
• Automized public hearing process
• Phone and email comments submission
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There is no one-size-fits-all solution for making a Community Engagement Plan, but try our downloadable Guide to Citizen Engagement in a Master Planning Process as a starting point and choose the community engagement strategies that best fit your upcoming projects.

Community engagement platforms

A community engagement platform is a software that comprehensively supports the participation and planning process. It helps planners collect local insights, communicate project flow, and develop evidence-based plans. It's not exactly a tool but a set of tools that vary between platforms. For example, Maptionnaire provides tools for co-design, collaboration, feedback collection, building interactive project pages, and analyzing data. It also has map-based features to help professionals interact with communities using maps, floorplans, and site illustrations.

For many organizations, the right community engagement software can enable higher-quality and more efficient public participation—but there's no one-size-fits-all solution. When considering engagement platforms, first clarify your budget, technical capacity, and other engagement needs. Then, consider the pros and cons of in-house, open-source, and subscription-based (SaaS) solutions: 

• In-house solutions offer complete customization but require significant development resources and can be costly to maintain. 
• ‍Open-source software provides flexibility and control but demands technical expertise for setup and upkeep. ‍
• SaaS platforms may be less customizable and involve ongoing fees, but they are easier to use and supported by vendors. 
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Ultimately, an effective platform for community engagement should be user-friendly, accessible across devices, and offer multi-channel engagement to reach diverse audiences. Its features should include tools for collecting and communicating ideas, as well as space for meaningful dialogue. Data privacy and security compliance are crucial to protect participants' information, along with robust reporting and analytics to measure engagement outcomes. Reliable support, either through vendors or internal teams, ensures smooth operation and long-term sustainability.

Learn the most important considerations before choosing a community engagement software for your organization: What is a Community Engagement Platform and How to Choose One

Community engagement examples

Still need a little inspiration to get started? Below are some community engagement ideas that showcase a variety of planning, engineering, and design projects, each with its own engagement strategies.

• Understanding university students' perspective on campus places - A diverse mix of stakeholder meetings, workshops, town halls, charrettes, and digital map-based questionnaires.
• Identifying city planning challenges and opportunities with stakeholders - Traditional stakeholder workshops enhanced with digital community mapping tools.
• Discovering how rural communities perceive their neighborhood boundaries - In-person workshops in larger towns and a digital map-based questionnaire to cover the whole county.
• Co-designing parks with community members - Pop-up booths at community events with a creative park designing game and a matching online version of the game. 
• Pinpointing a community's barriers to active mobility - A traditional questionnaire and a public consultation meeting, leading to a more in-depth digital map-based questionnaire
• ‍Collecting current and desired origin-destination data in a transit network - A fully-digital questionnaire with map-based questions, plus an extensive marketing and public outreach campaign.
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Discover more community engagement resources

• Three Types of Community Engagement  
• Three Principles of Public Participation  
• Guide to Citizen Engagement in a Master Planning Process  
• ‍What is a Community Engagement Platform and How to Choose One

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