Planning for Public Engagement

Public engagement is a key component of planning sustainable places: from an economic, social and environmental perspective. There are many ways to engage the public meaningfully and continuing to engage them in the implementation. This session focuses on practical methods and examples from varying situations to help the attendees after Habitat III implement the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals along with other objectives. The Global Planner’s Network outreach model promotes community engagement and emphasizes long term quality of life through a threefold program: engaging national policy makers, training for local leaders and collaborative demonstration projects. Often a barrier to healthy and inclusive communities is social and political. This session will highlight experience engaging citizens and stakeholders in the planning process. The New Urban Agenda is poised to improve quality of life for millions to enjoy the benefits of urbanization and inclusive development. Planning uniquely embeds the technical aspects of place-making within a participatory framework to build social and political support. This is particularly important in tackling issues of social exclusion and cultural diversity and conflict occurring in many urban areas. It is also essential to empower communities in decision making by harnessing non-technocratic lay knowledge. The members of the Global Planners Network will share community engagement expertise in the Americas, Europe, Australasia and elsewhere. The GPN promotes community engagement and emphasizes long term quality of life by engaging national policy makers, providing training to local leaders and collaborative projects that reinforce these objectives in a real-world setting. Our engagement with governments and stakeholders at all levels promotes transparency, ethical standards, community-driven plans and managing the development process. This session will highlight the elements of GPN's successes in implementing engagement methodology through several examples to inform participants implementing The New Urban Agenda. We will highlight our recent efforts in communicating planning to a wide range of stakeholders and viewpoints, especially reinforcing the economic benefits of planning. In addition, the session will look at specific outcomes of our three part approach.