Browse Content: Tool, values-based planning

Visioning is a community engagement process that helps people to articulate or define the future they want for their communities. Visioning is often completed in conjunction with a master planning initiative and often looks decades ahead.

“CommunityViz is advanced yet easy-to-use GIS software designed to help people visualize, analyze, and communicate about important community planning decisions.”

The Common Ground process focuses on identifying and working from areas of overlap and consensus in people's viewpoints, rather than focusing on differences and disagreements or necessarily striving for consensus.

Human Geographic Mapping abandons typical political boundaries and maps areas based on natural elements and human interactions. The process is used to outline boundaries and important features based on social networks and scales.

Youth Master Planning, a comprehensive process to plan for issues facing young people, brings together stakeholders including parents, teachers, employers, and youth. This method of community planning is taking hold in cities throughout America.

Sacred Site Mapping is a process pioneered by Randolph Hester in Manteo, NC. This process identifies the "sacred spaces" of a community through mapping, inquiry and validation, combining observation techniques with information gathered from citizens.

Most people remember childhood scavenger hunts, but communities have used the game to build community, identify local assets and character, and sometimes take advantage of new GIS and location-based tools.

Graffiti Walls (or "Idea Walls") are public spaces for citizens to brainstorm graphically. They provide an informal place to help community members generate ideas or suggestions and respond to the ideas of others.

Asset mapping is the process by a community inventories its assets and capabilities. The process can take many forms, but is a positive way of identifying both strengths and gaps and identifying a plan for moving forward.

Stakeholder mapping is a way of geographically showing and analyzing the stakeholders in a situation, along with their relationships, values, attributes, or other information that might impact the situation.