Neighborhood Collaborative Planning

This project was funded by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in order to encourage the profession of planning to think critically about the ways in which families' and children's lives might be improved. The Casey Foundation has a special interest in the most needy residents of our communities. Through a number of initiatives, the Foundation seeks to link people and the meeting of their needs to and through place. An introduction to the work of the Foundation was provided at the 1996 APA national conference in the session, Linking People with Place.

APA focused its project on neighborhoods and the means by which collaborative planning can improve the overall health of neighborhoods. The traditional practice of planning, in which a municipal planning department plans for the physical future of the entire jurisdiction from city hall, often fails to provide effective planning for the full range of community components that affect families and children at the neighborhood level. Some common characteristics of this problem include:

• the inability of some municipal planning offices to work collaboratively with other organizations doing community development and human service delivery work at the neighborhood scale;
• an emphasis in many public planning departments on the physical realm of land use and capital improvements, to the exclusion of other often non-physical interests affecting quality of life (human services, education, crime prevention, and economic development).

This project explored the way in which this new form of collaborative planning can take place by:

• examining the current state of neighborhood planning as practiced by city planners;
• setting forth the issues that stand in the way of full collaboration in the neighborhood planning;
• exploring models and examples of successful collaborations that improve the quality of life in neighborhoods;
• recommending how state planning legislation can support collaborative neighborhood planning;
• setting forth a policy for the American Planning Association in support of good practice and overall policy in this area.

In addition, as a result of this project, APA intends to open discussion with its potential collaborators and within the field of city and regional planning.