From Planning Routes to Planning Cities: SEE Can Help

Moving to a new place can be overwhelming. Our sense of home is so much more than the building we live in; it is a dynamic relationship between person and place. Will I have access to a pharmacy that stocks my medications, a grocery store that offers culturally-appropriate foods to soothe my homesickness, a pet store that caters to my diabetic cat? Are there sidewalks and public transit to connect me to these places, and in a timely fashion? Can I get there easily? Safely? Wherever we move, novelty and uncertainty are our new next-door neighbors.

Now imagine a reality where you have not moved, but a layer of nuance is introduced to your once familiar setting and brings with it the same questions. Your location has not changed, but in some way your environment has, destabilizing your routine and threatening your ability to get your needs met. Our first reaction is often to avoid this disturbance and preserve our sense of place. But changes to our environment will always take place. How can we learn to better adapt to these changes? This is where the work of an urban planner can help.

Photo by Isabella Beshouri

Urban planners propose changes to established communities for a variety of reasons: to expand public transit and improve mass mobility; to rectify a history of racial injustice by remedying entrenched segregation; to mitigate climate risk, and to adapt civic life to be resilient in the face of the unavoidable. The aim of planning should be to foster environments that are supportive of human and environmental health, center equity and justice, protect public safety, and improve physical and socioeconomic mobility, all the while enshrining local character to foster community identity and pride of place.

It’s a lot, so it’s good that we are not doing it alone. This mission is unattainable by any one group or vision, and so requires public participation during the design and implementation of changes. As planners, we can draw on aspects of the Supportive Environments for Effectiveness (SEE) framework to facilitate community-wide visioning sessions and to support them as their environment shifts. At the nexus of value and practicality, lessons from the SEE framework are worthy additions to the participatory design toolkit:

Model Building

Most of the time, the motivation to attend a community listening session is not to sit and receive the project’s elevator pitch. It may be important for residents to know about plans for new traffic signal coordination, but their motivation to learn about such plans is likely related to concerns for how the changes might be disorienting as they navigate the city.

Photo by Sydney Mark

Many proposed changes to the built environment are requests for permission to disrupt our painstakingly constructed mental models; models built from experience, and heavily relied upon to make sense of the world around us. Mental models are the hidden subject of development no matter the project. It is important to greet public comment with an awareness of these emotional pressure points and what inflames them. With an empathic understanding of what we are asking, we can think more deeply about how to support stakeholders through their model-building process when we propose changes.

Model building support can take many forms, from facilitating Focused Conversations to enlisting virtual reality. Community engagement is a complex and locally tailored process; there is no one-size-fits-all approach that transcends physical and social geographies. But, with an understanding of mental models, we can more effectively facilitate a feedback process by starting from where participants are at with their own understanding, and being mindful of the shared language we use to frame the problem and the proposed solution, making sure to avoid jargon. 

Being Capable

The desire to gain knowledge and explore is ingrained in human nature, but our capacity to absorb knowledge is mediated by the limits of our directed attention, as well as how competent we feel in applying the new knowledge. To support the model-building process, information is best delivered at the intersection of clarity and brevity. Less is more; both to preempt information overload and to leave space for processing emotions and uncertainty. We also want to feel heard and like we are a part of the process. When both are considered, the community engagement process unfolds into a matter of helping our neighbor weatherproof their mental models so that they feel prepared to navigate a slightly different world.

Meaningful Action

Through complementary initiatives and campaigns, urban planners can create the tools and space for citizens to draw connections between urban systems and their personal identities. They can help enliven civic life by infusing meaningful action into such systems; whether by striking a parallel between transit use and sustainability through a summer-long challenge to reduce personal commuting emissions, or by hooking our thrifty impulse with a calculator that compares monthly automobile gas to transit pass budgets; there is a draw to participation in the public space for all of us.

We are always trying to find meaning within our everyday lives. The inlay of meaningful action within our routines helps us feel accomplished and useful; it adds a layer of intentionality that renews elements of civic life that may have lost their luster with time and repetition. With time, strategies that reinforce meaningful action can lead to an enduring pride-of-place; together with efforts to support model building and effectiveness, positive feedback loops of public interest and trust-building can emerge.

Photo by Isabella Beshouri

There is an innovative dialogue between urban planning and the SEE framework, prompted by their orbit around a common inquisitive core: How can we leverage our environments to bring about the best version of our society, our communities, and ourselves?

We use “home” as a noun: it can be a place where we raise our family, get creative in the kitchen, and take refuge after a long day.

We also experience “home” as a verb: finding our identity between the spaces we inhabit and the spaces we don’t; organizing and visioning with our communities to transition spaces from liveable to lived-in; developing our sense of self in parallel with the communities we build. This process is not always organic, straightforward, or comfortable, but when it comes to changing our environments for the better, we’ve got to SEE it to believe it.

Isabella Beshouri was a reDirect fellow during the summer of 2022, working with the city of Ann Arbor’s Office of Sustainability and Innovation to help grow and improve the city’s A2Zero ambassador program.