Citizen Engagement in Practice - Informing Digital Futures: Strategies for Citizen Engagement - page 61

and community leaders alike recognized the need to improve the relationship
and rebuild trust. When community leaders identified a need to redevelop
the main commercial core of the Pilsen district (18 th Street) as an attractive
commercial area and to address problems such as urban decay and crime,
they saw an opportunity to bring all stakeholders together, including univer-
sity staff and local residents, in a participatory planning and design initiative
(Al-Kodmany 1999).
A planning team was formed comprising 25 community residents, in-
cluding representatives of the 18 th Street Commission, and two planners,
two architects and an artist from the university. The university's highest
priority for the engagement was to build community trust. The team's ob-
jectives included:
• creating a mutually respectful partnership with Pilsen residents;
• preserving the history of the neighbourhood;
• providing a broader understanding and context of urban issues;
• exploring effective visual communication methods.
The process began by exploring current conditions in the neighborhood.
The university team members soon realized however, that the techniques
they were using to present information to residents (mainly slide images
presented by projector in a fixed sequence) were not promoting meaning-
ful public participation. This technique did not allow participants to visual-
ize new developments in context, and participants became focused on
small details of existing sites, rather than “ applying their community
knowledge and expertise to develop overall strategies and solutions ”
(Al-Kodmany 1999). The UIC team therefore sought a visualization envi-
ronment which would promote full citizen engagement. To do this they
embarked on building an interactive geographical information system
(GIS) image database. Existing maps, photographs, tabular detail, and text
information about the Pilsen district were used to create thematic layers re-
lating to, for example, demographics, transportation, housing and property,
economics, history, and crime statistics. The GIS provided critical contex-
tual information but this needed to be supplemented by a way of creating
and manipulating visual representations of new ideas. This facility was
provided by a graphics artist, trained to draw urban scenes, using an elec-
tronic sketchboard which was linked to the GIS. The artist captured par-
ticipants' wishes and concerns and produced rapid sketches that could be
evaluated and annotated. Participants were also able to draw their own
visualizations on the sketchboard.
These two tools were used during the course of a series of planning
workshops; two screens enabled the presentation of the GIS images and