Urban Design: Civic Dinners

Local governments are always seeking to engage the public in the city-planning process to better address community needs and establish a deeper sense of public ownership. Many cities, however, find themselves struggling to develop effective civic engagement strategies that attract a diverse audience to public meetings.

This week, our Project Manager Josh introduced us to Civic Dinners, and explained how this organization is helping city and regional governments bring community members together to engage in valuable community conversations.  

Written by Josh Janet, Project Manager | PE:

City and regional planners often struggle with attendance at public meetings. Anecdotally, Seattle seems to achieve better numbers than other cities I’ve lived in, but it still struggles with reaching a diverse clientele. These meetings attract predominantly retired homeowners, whose voices deserve to be heard but only represent a fraction of the population.

“Civic engagement isn’t rocket science, but it does require thoughtful design and careful implementation.” This opening statement appears in a guide produced by Civic Dinners, a company that serves to build civic-minded conversations in communities over home cooked meals. Based in Atlanta, Georgia, Civic Dinners aims to supplement traditional public meetings and online feedback portals by providing a platform for communities to organize smaller get-togethers that are more likely to be attended, allow for deeper and more diverse conversations to take place, and collect feedback on whatever subject or plan the community is looking for input on.

Civic Dinners strive to bring people together over food to discuss important issues.   |   Image via Civc Dinners.

The way it works is that Civic Dinners works with an organization to prepare a toolkit for marketing, hosting, and engaging the public. These toolkits include:

• Branding, naming, and conversation framing for public outreach;
• Conversation and facilitation design work for 4-10 stakeholders;
• Final question designs; and
• One page overviews and invitations.

Next, Civic Dinners and the contracting organization engage the community to find hosts for these events. Hosts are provided training resources, technical support, and the prepared toolkits for each event. The hosts prepare the dinners, and the only real guideline is that guests be provided equal time to share their opinions, one voice at a time. Finally, the feedback is collected from the host (or through social media) at the end of the dinner and evaluated by Civic Dinner staff to identify key takeaways and common threads from the conversations.

Civic Dinners has tested its platform through a number of successful projects, including:

• ARC Millennial Advisory Panel: The Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) used Civic Dinners to engage 300 participants across 35 dinners over 9 weeks for input on their proposed Regions Plan. Civic Dinners identified eight key themes from the dinners and used those to help organize eight Action Teams for preparing formal recommendations to regional leaders. All eight teams “had two months to formulate a point of view on their topic, co-write an op-ed, interview stakeholders, and prepare recommendations” to ARC. Two teams have since formed non-profits.
   
• The Gr8 Exchange on Transportation: Over a one week period in Gwinnett County, Georgia, more than 4,000 surveys were completed and just under 40,000 individual responses collected for a public input initiative on transportation. Eighty-three (83) events were held; not all were dinners, but many still included small gatherings to engage citizens and community leaders.
   
• #ourATLriver: Imagining the future: A single dinner with 100 guests among 10 tables was organized for the non-profit Chattahoochee Now to discuss the future of the Chattahoochee River and the 53 mile stretch that runs through the Atlanta Region. The top ideas collected from each table were shared with the group, along with individual ideas from guests that were collected and implemented into a Chattahoochee River master plan.

#ourATLriver provides the public an opportunity to discuss the future development of the Chattahoochee corridor.   |   Image via Civic Dinners

This type of event obviously requires more planning than renting a space in a community center, preparing a PowerPoint presentation, and providing a box of coffee and some store-bought cookies. It has decidedly greater potential to reach more people and collect better feedback, though. Civic Dinners is currently seeking six cities beyond Atlanta to pilot a “Year of Dialogue” program to launch a dozen “essential conversations facing the future of cities.” The only real question I have now is: how can this be introduced into Seattle?

Urban Design: The Future of Integrated Transportations

To accommodate high population growth and control traffic congestion in Seattle, the city is seeking solutions that will provide better mobility and integrated transportation choices for the public. Establishing a network of shared mobility hubs in partnership with transit agencies and private mobility services is one of the potential solutions that the city is currently looking into. This week, our Project Manager Josh discussed the potentials of implementing shared mobility hubs and autonomic vehicles in Seattle, and shared his thoughts on how these integrated transportation choices might transform travel experience in the future.

