Category / Engagement / Planning
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Student Streets Create Healthier Neighbourhoods
The Daily School Route (DSR) is an enhanced approach to active school travel that creates active transportation systems for kids. The DSR sees kids as “transportation users” within their own system and creates a network of routes, called Student Streets, to help facilitate safe, effective active school travel. The goal is to see 100 per…
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Expanding Access To Bike Share
One of the challenges of the Bike Share system, like all forms of public transportation, is encouraging and ensuring that a broad diversity of people, ages, genders, cultural and racial backgrounds, as well as physical abilities and incomes can access this public resource. In that vein, the Everyone Rides Initiative (ERI) is dedicated to making…
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Building a community hub: From concept plan to implementation
YWCA Hamilton recently opened the doors of the Putman Family YWCA, a renewal of their location at 51 Ottawa Street North in Hamilton. The new facility is a dynamic community hub combining affordable housing, economic development infrastructure, and state-of the-art green building technology. As is the case with many successful projects, planning was key right…
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Using technology to boost participatory planning
The use of technology to help with public engagement in the planning process has seen a big boost during the COVID pandemic. While physical distancing requirements have limited traditional models of engagement, such as PICs or open houses, it has also exposed how, in many ways, these methods are no longer the best and only…
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Our Participatory Planning Toolkit
Civicplan takes a participatory planning approach to engagement that is multifaceted and flexible. It begins by understanding the type of engagement that works best for clients so that we can design a custom process to meet their needs. We work to set clear expectations about the nature of engagement, whether it is seeking simple feedback,…
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COVID-19 is inspiring healthier street design in Canadian cities
As communities adjust to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, a vibrant global discussion is taking place about how cities should provide more street space to facilitate safer physical distancing. Even with staged re-openings, the expectation of a second wave has planners thinking about how to design streets to anticipate a new normal over the…
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Engaging Neighbourhoods Using Technology for Participatory Planning
Participatory Planning is a way of doing planning that puts residents at the centre of decision making in their community. Paul Shaker, RPP, is a principal and co-founder of Civicplan, a Hamilton-based company that has developed a participatory planning platform called PlanLocal to help residents engage more directly in planning their neighbourhods. It combines elements…
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Citizens shaping the spaces around them
How a carefully layered participatory planning process gave community residents a voice in municipal spending. Deciding how to spend money on neighbourhood infrastructure improvements is no mean feat. Which projects get the money over others, or do you divide the spend evenly across all potential ventures? Assuming a split according to greatest needs, how do…
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Hamilton’s SoBi Delivers on Key Bike Share Promises: User Engagement Highlights
Why Bike Share? Cities across North America from Atlanta to Vancouver have established bike share programs to address a variety of urban issues and policy objectives. Promoting cycling as a means of everyday transportation supports public health officials, city planners, environmental advocates and sustainably minded transportation planners. In general, bike share programs promise to encourage…
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Crowd Maps: Painting the Big Picture through community engagement
How do you get more people to engage effectively in planning their community? That’s a constant question we face as we design and launch planning projects. While there isn’t a one size fits all approach, there are tools that tend to be more helpful at getting people to express themselves. Online tools can be very…
