Memphis Math: A Formula for Meaningful Engagement

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If people aren't comfortable, you get conversations that are really short, that are really that go into depth. You get yes, no answers. You don't get the on and on explanation. Sometimes people are a little too comfortable, but that gives us some really good information that we can then make meaningful.

Planners hear a lot from residents, their frustrations, hopes, fears and specific requests. But the hardest part is proving what happens next. Christina Edingborough, a municipal planner in Memphis, believes the missing link is meaningless, showing people that what they said didn't disappear into just a summary paragraph in a comp plan. Hi, I'm Megan Stromberg, Editor in Chief of the American Planning Association and the host of People Behind the Plans, an APA Podcast. In this episode, Christina unpacks what she and her team call Memphis Math. It's a system they use to turn open ended community feedback into quantifiable data that can directly inform planning recommendations. She walks through how Memphis builds trust through transparent note taking, public documentation of community comments, and a method that measures what topics are widespread, what issues people care the most about, and whether different neighborhoods are even talking about the same thing. The result is a clear line from we heard you to here's what we're recommending in the plan for your community. Hi Christina, it's so nice to have you on People Behind the Plans.

Glad to be here.

Before we get started talking about what you're doing in Memphis, I'm curious about how you came to planning. Did you take a traditional route or something else?

At this point I don't believe there is a traditional route to planning. Most of the folks that I know didn't learn planning was a thing until they were already in college. Like I didn't know that planning was a thing until I was a senior in college as an urban studies major. My advisor said the questions that I was asking were planning questions and I was like that sounds lame. I'm not going to do that. So went into the beautiful world of community development and worked there for what seems crazy but almost a decade before I became a municipal planner. After working in community development for a little bit, I remember what my advisor and college soul meant. Go get a planning degree. And so I went to the wonderful, beautiful University of Memphis, became a Memphis Tiger, studied city and regional planning here, still didn't come and be a minuscule cleaner, worked for a local community development corporation and then for community development intermediary before finally coming to the city two years ago.

If you think back to your significant career in community development, how did it prepare you to be a planner? Or is it different worlds?

They are similar, but different. Community development for the most part is in the nonprofit space, right? So it's a lot more hands on. It's a lot more grassroots, interacting with people. But now as a municipal planner, you know, I'm the government and to most of the general public, the government is just that doesn't matter if we're talking local, state, federal, you're just the government. So that's been one of the biggest adjustments in the community development world, is something that I hope that I've brought over well into the planning world. It's just the need to show up and show up well and being able to explain what you're saying in a way that people will actually be able to process and move forward. Your regular neighborhood grandma probably doesn't speak development, so being able to translate development language into neighborhood language was a lot of the work. And I find that it's been a piece that I'm glad I get to feel here. Working with the city of Memphis in the comprehensive planning office is being able to go back to neighbors and say, all right, you're upset because you got a notice about a setback.

They just want you to move your fence. Like those types of conversations that sometimes get lost in the technical jargon.

But it sounds like you have an experience of not just translating planning and community development topics to others, but a real knack and skill for listening to what people have to say.

The need to listen in a way that is actually meaningful is really, really the only way that you can move anything forward in the community development world. When I'm dealing with a bunch of grants to move anything forward, right. Or I'm dealing with some level of philanthropy, I need to be able to show that this is actually going to impact people. This development project is something that communities want. It's something that it is expected of anybody that's giving you money to be able to produce. What was a little wild when I came into local government is that that expectation simply wasn't there. It's, you're the government, you know what you're supposed to be doing. You're the technical experts. There's nothing that you have to prove that you actually listened. And so this whole framework came about because of the need to listen and need to prove that we listened In a way that's actually meaningful.

Let's get into it. Let's get into this framework that is happening in Memphis that you and your team have developed. Because I think it's something pretty special. So when you and I talked before you called it Memphis Math. Can you give us a sense of what it is you're doing?

This is my passion project, so if I start rambling, let me know. Pull me back. So the listening piece. We have three metrics of listening. To listen well, you need an environment that is safe. You need an environment that is comfortable. You need an environment that is meaningful. Safe, comfortable, meaningful. The thing that we run into a lot and the reason behind all of this is people drop off at the meaningful part, right? Planning has been excellent over like the last 20 years of really embracing the need for quality engagement. Right? Getting people in the room, getting people to have the conversation. But then what do we do with that information? Did it actually mean anything? Right? Did it go anywhere? You can't really do that unless you can track it. So the safe, comfortable, meaningful. Really quickly, safe community members leave saying, I could show up there. Nobody's going somewhere where they don't feel safe, full stop. Safety for us means a lot of pre engagement work means a lot of pre listening, knowing what people are going to need when they get there, to get them there. Safety for us means at some of our meetings in the past, we did bus vouchers or rideshare vouchers.