Written by Josh Janet, Project Manager | PE:

The passage of the Sound Transit 3 (“ST3”) package last September by a majority of King, Pierce, and Snohomish County voters will substantially expand light rail, bus, and other public transit systems to provide better connections throughout the region. Although the staff at Urbal have been generally supportive of the package, we joke from time to time about the timeline associated with these new connections. My coworker Kendra and her husband Tyler celebrated the birth of their first child, Arlo Oester, at the end of 2016; he will be at least 13 years old by the time the light rail extension opens near his home in West Seattle (assuming this schedule is accurate).

I thought about ST3 during a few panels at the 25th annual convention for the Congress for New Urbanism (CNU) this past week. CNU is a non-profit organization of architects, urban planners, engineers, developers, and others interested in improving the quality of the built environment “to build vibrant communities where people have diverse choices for how they live, work, and get around”. These panels discussed mobility and how technology can address the first and last mile problem (i.e. the problem of how users get to and from bus and light rail stations when they are not located near them in the first place).

Shared Mobility Hubs

An example of a shared mobility hub.   |  Image by Sophia Von Berg via Shared-use Mobility.

Shared mobility hubs (“Hubs”), or integrated mobility hubs, are central locations in neighborhoods that provide a variety of transportation options and services. These Hubs are intended to encourage a greater reliance on alternative transportation options beyond car ownership, and may include features like the following:

• Access to bike lanes and bike infrastructure;
• Bike-share, bike storage, and bike repair services;
• Changing rooms;
• Electric vehicle charging stations;
• Ride-share parking (like Car2Go and Zipcar);
• Drop-off and pick-up areas; and
• Bus stops.

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) is currently planning a network of these hubs around the city, and has even hired a team of dedicated staff members to lead the efforts. The criteria they are using for the development of these hubs include:

• Hubs to be built around or near transit stops;
• Street space will be dedicated only if necessary;
• Hubs need to be located near users;
• Hubs need to incorporate quality wayfinding, lighting, and cohesive branding to integrate them; and
• Fare integration needs to be incorporated where possible.

It’s anyone’s guess as to whether these will actually be implemented or planned to death, but I’m curious to see where SDOT is thinking of locating these. I’m on the fence as to how often these will be used and if they’ll make any dent in changing the paradigm for vehicle ownership at all.

Autonomous Vehicles

 Seattle will be the first place to test BMW ReachNow's autonomous cars.   |   Image by BMW via The Drive

Autonomic Vehicles (“AVs”) are the elephant in the room when it comes to the future of transportation in America. Everyone seems to expect these to be on the market “soon,” but it remains to be seen in what form and under what kind of operations and regulations they will be allowed on the road.

The biggest question in my mind, beyond how AVs will share the road with normally-operated vehicles, is whether or not AVs will be allowed for purchase by private citizens. Personal AV ownership has the potential for two huge impacts to our environment. The first is that, under normal circumstances, an individual will drive to work and drive home, resulting in two (2) trips generated on any given day. With personal AV ownership, does that car get parked in a parking lot or garage during the work day or does the owner send the car home? Many planners and techies seem to be expecting that AVs will reduce the need for parking in urban centers, but this scenario would effectively double the amount of trips being taken per day and worsening congestion.

The second impact is that personal AV ownership may place pressure on increasing sprawl away from urban centers. There are generally limits to how long people are willing or interested in sitting in traffic, but if you no longer have to focus on driving in that space and can instead read a book, watch a movie, or even operate an easy bake oven, then the time it takes to get to work may be less of an impact on where people choose to live relative to their employment.

The only scenario I’m somewhat comfortable with right now is the use of AVs for ride-sharing services, but even that begs the question- where do those cars go between use? Do they just drive around the block aimlessly until they’ve been re-directed by an app service? Are they re-directed to the nearest shared mobility hub?

ST3 makes sense under today’s challenges with population growth throughout the region, but AVs have the potential to re-write the book on transportation, and I’m wary that it will be for the better.

