CHICAGO COMMON GROUND PLANNING PROCESS

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, 2001-2005

Project Description

This project was conceived as part of a growing movement called “community-based regionalism,” which allows local jurisdictions to remain the primary unit of planning and management, while stressing the importance of considering all issues from both local and regional perspectives. Given that, the Common Ground process sought to develop a comprehensive regional vision that was rooted in local perspectives and would be implemented locally.

The process involved workshops to introduce civic leaders who had not previously worked together, and to identify issues and challenges; youth forums; a Regional Forum that brought together 850 citizens and used electronic meeting tools; geographically-oriented workshops; goal-writing workshops for 20 working groups; goal review workshops; local cluster meetings to review effects on communities; technology-enhanced visioning workshops; and creation and adoption of the 2040 Regional Framework Plan.

Finance and Support

The Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission (NIPC) took primary responsibility for developing the Common Ground process and producing the 2040 Regional Framework Plan. Budget information is unavailable, but the primary financial sponsor was the Illinois Department of Transportation, with assistance from the Chicago Community Trust, Gaylord & Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, Grand Victoria Foundation, Nicor, and the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity. Another fifty organizations, agencies, and businesses are also acknowledged as partners, providing in-kind or financial support to the project.

Stakeholders

All residents of Metro Chicago were considered stakeholders and invited to participate. The project made a particularly strong effort to attract participants from six groups: residents of the region, committed civic leaders & activists, under-represented populations, youth, elected officials, and planners & professionals.

Methods

The project involved a vast number of people in many different situations and combinations, which maximized the amount of interaction and cooperation among different ethnic groups, citizens of different communities and different professions, and government leaders. The visioning process included a number of distinct groups and steps, ordered here from start to finish:

• Leadership Workshops: Held in twelve different locations throughout the region, these meetings brought together civic organizations and businesses that had not previously been involved in planning, or with one another. An additional set of breakfast meetings brought leaders together to brainstorm about people to involve and ways to increase participation. The primary goal for this first set of meetings was simply to engage participants, develop connections, and broaden NIPC’s network. Each workshop also developed a list of issues and challenges for its part of the region, which resulted in a total list of 57 issues that would be used to set the agenda going forward.
• Regional Forum: In the fall of 2001, NIPC held its first large-scale public meeting, facilitated by AmericaSpeaks. 850 people from a wide range of communities and backgrounds attended. Participants sat in small groups at tables with a facilitator and decision support tools (i.e. keypad polling and networked computers), to review and prioritize the issues and challenges from the Leadership Workshops. Participants also committed to assisting on parts of the project.
• Working Groups: Over 275 people volunteered to serve in working groups, which were focused on five topics in each of four geographic areas. The groups met monthly for a year and used CoVision’s WebCouncil e-participation technologies to communicate and share information. Each group produced a mission statement, researched relevant options, and conducted a SWOT analysis; this work all set the stage for drafting goals. When this stage was completed, the 20 working groups combined into five major groups, which met together to draft goals; groups continued to share information via WebCouncil.
• Youth Forum: Since youth had difficulty in making the evening working group meetings, NIPC established a separate meeting for them (mostly teenagers from Chicago) during the 2002 APA National Conference in Chicago. Almost 100 youth attended, conducting their own SWOT analysis and identifying the issues and goals most important to them.
• Goal Review Workshops: After the working groups provided feedback and revised and the goal statements, they were then presented for feedback to a wider audience. Goal-review workshops were held in numerous locations through March of 2003, with most attempting to address issues that often fell under the radar. Meetings tackled issues of diversity and representation, farmland, youth, and cooperation with elected officials, who had not participated in the working groups. These meetings were used to revise the goals and issues.
• Commission Endorsement and Planning: The Commission voted in March to approve the 52 major goals established for the project and the five major themes used to characterize and simplify presentation of the goals. NIPC staff then incorporated the goals into a regional plan that focused on local planning and its connections to regional issues.
• Cluster Workshops: Workshops in thirteen clusters of municipalities were used to gain the expertise of local planners and officials in setting specific local visions and directions. The sessions were also used to create a map that illustrated the desired framework for future growth and planning. In these workshops, participants used a NIPC tool called “Paint the Region,” which allowed people to paint” their centers, corridors, and green areas over layers of digital information using GIS technology. Groups of five to ten people worked with discussion and technical facilitators and many tools, including keypads, GIS and Paint the Region software, laptops, informational resources, and projectors. When finished, the “palettes” created by each group were shared and used for creation of the final map.
• Building the Map: NIPC staff finally began to synthesize the vast quantities of data and opinions presented to them. They first combined multiple maps created by each cluster group, then combined the amalgamated cluster maps into a single map of centers, corridors, and green spaces for the 2040 plan. The staff also compared these maps with information from local maps and plans, as well as statistics on population, density, and job growth. The map was submitted for public feedback, which informed further revisions

Outcomes

The planning process brought together more than 4,000 participants at 200 public meetings, and also convened more than 90 students for a youth summit, at the 2002 APA National Conference in Chicago. The process introduced all of those people to GIS and e-participation technologies, as well as keypad polling, and created successful collaborations between different governments, stakeholder groups, and community organizations.