Knowing that I can get to this place and back home safely. Our second level picture this as a pyramid. Sacring's at the bottom is the fundamental foundation of everything. You can't have a comfortable meeting that's not safe, that doesn't feel safe for us. Comfort means I can speak up here for comfort. That means that we have addressed biases, we have done the internal work to make the language or the things that we're talking about in a planning sense approachable and people actually know what we're talking about. That we as planners have done the internal work, we've done the facilitation training, we've done all of the things that we can do to make these conversations comfortable, right? Comfort does not mean that there's no angry people. Right? Angry people are something you can control. Right? We understand that people are coming in with very valid reasons, sometimes could be angry, even if they're missing a piece of information along the way. And so they're angry about it, that's fine. If people aren't comfortable, you get conversations that are really Short that really go into depth. You get yes, no answers. You don't get the on and on explanations.

Sometimes people are a little too comfortable, but that gives us some really good information that we can then make meaningful. So if we have something that is safe, people showed up, it was comfortable, they felt in a way that they could actually speak up. And then meaningful is what I said here matters and what I said here needs something else. So we tell people all the time as planners, we are professional recommenders. Nobody built it for me. I don't sit on any boards. Everything that I'm doing is a recommendation for somebody, right? But I can prove that what they said in that meeting was meaningful to that recommendation because of the Memphis math.

I just have to say I love this idea of Memphis math and I hope it becomes a planning term because I know I said we weren't going to get too technical because you have written a PAS memo that goes into this in more detail, but just to get a little bit more wonky, tell us a little bit about how you receive feedback and catalog it. I guess, for lack of a better word, you receive it, you track it, then you confirm it. Take us through that path of that first comment you hear to it becoming data that serves the comprehensive planning effort.

It's really sparks in that comfortable piece, right? The questions that we ask are always open ended. What we're trying to avoid is coming in and saying, hey, neighborhood, you want this? Trying to avoid that at all costs. I came up with a really silly explanation, but I think that it will keep people out of like the really niche level of it. If I went to a community meeting and I had done the work to make it safe so people could show up and I asked the question, tell me about your favorite food. The way that we ask the questions, the way that we are recording it, the way that we are showing the people that we're listening is going to give a better answer. So at every single one of our meetings, we work in tables. So like small group discussions, we have a facilitator, we have a recorder. They're a team. The only thing that makes it back to City hall is what is on this gigantic sticky note and what's on the map in front of us. So what data we're collecting is very, very, very, very specific, right? It says whatever is on this board is what goes back to City hall, which means the table themselves have to agree with what's on the board.

That's our first level of consensus. We do facilitation training and Recorder training with staff. So anybody who's working with us, we sit down, we say, these are the types of questions. The biggest thing for planners is let people be technically incorrect. We don't need any. Well, actually that's really important for building.

Trust and accepting what people have to say as expertise.

Exactly. Another one of our rules we're recording and facilitating is write down what the people say very specifically. And that's really critical in building our data set. If you don't know what they mean, ask them, say, can you follow up on that? Can you expound on that? And that gets back into that comfortable place. And so we come back to City hall with stacks on stacks on stacks of these notes with topics in a bunch of contexts that sometimes are wild, that are sometimes differ from meeting to meeting, table to table. So silly example, our tables are the 50 United States. And we asked them, what's your favorite food? And 10 of them said barbecue. When we get to meeting pool, my state said barbecue. How does that differ? How does that compare to other things? And that's where the Memphis math comes in.

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Now I'm gonna try not to get too deep. Okay.

All right. We got a pretty smart audience though, so...