Urban Design: Tent Cities

Work in progress of a tent encampment at south Seattle.   |   Photo by Josh Janet

Every year, King County organizes a “One Night Count” of both the unsheltered homeless population throughout the county and those individuals staying in shelters or transitional housing. As of the January 2016 count, nearly 3,000 people were living on the streets in Seattle—a worsening crisis that the city has been trying to address for decades. Following the city’s authorization of homeless encampments in 2015, Seattle Mayor Ed Murray and King County Executive Dow Constantine declared a state of emergency to tackle its rising homelessness. This week, our Project Manager Josh discussed the use of encampments in Seattle, and shared his experience of volunteering with the set-up of encampments around the city.

Written by Josh Janet, Project Manager | PE:

Homelessness is a topic that can evoke wildly varying but passionate responses, especially when discussing how to address it. In 2015, the city of Seattle hired a consultant to provide her suggestions on how the city should respond to the growing crisis, and the report that was produced called for re-allocation of funding from transitional housing to rapid re-housing. The consultant had very choice words for homeless encampments in particular: “Encampments are a real distraction from investing in solutions. You can see it takes a lot of energy to get them running and they don’t solve the problem. You still have people who are visibly homeless, living outdoors.”

Although rapid re-housing may work for some, many local homeless housing advocates challenged that it has not shown to work for more vulnerable members of the community. Neither the report nor the consultant’s comments address that fact that if housing isn’t available today, individuals and families that are homeless don’t really have any other options.

Seattle is one of the few cities in the country that has attempted to regulate the use of encampments around the city. The Seattle Municipal Code allows encampments to be accessory uses on property owned by religious organizations and interim uses (up to three months) on other property that meet certain restrictions (such as a 25-foot buffer from residential properties). The maximum allowed number of residents is set at 100 and the site must meet a number of safety standards, including the placement of fire extinguishers and 100-person first-aid kits, designated smoking areas, power protection devices and associated safety posts. Encampments are also required to provide and maintain chemical toilets, running water (either indoors or properly discharged outdoors), and garbage removal services. Cooking facilities aren’t required but need to meet health standards.

I first volunteered with the set-up of an encampment when the Tent City Collective was provided space in a parking lot on the University of Washington’s campus, back in December (right down the street from the College of Built Environment in Gould Hall). With the three months up, the collective had to move this past weekend to another site, located in south Seattle near Renton. Less visible than the UW location, this new spot pits residents much further from services and employment and was basically a large mud pit when they were in the process of constructing the new encampment.

If you’ve never been to an encampment, wooden pallets are arranged in a 3x4 pattern for families and in a 2x2 pattern for individuals. Plywood sheathing is nailed onto the pallets, and these provide a basis for tents to be installed such that they do not need to be set on the ground (staying dryer and warmer). Each unit of pallets must be set 4’-0” apart to provide city-regulated clearance aisles for emergencies. In-between, organizers set them at 1’-0” apart to provide some space for access but also squeeze in as many tents as they can onto the site. In a separate area is the “kitchen,” a covered area where milk crates full of donated or collected foodstuffs are stored for resident use. Other supplies are stored here as well.

One of the biggest challenges for the homeless population in Seattle is security. It comes up often when the Mayor discusses the perceived need to clear out places like “the Jungle,” the area underneath I-5 between roughly South Dearborn Street and Lucille Street. In a talk at the Central Library last June, however, former and current residents of the Jungle spoke to the critical need for stability and community that the Jungle provided. If a homeless individual is on their own, it is likely that whenever they leave their tent behind with possessions in it, it is going to get ransacked. Imagine leaving your home every day and finding all of your possessions gone that evening, forced to start from scratch again the next morning. Encampments and other “village” style communities allow for individuals and families to leave for the day, whether for work, food, support services, school, or just needing a break, and return to a relatively stable environment.

As long as rapid re-housing is promoted as the primary method for addressing homelessness, there is going to be a lag between identifying the most vulnerable members of our community and actually finding affordable housing for them along with whatever support services they need. Encampments should not be seen as a city goal, but in the short-term, they provide a measure of normalcy that is better than the alternative. If you are interested in helping tent city residents in the future, whether through support or volunteering during their next set-up in three months, you can find more information on Tent City Collective’s Facebook page.