DESIGN CHARRETTES MARCH – JUNE 2008 - CONSIDERATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

WNevel — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:32:00 GMT

DESIGN CHARRETTES MARCH - JUNE 2008

CONSIDERATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The Envisioning Annapolis series has been a wonderful educational urban design experience - in the broad sense. It has been meaningful, but perhaps not practical for those Annapolis and Anne Arundel County decision makers that have to make day-to-day decisions regarding planning and development in this unique, charming, historic area.

The design charrette is a great way to cap this Envisioning series and lay the foundation for continuing this work. Planning is a continuing process, but is frequently manifest in some sort of a document - a comprehensive plan, a set of goals, objectives, policies, a transportation plan, an environmental plan, an urban gateway plan, fiscal plan, and even a zoning ordinance. Obviously this Envisioning series is not any of these. But hopefully these day to day, nitty gritty working documents may be positively influenced by the Envisioning process.

In thirty-five years of professional comprehensive planning and transportation planning I have had the opportunity to participate in both formal and informal urban design charrettes. The most notable, and the one that left the most significant impression, was led by Lawrence Halprin of Lawrence Halprin Associates (LHA). Lawrence Halprin has had a varied career, but is truly one of the most prominent urban designers of the 20^th Century.

Briefly the firm where I spent most of my career, De Leuw, Cather/Parsons Transportation Group was a subcontractor to LHA for the transportation element of a major CBD plan. There was one other subcontractor/facilitator, an economic/fiscal firm that provided some financing approaches to the exercise. As project manager for the transportation element, my role was a technical facilitator for the "citizen designers." The stakeholders, developers, business owners, government officials, residents and community activists, were the "citizen designers." The technical staff acted as facilitators, except for Mr. Halprin and one or two of his staff, who acted as " conductors."

Mr. Halprin used the term "scoring" as in a musical score to describe this process. We started out with very short, simple issues and proceeded to more complex urban design issues culminating in a day-long "citizens design" session. It was effective!

Based on my experience, especially the Lawrence Halprin approach, I offer some suggestions that may aide the Envisioning Charrettes. Some of these suggestions are also based on hindsight, (what a great teacher!):

1. Target Area - Don't focus only on the boundaries of Annapolis, but rather view Annapolis in the context of Anne Arundel County, and to some extent the region, especially Queen Ann's County.

2. General Participants - Broaden the base of the audience. With all due respect, there are an awful lot of gray beards/gray heads (including this author), that have been involved to date. Formulate an action plan that will include representatives from the 50, 40, 30 and even the 20 something's and below age groups. Also, include more "people of color" in the charrette process.

3. Target Some Decision Makers - Involve a representative sample of those who have a responsibility for planning and development decision making in Annapolis and Anne Arundel County. This would include elected officials, staffers, plan commission members, planning advisory committee members, transportation and public works decision makers, school facility planners, college and university planners, military base planners, medical facility planners, community activists, etc.

4. Time Horizons - Subdivide the citizen participants into three groups with different time horizons - those with a long range focus, say 40 to 50 years, those with a 20 to 30 intermediate year emphasis and those and those action oriented folks with a 10 to 20 year horizon.

5. Working Groups - Subdivide the size of each "working group" into twelve to 15 participants, including one or two professional design facilitators. Each of the spokesperson(s) for the group should be chosen from the citizen participants, not one of the technical facilitators.

6. Designate Objectives - Each charrette working group should select or be given a primary and secondary set of objectives, such as developing a plan for Downtown Annapolis, developing a local and county-wide transportation network, creating a pedestrian friendly environment, developing an environmental enhancement plan, developing a "gateway plan," developing an economic or fiscal plan, etc. While each group would have a primary objective(s), they would also have to describe or at least consider the complementary elements/objectives that the other working groups are treating as their prime objective.

7. Provide Support Material - The room in which the design charrette is held should be surrounded with supporting photographs, maps, charts, design drawings etc. to support the development of the workshop product. These should include population, population density, ethnicity, land use, housing transportation network, natural resources, environmental data and issues, open space and recreation, harmony of water and land use, list of community assets, list of area liabilities, incidents of crime, etc. Photos should include the "downers" (Arlington, Fairfax, Silver Springs, etc) and the "possibles" (San Antonio, Austin, Winnetka (IL), Carmel (CA), etc. Staffers should be in the room to answer questions regarding this information, but not make presentations.

8. Add One Session - Between the March 15^th and the June 7^th charrette session there should be one other session. This should be a workshop session focused on the "citizen" designers and supported/facilitated by the professionals from the four professional teams (Univ of MD, Catholic U., Morgan State Univ and VA Tech). The work of the "citizen" designers should then be integrated into the professional teams which will be presented in early June. A huge premise here is that this is a beginning and will not conclude in a "completed" plan; otherwise there will be many disappointed participants.

9. Make it Meaningful - This should not be an exercise for the erudite and those in the urban design professions. There are too many of these types of plans. The process should be understood by the informed residents and community decision makers that this is a path to the future. And not one of these situations..., when after a third span is built on the Bay Bridge, with an elevated deck on the Severn River Bridge, and somewhere XX Seasons has constructed a 2000 unit development on historic , critical land and the designers comment, "if they had only listened to me back...."

Good luck with the design charrette. This process comes at a critical time as both the City of Annapolis and Anne Arundel County are engaged in revising or updating their Comprehensive General Plans or major elements of these plans. The entire Envisioning Annapolis process, including the design charrettes, should improve the quality of these plans.

Thanks for listening.

Bill Nevel *

CC: Pat Lynch, President, Broadneck Council of Communities, Inc.

*The author is a resident of the Broadneck community (Amberley), a retired urban/transportation planner, president of Nevel& Associates, a director on the Broadneck Council of Communities, and a member of the Anne Arundel County's General Development Plan, Special Advisory Committee.