Aside from the final map and plan, the project created a number of other important maps and data sources for use in the future, including a regional growth transect and map of employment centers. NIPC launched the 2040 Plan implementation stage with a community celebration at the Sears Tower, and has now made the plan available in a number of different forms and venues (complete plan online or in print, popular summaries online and in print, maps, lists of visions and goals, and documents printed in Spanish as well as English). NIPC has also begun several spin-off programs and collaborations, including the Full Circle Program. This neighborhood-level initiative trains citizens to conduct neighborhood inventories with GPS units and handheld computers; complete an asset mapping process for the neighborhood; and use information from these steps is used to collaboratively create a vision and plan for the future.

Evaluation

The project included evaluation (mostly through surveys) at each public meeting and event, as well as ongoing feedback opportunities through CoVision’s WebCouncil e-participation toolkit. Survey evaluations asked participants to reflect on the quality of the meeting as a whole, the value of technology and tools, and the effectiveness of interaction and collaboration strategies. NIPC also plans to continue evaluating the 2040 Plan as implementation begins, which can lead to revision and changes in direction as needed. Staff will develop a “report card” using a variety of indicators and publish it each year, in order to measure status and ensure accountability.

The 2040 Regional Framework Plan was honored as the APA’s National Plan of the Year at the 2006 APA Conference.

Innovative Ideas

The Common Ground project is more innovative in terms of concepts—specifically integration-- than process design and implementation. Like the 3i Solutions project, Chicago’s Common Ground relies upon a three-part organization to the plan and community priorities; visions and recommendations are formed around centers (villages, metro centers, and towns), corridors (transportation networks), and green areas (from small neighborhood parks and seasonal streams to major prairies and forest areas). Common Ground stresses that all three must be healthy and must interact successfully in order to create livable communities. In the planning process, Common Ground used a unique mix of technical and non-technical tools, which allowed for maximum accessibility and engagement. One of the only visioning processes to use keypad polling, electronic town meetings, and other e-participation strategies, the project placed value on both high-tech tools and on face-to-face conversations; public participation was the central hub and focus of the process, rather than a tool or an afterthought. The concepts here are very much like those used in Greenprinting, with extra emphasis on the use of high-tech tools in the public mapping process.

NIPC staff worked to
condense the numerous goals set in the Common Ground process into a small
number of clear and coherent themes; the staff then looked outward again to
create a number of actions leading to implementation. Image: 2040 Regional
Framework Plan

 

Another unusual concept is the proposed implementation structure, which merges regional and local planning strategies and seeks inter-governmental collaboration. The 2040 Regional Framework Plan recognizes that regional governments and planning commissions are able to provide technology, information, and expertise in planning to a large number of communities more efficiently than communities could obtain such tools themselves. Conversely, local communities are better able to engage people, obtain local and broad public input, and develop capacity than are regional bodies. In this way, regional institutions can help to build local capacity and strengthen on-the-ground planning results, while local communities use that capacity to do the detailed planning work and inform future projects at the regional level.

In addition, Common Ground’s strategies for increasing collaboration and regional thinking while maintaining local autonomy are groundbreaking. Since NIPC is not a legal authority in the region, it cannot dictate planning techniques and ordinances that local municipalities should use; indeed, it would not want to. Rather, NIPC ties its funding closely to its conceptual goals—local actions with a regional view—providing an incentive structure rather than command-and-control leadership. This strategy makes it much more likely that communities will accept and embrace the plan than consider it an unwieldy burden.

http://www.nipc.org/cg/

CHICAGO COMMON GROUND AT A GLANCE

COMMUNITY TYPE
    Urban/ suburban

AREA
2,122.8 square miles (including 6 counties and 272 municipalities)

POPULATION
    8,711,000 (2006 urban)

LOCATION
    Metro Chicago area

PROCESS
    Common Ground Process

PROJECT LEADERS
Northeastern IL Planning
    Commission
Illinois Dept. of Transportation

PROJECT THEMES
    Development
    Transportation
    Green Space
    Integration and Cooperation