Improving Community Engagement in Toronto's City Planning Process
Affiliation
Global Goals Jam Toronto
Duration
3 days
Site
Regent Park Community Centre
Role
User Researcher, Visual Designer
Team Members
Nishanth Bharadwaj, Titilope Onabanjo
Céline Genest, Ingrid Viviana García
MY ROLE
Interviewer
Visual Designer
User Research
TOOLS
Behavioural Archetype
UI Design
METHOD
Field Research
Brainstorming
Project Background
Global Goals Jam is a worldwide initiative that brings people together to contribute to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals. This year, the Institute without Boundaries (IwB) hosted the Global Goals Jam in collaboration with Cooperathon and Claro Ventures at the George Brown College School of Design in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
The School of Design housed a co-creative space, bringing together students, recent graduates, and professionals from different disciplines to create meaningful design solutions and interventions that are meant to contribute to a sustainable future.
Individuals were brought together and divided into six groups to tackle the following challenges as part of this Global Goals Jam:
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Respite sites & emergency shelters
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Virtual employment
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Upskilling & retraining
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Experimental entrepreneurship
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Citizen engagement
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New immigrant employment program
Problem Space
“In Toronto, the typical demographic at city planning engagement events are male, over the age of 55, educated and a homeowner. A key challenge is reaching a broader demographic, including youth.”
- Daniel Fusca, City of Toronto.
The public engagement process significantly influences policy-making and city development. The City of Toronto is currently evaluating its public engagement process and exploring innovative methods of improving public engagement to enhance city development.
Our team was introduced with the following problem space statement:
Problem Space Statement
How might we use technology to empower residents to be involved in the decision making process for the evolution of the city?
Understanding the Problem at Hand
The City of Toronto currently utilizes various planning tools to develop and evolve. The most important of which is the Official Plan - which acts as the blueprint for the city and sets out policies to guide how the city should grow and change. Per the City of Toronto’s website, every year, the Planning Committee engages as many as 20,000 residents through public meetings alone, and many thousands more are involved online.
There is a flow chart available to the public that illustrates the process and actions that occurs when a property owner wants to redevelop a plot of land (Development Application Submission)
Current City of Toronto's Development Application Submission
Field Study
Our group commenced the project with ambiguity, which allowed us to develop a fresh understanding of the given problem space statement. As an initial step to learn about the given problem, our team conducted a field study at Regent Park Community Centre to speak to community members.
Nishanth B. Observing a Vandalized City of Toronto Notice Board on the way to Regent Community Centre
At Regent Park Community Centre, we connected with a Youth Worker, Peter Kawano, where he enlightened us about the community and his experience regarding community participation during the redevelopment of Regent Park.
Regent Community Centre
The Community Centre was a portion of the larger-scale Regent Park Revitalization project, completed in early 2016. The new facility offers dozens of rooms for a variety of activities, including a modern fitness facility and a climbing wall.
We learned that public consultations were split into two phases. With several focus group discussions, stakeholder advisory group meetings, and, to our interest, youth working sessions where participants were between the ages of 13 to 24.
Peter recalled that the focus groups, specifically the youth groups, were all able to voice their opinions. The youth group envisioned the space to be a youth-friendly community centre that included welcoming spaces with more colours, comfortable furniture, etc. They also wanted the community centre to include electronics rooms, climbings walls, basketball courts, and outdoor green space.
When Peter was asked about his experience when witnessing youth participating in public consultations, he stated it was a positive experience. The community was able to see that their voices were taken into consideration during the discussions. Overall, it improved the community in the Regent Park area.
Climbing Wall in the Community Centre
Sketch from Youth Consultation Session
Resident Research
After the field study, our team conducted interviews to learn more about Toronto residents’ first hand experiences when it comes to participating in Toronto’s planning processes.
From the interviews, we learned about the individuals’ positive experience and pain points. We amalgamated our conversations into tangible elements and keywords and categorized them into common themes.
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Pain points
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Motives to participate (Issues individuals care about)
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Familiar technology and communication tools
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Barriers to engagement
Brainstorming Session with Residents' Interview Responses
Behavioural Archetype
Our team built a behavioural archetype map, where we rearranged the amalgamated conversations to determine the interviewees’ goals, needs, pain-points, thoughts, feelings and actions.
During the exercise, we merged archetypes that shared similarities and, as a result, we narrowed it down to two archetypes:
The Resident & The Developer
Discovery
The Gap
The behavioural archetype map illustrated some common points shared across the archetypes. However, we were intrigued that there were critical contradictions amongst the behavioural archetypes, which revealed that there is a gap of understanding between the two archetypes.
The citizen archetype feels unconfident that their participation in the planning is meaningful. On the latter, it is in the developer’s interest to incorporate communities’ input during the public consultations.
Voice of the Resident
“Why would they take my opinion/voices into consideration?”
Kevin Groniger
Voice of the Developer
“Critical for developers to incorporate community’s opinions in the planning process for future developments”
Liem Vu
Our team also learned that the archetypes share some common motives. The resident attends and participates in public consultations when a development affects property values, impact on the commute, and improvement in their community. As for the developers, their motives to engage the city would save the project capital in the long run, lead to good publicity, and avoid challenges in the later stages of planning.
With more understanding of this gap, we redefined the problem space statement.
Problem Space Redefined
How might we bridge the “listening gap” between developers and residents so that residents and communities are empowered to participate in the decision making process?
Gathering the insights, we sought to bridge this listening gap between developers and residents by tailoring our ideation to tackle four themes -- time, location, trust, and awareness.
Ideation
Our team leveraged the insights and the four themes and developed low-fidelity of a web-based decision support tool platform that encourage citizens to co-create together to build the community together.
Our group envisioned this platform to resemble “Slack for Communities.” With key features, such as a dashboard, feed, online participatory processes, and a tool for citizens to find project information, especially educating the public City of Toronto’s planning processes.
Features
01 Time & Location
Our group envisioned an online platform that is readily available for Toronto residents to access to learn about ongoing or upcoming projects.
The Events feature would encourage residents to view and select upcoming public meetings.
02 Trust
The Participation feature: Our group hope to create an ecosystem to foster "build with us" mentality as residents can voice their opinion during the public consultation phase.
The Project Status/Progress feature would allow residents to view an online real-time progress bar for the entire project process.
Lastly, the online platform would enable residents to vote, comment, and submit ideas. The goal is to make participation more accessible and offer residents the opportunity to give their feedback on various ideas or options. Also, it would provide the developers and city planners with the opportunity to respond to resident's comments. Allowing all participants to learn and listen to each other.
03 Awareness
The Home Dashboard feature would include a map that illustrates ongoing, active and previous projects in the GTA. Residents can scale the map to the area of interest or their community to see projects in the proximity.
The My Projects feature would encourage residents to follow specific projects of their choice and get notifications about the project updates, council decisions and project information.
Lessons Learned & Next Steps
Engage the Youth: Over the span of three days, our group witnessed the importance for the City of Toronto, property owners, developers, and the community to collaborate to shape the city. Although our group’s vision was a digital tool to bridge the listening gap between the developers and residents, we firmly believe educating the youth at their earlier stages of life will yield a significant rippling effect.
Featured Judge at Future City Competition 2017
There are many different outreach programs and friendly student competitions across the GTA that all share one goal - to spark people’s interest in planning. To name a few:
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Imagine the future of your city (Hamilton District School Board) partnered with Cadillac Fairview
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City of Toronto’s Initiative: Youth Engagement Hubs
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Future City Competition sponsored by Discovere