About Neighborhood Planning

Center For Neighborhoods seeks to enable neighborhoods and resident leaders to articulate and accomplish their vision for community improvement.  Effective planning is integral to this, because through planning neighborhoods are able both to discern a broadly-held vision for their community and to develop feasible strategies to create that vision. 

Center For Neighborhoods has practiced community planning and design since its founding as the Louisville Community Design Center.  Our approach to neighborhood empowerment has been enriched and amplified thru the establishment of the Neighborhood Institute (a neighborhood leadership academy) in 1987 and more recently, by engaging in the Making Connections Network (an intensive community organizing initiative focused in four inner-city neighborhoods). 

We believe this tripartite, interactive approach (planning, organizing, and leadership education) builds powerful synergy that enables neighborhoods to begin moving toward realizing their dreams and visions for the future.

The Plan Approach

To succeed in accomplishing any goal, however ambitious or humble, a neighborhood must be motivated by a clear and compelling vision of success.  Such is the case in Irish Hill and in Old Louisville & Limerick, where community stakeholders – residents and business owners together – have developed powerful visions and implementation strategies that will ultimately transform the identity of these neighborhoods and, consequently, that of the community as a whole. 

While the Center For Neighborhoods has been instrumental in evoking these visions and in crafting implementation strategies unique to each situation, our work has been successful only through the tenacity and commitment of the citizen planners we have served.  Together, plan task force members and other stakeholders have contributed hundreds of hours of thought and aspiration to the making of real and vital neighborhood plans.

To develop a coherent neighborhood vision and strategy, we recommend and practice a traditional planning sequence: 

• Inventory
• Analysis
• Synthesis

Inventory

During the inventory phase, the plan task force “builds the picture,” assembling all data, information, and opinion relevant and available to describe the neighborhood in its current state.  Through a series of facilitated discussions, the task force then seeks to “understand the picture” – to discern patterns and trends, neighborhood assets and liabilities.  This analytical phase is most important – when task force members and the neighborhood they represent must come to terms with the critical problems that threaten neighborhood vitality, while discovering and then embracing the possibilities that could lead to substantial neighborhood improvement.

Analysis

From this analysis springs a rationally synthesized vision and strategy for the neighborhood.  Instead of what we are, what do we aspire to become?  What inherent strengths shall we build upon, and what shortcomings need we resolve?  What cumulative result should the neighborhood aspire to, and work toward, over the coming months and years?  How may government help to accomplish these goals?  What can we do ourselves, or with the assistance of partners and resources other than government?  By what means can the neighborhood institutionalize their responsibility to lead the implementation of the plan, once completed?

Synthesis

The process for developing the core plan – the inventory, the analysis, the vision and strategy – is a series of facilitated discussions and dialogues.  From the outset, the role of the planner is to structure and to conduct the process in an orderly and effective manner, and to provide the task force with sufficient information and analysis upon which to base their own thinking, choices and decisions.  If neighborhood planning is a process of discernment, then the role of the neighborhood planner is both to provide the information through which the task force may reach common understandings, and to lead the process in such a way that effective discovery and consensus can be reached.

Our approach, then, to a “typical” neighborhood – recognizing that none such exists – is a series of up to six, 2½-hour task force meetings, during which time the task force progresses through a sequence of inventory, analysis, and synthesis of a vision and accompanying strategy.  During the inventory, the task force depicts the neighborhood’s present identity; while the vision, later, describes the identity that the task force would have the neighborhood become.  Implementation strategies are based both in constructive changes necessary to accomplish the vision, as well as in remedies to problems or shortcomings that presently detract from the kind of neighborhood to which the task force aspires.

A Two-Phase Approach

The following is a delineation of our plan approach, written in conformance with the Plan Model articulated by the Department of Planning and Development Services in their Request for Qualifications. 

We envision a two phase approach:

Phase I

During Phase I, the neighborhood plan task force will be appointed and organized as the representative stakeholder group empowered with the responsibility of developing the neighborhood plan.  Phase I represents the core of the planning process, during which time the task force will develop the Vision Statement, Neighborhood Identity, and a strategic Implementation Plan intended to accomplish the Vision – and to create the desired Neighborhood Identity – over the coming months and years.  During Phase I, two public hearings are proposed:  a first to solicit broad public participation in a so-called “SWOT analysis” (the identification of neighborhood Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats); the second to present to the community the Task Force’s work, thinking, visions, and strategies at the conclusion of Phase I.

Phase II

Phase II will include the development of the Land Use/Community Form section, and of “optional” sections described in the RFP.  The nature and scope of the latter will be entirely warranted by the findings and thinking of the Task Force during Phase I.  Meanwhile, the Land Use/Community Form section will include a more detailed examination of land use, community design, and zoning issues surfaced during Phase I, attempting to develop cost-effective measures and plans that are consistent with the spirit and letter of the plan’s Vision and Identity sections.