Greenbuild 2014 Charrette: Powering Community

This year’s Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, the US Green Building Council’s premier event for sustainable building, is just around the corner!
 

We are excited to share some details about a special, interactive session at this year’s conference that members of evolve and our local partners are facilitating. If you’re attending, we hope you will join us Wednesday, October 22 at 8:00 am in Meeting Room 338 at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans. Christine Mondor and Anna Rosenblum from evolveEA have teamed-up with Fred Brown from the Kingsley Association to provide charrette participants with hands-on learning experience based on our ecodistrict planning and related work in Larimer and other neighborhoods in the greater Pittsburgh area.
The session is designed to help participants:

• Identify the relationship between community capacity and the need to move from activation to participation to vision, implement, and steward high performance systems at the neighborhood scale.
• Identify examples of four methods of community activation, including Measuring to Manage, Tribe Building, Creating the Commons, and Kicking the Tires.
• Identify how instruments like  toolkits,  simulations and  games change the paradigm of community participation to activation, and recognize each tool’s best use, including education, visioning and action.
• Apply what they have learned to create their own tools for use in community-scale projects.

LEED for Neighborhood Development (ND) and ecodistrict planning set ambitious goals for the design of the physical environment or the “hardware” of a community, but many formats are fairly silent on the social environment or the “software” of community and culture. High performing urban systems require innovative engineering and design as well as community capacity to imagine, implement and steward the systems. In this session we’ll demonstrate how high performance neighborhoods are best built by empowered communities and identify opportunities to build community capacity through the planning and design processes. Creating community capacity is not a one-time affair or a singular event but is an ongoing process.

In our session, we will present four ways that a planning project can leverage community capacity. We will demonstrate how these methods cultivate authentic leadership and strengthen decision making mechanisms, while developing legal structures for equity and financial resiliency. Our presentation will compare emerging tools for engagement and will discuss how these tools change the paradigm of community participation to community activation. We will discuss where each tool is best suited for use, including education, visioning and action. Session participants will leave with methods and tools to help move communities from planning to action.
Our work has taught us that “The Race Is Really The Prize” when it comes to powering communities. Join us at Greenbuild to discover what this means!