Quelles sont les pratiques exemplaires pour intégrer les commentaires de la collectivité dans la planification environnementale ?

Definitely the transparency in communication, engagement & commitment to inclusivity. Regularly update the community on the process and progress of the planning give feedback and respect local knowledge . Create a plan that reflects the community’s values and concerns.

A good way to incorporate community input into a project requires a participatory process to help shape goals and confirm proposed outcomes early in design. Research shows that liveable and vital communities result from thoughtful design and placemaking. Experiential media—site studies, concept models, and sketching—derived from charettes before beginning formal design schemes provides the tools to determine social, economic, and environmental qualities that best serve a community. Some critics claim that public interest architecture compromises design individualism and introduces untrained perspectives. Experience shows that these claims oppose the public good and that participatory design is a source of innovation, not a restriction.

Defining the purpose and scope is crucial before engaging the community. It establishes clear project goals, outlines environmental and social issues, and sets boundaries. This ensures effective communication, realistic expectations, alignment with community needs, targeted stakeholder engagement, and overall project focus.

A well defined purpose and scope helps in understanding if the solution you are attempting to propose will be wide spreading (beneficial for more people in the community, and addressing surface issues) or deep diving (beneficial for a select few but solves deep seeded issues). This helps in setting expectations of the outcome and set boundaries to the issues that the sustainable solution can address. This also helps the stakeholders in the community to have realistic expectations from the project.

Ensuring clearly outlined purpose, objectives and scope of the project supports the community engagement more focused and meaningful. For instance, in a city's plan to create a community park, the scope may involve determining the park's size, amenities, community impact and environmental considerations. By clearly communicating these parameters to the community, such as through town hall meetings community can provide input on specific aspects, ensuring that their ideas align with the defined goals.

Identifying and reaching out to stakeholders is essential. Stakeholders, including residents, businesses, government agencies, NGOs, etc., should be identified along with their needs and concerns. Actively engage them through surveys, interviews, workshops, or online platforms to collect valuable feedback for your project.

In my experience, it’s important to understand the historical or cultural contexts of the stakeholders you’ve identified as well and mapping out the relationships between parties. Facilitating a deeper awareness of the identified stakeholders involves understanding their perspectives, the role that they occupy, and any potential conflicts that may arise as projects and planning continues. Creating a collaborative sphere through workshops, data-sharing, transparency, etc., ensures that the planning process respects the perspectives of your stakeholders.

Those lives most affected, involved with or who directly experience the project—including the underserved—are primary stakeholders of concern, with those having interest or influence following. The emphasis is upon meeting the needs of primary users, caretakers and operators first, and then organizational and legalistic factors next. Role playing is a powerful tool to best understand stakeholder needs and concerns. Immerse yourself in stakeholder domains and spend time learning their hopes for what the project might provide. Invite all stakeholders to workshops designed for their participation. Serve good food, ensure availability, and build trusting relationships by responding to concerns. Then involve this support throughout the project.

Community participation can create support for the green infrastructure project. This could have key short-term benefits (e.g., community supports the proposed project), as well as long-term ones (e.g., community becomes long term stewards of the project). Experimental evidence has revealed that people who believed decision was based on public input rated that outcome more favorably than those who were told the same decision was established only on expert opinion, suggesting that public participation itself enhances legitimacy.

By recognizing and involving individuals and groups with a vested interest in the environmental project, planners can tap into valuable local knowledge and perspectives. For instance, in a wetland restoration project, stakeholders might include local residents, NGOs, government agencies, and researchers. Engaging these groups through public forums, or targeted meetings ensures that diverse viewpoints are considered.

Interested and Affected Parties must kept abreast throughout the duration of the project and the steps taken to engage with them to participate using Newspaper advertisement, on-site notice, e-mail or directly for comment and sending a Letter of Notification and a Background Information Document (BID), Landowners are sent an initial letter of introduction to the project and a BID. Other than I&APs initially identified, any person requesting to be registered as an I&AP must be included in the I&AP database. An attendance register and meeting minutes are provided. Any comments are recorded for mitigation.

