Everything Counts in Memphis: Community Engagement for Data-Driven Planning
PAS Memo 127
By Christina Edingbourgh
Planning has a "we said/they said" problem. Residents show up to meetings, share what matters, and leave, hoping their voices count. Planners take notes, write reports, and move forward with plans. Then, years later, communities ask: "What happened to what we said? We said we wanted this, not that." And planners have no answer, no documentation, no proof — just vague memories and filed-away sticky notes.
But what if things were different? What if planners treated community feedback like the data it is: trackable, quantifiable, and traceable from the meeting where residents said it, through the drafts where it was considered, to the policy where it appears (or doesn't)? This wouldn't just be better engagement. This would be engagement planners can prove was meaningful.
The Memphis Division of Planning and Development had an opportunity to test this hypothesis when it began community engagement efforts for the update to its comprehensive plan, Memphis 3.0, in 2024. Staff developed a new framework to collect, analyze, and use community feedback. First, they used abductive and inductive reasoning to interpret community voice with fairness and precision, reasoning from what people said to what they likely meant, without inserting their own assumptions. Second, they applied "Memphis Math" using quantitative tools to normalize input across neighborhoods of different sizes and identify genuine citywide priorities rather than just the loudest voices. And third, they built accountability through a traceable system that creates "receipts," showing residents exactly what happened to their input at every stage of the planning process.
This PAS Memo documents how the Memphis Engagement Framework works, why it works, and how to adapt it to your city.
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About the Author
Christina Edingbourgh
Christina Edingbourgh is the administrator of the City of Memphis Office of Comprehensive Planning, where she leads the Memphis 3.0 five-year update. She brings eight years of community development experience to municipal planning, having previously served as a neighborhood planner for a local community development corporation and later as director of neighborhood planning at a community development intermediary. She began her municipal planning career in 2024, bringing a practitioner's perspective from the community side of the table to reimagining how cities can authentically engage communities and prove that engagement leads to policy change.