The goal of Neighborhood Planning is to build social capital, which is the ability of the neighborhood to organize itself to identify problems and solve them in partnership with elected officials, businesses, and public agencies. In this section, we define Neighborhood Planning, assemble the parts of a good neighborhood plan, and review its history. Neighborhood Planning is a way to unify and improve place-based social and physical conditions

Three approaches to Neighborhood Planning (or “models”) are: Rational Planning, Community Organizing, and Assets Based Community Development (ABCD). Each of these approaches is described with an emphasis on organizing and ABCD. Yet all are needed in different circumstances. This section contains the advice from the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative: “The heart is far more important than the head”

City and regional change have important neighborhood impacts. The region’s vitality and economic growth can slip away from older neighborhoods and focus on the urban fringe. For example, the City of Detroit is in crisis while the Detroit region continues to grow. Metropolitan governments can subsidize growth at the urban fringe, sometimes without knowing it, and fail to be good stewards of existing schools, parks, and infrastructure.

“Ultimately it is the planning process, not the plan document, that brings about development”. Neighborhood strategic planning can unify diverse community development activities such as in education, housing, economic development, and public safety through long term vision, goals, conditions assessments, strategies, objectives, and programs.

Neighborhood Planning always involves collecting background information. This section covers a range of planning tools used to describe neighborhood conditions and inform planning. The tools include some standard approaches like using Census data and surveys. Other less frequently used techniques are oral histories, population forecasts, and employment projections. Background information should be collected in the service of neighborhood strategic planning.

People cannot plan or build the world without creating or changing themselves. The built environment is the physical counterpart of the social community. It reflects the neighborhood’s history, culture, spiritual beliefs, and social organization. This section uses The Hill neighborhood in St. Louis to illustrate Kevin Lynch’s categories of “edge”, “path”, “node”, “landmark”, and “district” and also the concept of “sacred space”.

Slide Shows The three slide shows below address this broad topic of building community with land use planning and zoning. They show how to use planning and Form Based and Mixed Use Codes to create quality places and build social capital. The process begins with area-wide and neighborhood-based policy plans and a land use and

Housing for Community The following three slide shows include a range of topics regarding housing.  Part 1 covers the importance of decent affordable housing to personal, family, and neighborhood stability.  A history of affordable housing programs is presented, showing how motives other than the interests of residents, in combination with entrenched racial bias, often have

Part 1 – Background, Economic Transformation & Concentrated Poverty, and ED Approaches Part II – Programs, Financing, Place-Making “At the very center of the community building challenge is the effort to revitalize the community’s economic life”. However, broad economic conditions make this a challenge in neighborhoods, especially those of concentrated poverty. In many cities, a

Safety, both from fear and crime, is essential to neighborhood quality: it is a condition for the wonderful things that can happen in neighborhoods.  But the absence of safety also is a significant contributor to neighborhood decline and a barrier to personal and community action to make life better and to establish partnerships beyond its

Community Education, Organizing and School Reform [SLIDESHOW COMING SOON] “Many schools are like little islands set apart from the mainland of life”. Community Education, in contrast, is a philosophy (not a program) in which the school serves the entire community by providing for the educational needs of all its community members. In Community Education the

Part 1: Human Services and Neighborhoods Part 2: Establishing Institutional Partnerships People turn first to family, friends, and neighbors when problems arise in their lives. This “informal helping” is voluntary, spontaneous, individualized, flexible, based on self-reliance, and is reciprocal in nature. Such helping breaks down barriers created by “provider” and “client” relationships and helps overcome