Community Visioning for Place Making

A Guide to Visual Preference Surveys for Successful Urban Evolution

Anton Nelessen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000380606
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Stadtplanung & Landschaftsgestaltung

Community Visioning for Place Making is a groundbreaking guide to engaging with communities in order to design better public spaces. It provides a toolkit to encourage and assist organizations, municipalities, and neighborhoods in organizing visually based community participation workshops, used to evaluate their existing community and translate images into plans that embody their ideal characteristics of places and spaces. The book is based on results generated from hundreds of public participation visioning sessions in a broad range of cities and regions, portraying images of what people liked and disliked. These community visioning sessions have been instrumental in generating policies, physical plans, recommendations, and codes for adoption and implementation in a range of urban, suburban, and rural spaces, and the book serves as a bottom-up tool for designers and public officials to make decisions that make their communities more appealing. The book will appeal to community and neighborhood organizations, professional planners, social and psychological professionals, policy analysts, architects, urban designers, engineers, and municipal officials seeking an alternative vision for their future.

1

Introduction to Community Visioning

Using Visual Preferences and Vision Translation Workshops for Place Making

One of the early books I read as an architectural student was Autobiography of an Idea by Louis Sullivan. I read it again later on in my career as I worked on the early phases of Community Visioning. Sullivan’s description of vision is compelling. He wrote,

Now think of the power we call vision; that inner sight which encompasses the larger meaning of its outer world, which sees humanity in the broad, which beholds the powers, which unifies its inner and outer world, which sees far beyond where the eye leaves off seeing, and as sympathetic insight finds its goal in the real.

That last phrase, “as sympathetic insight finds its goal in the real,” is why consensus vision translated into the actual building of places and spaces is both powerful and necessary.

Using the gift of sight and emotions to guide the future of urban evolution is powerful. Tapping into expectations, experiences and memory is crucial to guide the future of positive urban evolution. Everyone has hopes for the future. Giving form to those hopes is the challenge and great opportunity that community vision provides.

The vast majority of people have similar positive or negative responses to the same places and spaces. A key to a positive physical future is determining those places and spaces that resonate positively in most peoples’ minds and then translating these into plans and codes that are built.

Early in my professional years as a consultant to local planning boards, it became apparent that too many people on the board, as well as the general public, attorneys, and many planners, simply could not envision a place from a two-dimensional site plan. Nor could they say with certainty what they liked or disliked about the proposed development. When the public and members of the boards couldn’t see the proposed three and four dimensional form from a two dimensional plan and elevations, the reaction was typically negative. These experiences have led me to the belief that the mind’s eye of most human brains is unable to imagine being in a new place, or moving around or through a building, space, or place, when this is presented in two dimensions alone. More was needed for them to make a rational decision. Most decisions defaulted to attorneys and the existing zoning regulations, mostly written by attorneys with no visual training. Three-dimensional models were not required or affordable for site plans or subdivision approvals. Sophisticated computer modeling and three-dimensional printing had not yet been invented. However, board members and the public could and did respond to renderings and photographs. Was this the key to planning and constructing buildings and spaces that will improve the quality of life along with the health and welfare of communities.

Images are the more important component of any Community Visioning process. Images used in Visual Preference Surveys (VPS) are best captured by three- and four-dimensional representations of spaces and places using still and video cameras. Additional information and techniques will be presented later in this book.

Images generate emotions, stir imagination, trigger intuition, and inspire people to want a positive form and character of place, or to see positive change when a place or space is perceived as negative. When images are evaluated and stored in your memory, they create a powerful gestalt. When many people envision the possibility of a place transformed from negative to positive, change becomes possible.

As an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD) and later as Director of the Multi-media Lab at Imageworks School of Photography and Media Arts, I researched and then developed a variety of photographic and projection techniques, along with response forms that tested the public reaction to a variety of rural and urban spaces and places. It was apparent from early beta tests, using projected slides and movie/video imagery, that people could more easily orient themselves and evaluate places and spaces. The positive results of these experimental techniques led to the development of the more simplified VPS.

The images in a typical VPS use many images of an existing location. These are supplemented by images of places and spaces that have been built in communities of similar size, character, and geographic location. In addition, there are renderings or computer simulations of places containing visual characteristics revealed during focus groups. The emotional response to these images answers the question:

How appropriate or inappropriate are these spaces and places now and in the future for this community?

A numerical scale response ranging from −10 to +10 is used. The minus numbers, from −1 to −10, measure the intensity of negative emotional response and inappropriateness of an image. The plus numbers, from +1 to +10, indicate a positive emotional response and appropriateness. The center “0” referred to no positive or negative response, or indicated that people were not emotionally moved either way.

Response Form (Blue Sheet)

The response form is divided into 21 possible responses. In this case, the image above the form was given a −2 response value.

One item on the questionnaire handed out at all visioning sessions asked, “When you gave an image in the VPS a negative response rating which of the following describes the emotion you were experiencing?” The other asked, “When you gave the image a positive response rating which of the following describes the emotion you were experiencing?”

From a summary of hundreds of questionnaires, the responses to the negative question had the following responses:

Depressed	46%
Hopeless	10%
Threatened	7%
Anxious	4%
Fear	4%
Rage	3%
All the above	26%

Additional responses can be found in Appendix III – Book of Public Comments

The responses to the positive question were as follows:

Hopeful	25%
Joy	16%
Happiness	19%
Safe	9%
Pride	6%
All of the above	25%

“Depressed” and “Hopeful” seem to be the two strongest emotions, with many participants responding to “all of the above.” To further understand these responses, focused discussions with participants, social workers, psychiatrists, and religious leaders were conducted over many years in an attempt to understand why certain images generated these reactions. As you page through this book the response values, whether collectively positive or negative, are notated above the images alongside a brief description of their negative or positive qualities, some including recommendations. Most negative responses generate a feeling of depression and hopelessness in contrast to the hopefulness, happiness, and joy felt when experiencing positive visions of places and spaces. As visual response testing has evolved, results have indicated that many of the places and spaces people rated as positive reflected the physical design and land use elements expressed in the natural and rural landscapes, and traditional historic cities. For example, buildings from the City Beautiful Movement, Jane Jacobs’s type streets, and early examples of Neo-traditionalism rated very positive. The visual and spatial characteristic inherent in the positive images are what people want now and in the future. Unfortunately, what they wanted was not what they could expect in development. In many cities, zoning regulations would not allow these places and spaces to be built without variances.

Most features of urban deterioration, functionalists’ buildings, and commercial and residential sprawl generate negative responses. The ubiquitous exurban sprawl model was planned to accommodate the single-family home, strip commercial development, and an auto dependent lifestyle which became the norm after World War II. Once they were codified in the 1950s’ comprehensive master plans and zoning, exurban sprawl was subsidized, built, and heavily marketed. With millions of units being built in the late 1940s and 1950s, it is difficult, if not impossible, to reverse this trend, and it continues to this day. Most buyers have limited choices. Units were cheap to bu...