I know. So our Memphis Math measures three things. First, the geographic breadth of the conversation. In Memphis, our city is. 325 square miles is a huge, huge city. Right. We have 14 planning districts within that city. Those 14 districts vary massively. Right. One district is interested, the other district may not be interested in it at all. And so if there's an alignment, a significant alignment of like people in half of our planning districts mentioned this when asked this open ended question. We know that that's some type of major thing that we want to care about. So in our silly example, we ask America what's her favorite food? We're going to make up 10 states at barbecue. That's something that's significant. Barbecue is an American thing. We should care about this. That's our first level of metrics. Our second level of metrics will say, all right, but how deeply do people care about this? Some of the folks who said barbecue, they just said it because it was on the list. I don't know. And then if you're talking to a Texan they care a lot about it. Right. They spent their whole entire meeting talking about brisket.

So in our purposes in our city, maybe the issue is affordable housing. Well, yeah, lots of districts mentioned it, but this particular district, half of the tables in the room talked about this one thing. It's significant. So brisking measurements is how widespread of a conversation is. Second thing we measure is how deep it goes. Like, do people actually care about this? And the third thing we measure are people actually talking about the same thing. Chose barbecue on purpose. Because if Ohio said barbecue, they're probably talking hamburgers and hot dogs like, yeah, good old barbecue. But if the Carolinas are talking about barbecue, they're talking about three, four different sauces. Is it mustard? Is it vinegar? If you're talking about Kansas City, they're talking about tomato based sauce. Memphis, we don't even believe in sauce. Like, when we get into the actual nitty gritty, those context clues that we put in that comfortable meeting, we can start talking and thinking about the nuances between this big topic of barbecue, or in our case, affordable housing. We call that language consistency. Are they talking about it the same way, using affordable housing? Again, if half of our districts are talking about naturally occurring affordable housing versus the other half is talking about subsidized affordable housing, and this group over here, this particular district, when they were talking about subsidized affordable housing, they cared a lot about it.

Now we can say that there are 75% consensus in north district about this topic compared to this topic as it came up in south district where There is only 20% consensus at the individual tables. Overall, they were talking about the same things, but it wasn't weighted the same. Once you have that information, you can map it so you can go to.

The website affiliated with the comprehensive planning process and anybody can check and see what was said and what was captured, whether the planning department really did its job of capturing the issues that are important to all 14 districts.

Correct. So if you go to our website now on the five year update page, you just have notes, so many notes. Every map that went to a meeting, all of the notes. But yes, the idea is that it's just public. You know exactly how people are using it, you know exactly what community members said. One of my favorite things about presenting things this way is that every time we go back and talk to a community member and we have this information, they say, oh, that was my comment. I was the one that said that. And they get excited and they get really excited because they can see that, oh, what I said Actually made it into like the big city plan. Right. That's always a joy. I'm like, yeah, we were listening the whole time. And we can now prove it. Which builds community trust. But another benefit of it, it builds institutional memory. Because I joke that local government has a new local government every time there's a new mayor. So every four to eight years, there's a new government. And after a certain administration leaves, after certain planning staff leave, a lot of times that information of why did we make this policy decision?

Why did we pursue this study? This plan gets lost. Oh, it was just in the heads of the planner before. This is something that will live on past all the planners who are in the office currently.

Well, and that loss of institutional knowledge as politics change and staff changes, that's not a Memphis problem. That's an everywhere problem.

That's an everywhere problem.

I'm just so struck as you're talking about what a labor intensive process this must be. How did you get the support within the city to do the work this way?

I'm so happy because I get to talk about cool people. So our current mayor of Memphis is an urban planner, Mayor Paul Young. And so he's been very nice, very kind to us. We have a chief of development and infrastructure, that's Chief John Zeanah. He's written a bunch of memos and stuff. Our previous administrator, her name's Kendra Cobbs. A gem, an absolute gem, really let us sit down and run with it. We just had the staff support. We have to argue with people to do this. We just kind of did it. I understand and I recognize that it's not the case places and it's not. Has not been the case in the city of Memphis ever before. We had a really cool opportunity and a really cool time, and we're glad that we were able to do so and produce something that so awesome. I am so excited. Yeah, absolutely.

It sounds like you had a tremendous opportunity to create this formula and to do the work. And one hopes that you can systematize it, continue to work on that, and that it could be, you know, something other places could adopt. And that's something I want to talk about too. But let's get back to what community engagement was like in Memphis before. Am I remembering correctly that this is the first comprehensive plan in a long time?

