Lesson 21 - Neighborhood Planning Flashcards
What is neighborhood planning?
Neighborhood planning has been around since the early 1900s. The idea of the neighborhood was introduced in 1915 by Robert Park and E.W. Burgess.
What is a neighborhood?
Neighborhoods are often difficult to define geographically. For example, they often do not match with Census Tracts or other geographic units of measurement. However, if you ask a person what neighborhood they live in, they can often tell you.
Neighborhood planning
Neighborhood planning is a sub-city level of planning because of the challenges of the geographical definitions of neighborhoods. In some cases, the boundaries are set for planning purposes based on roadways, rivers, or census boundaries.
Neighborhood planning follows the same process as other types of planning, including collecting information, identifying key issues, setting goals, coming up with alternatives, selecting alternatives, determining the implementation mechanisms, and evaluating the progress towards the implementation of the plan. Plan topics vary from community to community. For example, crime prevention may be critical in one neighborhood, while historic preservation is important to another. Each neighborhood plan should cater to the needs of its residents.
Public participation is a critical part of the neighborhood planning process. The citizen participation portion of this course discusses participation methods. Engaging citizens results in a plan that represents the issues that are important to the community and helps build support for implementation of the community plan.
Many communities undertake neighborhood planning. For example, the City of Columbus, Ohio, has created plans for many of its neighborhoods. The City’s website includes a variety of these plans.
Neighborhood Planning
Bernie Jones has an excellent book titled Neighborhood Planning that was published in 1990. This is a simple book explaining how to conduct neighborhood planning.