Community engagement is crucial. Residents do know what is absolutely essential for their community. Inputs can be collected even anonymously but this data will provide a user-defined experience that can contribute a great deal to the urban planning or project. Nowadays digital footprint and AI can be great helpers, but humans perspective must be maintained throughout the process now and in the future. The trick is in finding the right method and medium for communication with the local community. Different historical or geographic coordinates request different approaches and there is no universal solution for inclusion. It's hard, painful and long, but rewarding process that can overcome various challenges.

Always utilize participatory and inclusive approaches to empower the community in decision-making. Methods such as visioning, scenario planning, mapping, design charrettes, and participatory budgeting allow for co-creation and collaboration. These tools help the community express values and preferences, fostering a meaningful partnership in the project.

Community design workshops leverage the benefits of experiential design methods and encourage the participation of affected people to “take part” in the making of any project. The process virtually creates “experiences” for stakeholders and public interests to stimulate their involvement. Though public interest architecture is not new, many architects use site studies, charrettes, models, and game simulations in the process—many who adapt methods of famous architects. For example, Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS) mostly developed the design charrette. Lawrence Halprin created his RSVP cycles to involve stakeholders experientially in projects. While Walter Gropius' priority for social responsibility advanced the use of outside “collaboration.”

Using different experiential techniques makes participatory processes uniquely interactive and identifies valuable commonality and discrepancies in workshop findings. Interpreting community input requires discernment obtained from multiple perspectives. Integral Theory allows full consideration for the strategic importance and potential benefit to a collection of beliefs and provides a complete structure for understanding complex multiple perspectives and opposing views harvested from community design workshops. The process reveals common and different findings for potential use in design, measurable to case studies and past projects. The approach allows community needs to shape design concepts without sacrifice to designer’s intent.

Analyze and synthesize community input by identifying key themes and patterns. Employ qualitative and quantitative methods to organize and interpret data. Compare input with other sources like literature reviews or case studies, highlighting commonalities and differences to inform your project.

Incorporate community input into your project by showcasing its impact on design, implementation, evaluation, or communication. Demonstrate alignment with community needs, interests, and concerns, emphasizing contributions to environmental and social sustainability. Acknowledge and address any trade-offs, conflicts, or limitations arising from the input.

Integral Theory organizes community input into a matrix matching individual and collective opinions with objective and subjective knowledge. The quadrants include experience, performance, culture, and ecology. Experience perspectives concern aesthetics, beliefs, learning, quality, and values. Cultural views include individual and group perspectives of art, music, ethics, history, places, and philosophy. Performance involves energy, codes, resources, materials, science, and technology. Ecology types identify views about site context, nature, social orders, and the environment. The approach may seem unnecessarily complicated; yet the Integral Theory provides the simplest model for showing how complex community input shapes design proposals.

Many architects cannot clearly speak or write about architecture, and often incomprehensible, self-serving gibberish results. While many architects have excellent design skills, effective communication with public stakeholders suffers. We need architects who can make buildings come alive in the minds of the populace. Designers who convincingly engage their audience by expressing architecture with broader context and appeal, who arouse, entertain, and inspire, and who crucially show how the world is made better by great design prosper through the process of public interest architecture. Community design requires good communication, and this is why experiential media is crucial in the public domain; it builds bridges with the community.

Share and report project results and community input to stakeholders and the public. Offer feedback, updates, and insights on project progress, outcomes, and impacts using clear and accessible language and formats. Express gratitude to the community for their input, inviting ongoing dialogue and collaboration.

Architects improve social, environmental, and economic conditions within the built environment more effectively when the profession responds to needs beyond individual clients’ interests. The community design process has genuinely demonstrated its capacity to deliver buildings and places of great public benefit because it delivers architecture that responds to societal problems by establishing common ground. Architects are powerless to solve social problems when they continue to design and construct isolated buildings. Architecture will become more potent as a transforming agent for the public good when designers’ knowledge and skills get employed beyond an individual project’s immediate program, responsibilities, and property lines.

Incorporating community input into environmental planning is crucial for ensuring that diverse perspectives are considered, fostering community engagement, and ultimately achieving more sustainable and inclusive outcomes.