These are a lot of working class people who, for the longest time, to get anything done, community members were doing it themselves. It was never the idea that the government was ever going to do anything. That was part of the idea from a Lot of our older community development corporations and community nonprofits, they function as pseudo government for a long, long time. The City of Memphis had a 40 year gap without a comprehensive plan. The previous Mayor, Jim Strickland. Mayor Jim Strickland was on the team that was like, okay, we get a comprehensive plan. And so Memphis 3.0 is the city of Memphis's comprehensive plan. It was a huge undertaking because there was no planning language we have in a haphazard like zoning, land use and all those things. But, like, long range planning wasn't a thing. And so Memphis 3.0, launched in 2016, wasn't adopted until 2019. In 2024, when I started, we took on the five year update. Adopting a plan in 2019 sounds cool. Until you remember 2020 happened, right? Absolutely. And so when we started in 2024, the Office of Comprehensive Planning had done millions of dollars in public space investment through our Accelerate Memphis project.

Had done a lot of those things, but a lot of that engagement happened online. The planning office, not because they did try, wasn't really back in neighborhoods the way that we would have hoped. Right. So in 2024, when we went back, people are like, another great community comment was, y' all show up every few years like cicadas, make some noise and leave. Oh, wow. That should tell you. Right? And so one of the biggest things that we got was we told y' all that when y' all were here before and because the players who were here before did such great engagement. But it wasn't as trackable as I would hope. It was hard to be like, this is how what you said turned into this project. Now I know it. There's a historic neighborhood named Orange Mound in Memphis. We did some streetscape improvements and the conversation was, well, we didn't know y' all were going to do that. Well, that's because y' all weren't in the conversation for five years. Yes, we did want this project, but we didn't know it was going to be that. And that's kind of where this whole Memphis map thing was birthed out of, is a way to track from what the people said to the actual implementation of the project to be able to go back and do what we wish we could have done beforehand and keep communities involved and keep that clear line of this conversation led to this outcome and making that public and viewable.

I love what you said about the ability to draw a line from something a community needed to its actual implementation. And I think that's a challenge that planners everywhere feel. What advice would you give to other planners in this arena, maybe they don't have the political will to put up the Memphis Math framework. What are some steps they can take to move towards some of the outcomes that you've articulated for us, which are pretty amazing.

Don't be like Memphis and start with the entire confidence of plan update. You can start way smaller. If you are doing any engagement, then just make whatever your engagement is trackable. For us, we did districts because we are a huge, huge city. A reason that the name is Memphis Math is because there are things that matter here. All of those are just variables that can be switched out for something else that matters in your account and matters in your city. Start on one project and if it's scalable, if it produces results, then you can make the argument of like, okay, let's move this. Change all the variables. This is a weighted scale for us. Change the weights. It's very flexible. It's just the idea, it's just the intent. You don't need a huge, huge planning team. It does take time. Like, I'm not going to go a lot of people and say it doesn't take time. But you don't. You really need the intent. Maybe I'll only track what we talk about in the first workshop. Just scale it to what you need because it's just proportions. Also, if you're going to go big, like we did one day in the future, machine learning AI, they'll make this whole thing a lot easier.

But the actual individual coding tags, they will never replace human judgment because of the nuances of conversation. So our joke is we treat AI like the intern, like, let them work, but check everything. That's kind of how we think about it. I think I said last, but for real last, know your people. Like I said, this is absolutely beautiful, beautiful place. I think planners in general have done that safety piece really well. We know how to put on a community meeting, that comfort piece of like, allowing people to speak, allowing no to be an option. That piece is how I actually think that we move this work forward so that it can be measured, so that it can be meaningful. But yeah, those are all the things.

If people want to find out more about the work that you're doing, where would you send them?

You can always check out the Memphis 3.0 website. If you Google Memphis 3, spell out the word point zero. It's under construction, so don't judge us. And then also social media, follow us at Memphis 3.0. And then also you can always just email me scena.edinburghstn.gov I love having these conversations. I love talking to new cities because I don't know everything about anything.

Well, that's an amazing offer. And then of course there's the PAS report and we'll link to that in the description of this episode. This has been a wonderful conversation, Christina. I really appreciate you sharing all you and your team have done in Memphis. It's inspiring.

Thank you. We have fun.

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This episode was sponsored by the Scenario Planning for Urban Futures certificate course from Michigan Engineering Professional Education, May 18th through 20th in Ann Arbor, Michigan, or remotely. Learn more at ope.engin.umich.edu.