Visualization

Photo: Workshop participants take advantage of Belfast’s public art chairs while doing fieldwork.

Heart & Soul Community Planning is rooted in the idea that people share common values when it comes to what makes their cities and towns unique. Although the language people use may be similar across communities, the specifics of what people mean by that language can be quite different from place to place.

So how do you get beyond nebulous conversations about “sense of community” to a shared understanding of the specifics of your town? You get on the ground and figure it out.

Two years ago, our Foundation issued a Request for Projects seeking towns in the Northeast and Rocky Mountain regions to experiment with us in developing a Heart & Soul Community Planning approach to local planning and decision-making. One of the towns applying was Acton, Massachusetts, a community of about 20,000 people about 45 minutes west of Boston. They put together a great application, but for our metropolitan-edge community we chose Golden, Colorado.

Well, a few months ago I was contacted by Justin Hollander of Tufts University, who told me that Acton had been so inspired by the goals of our RFP that they decided to proceed even after not being selected to work with the Foundation (got to love that!). Acton, he continued, had decided to use Second Life as one of its tools to engage its residents and provide hands-on planning opportunities focusing on a key commercial area called Kelley’s Corner.

Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities published in 1972 got me thinking about how we imagine the places in which we live, how the imagined places differ from the actual places, and the ways in which the physical structure of a place reflects the minds and desires of the people living there—and vice versa. Cities, in Calvino’s dreamlike tale, are like living, breathing organisms. They are built as much of the emotions and thoughts inspired when walking through them as they are of bricks and mortar. Here’s a passage from a chapter entitled “Continuous Cities”: