"Community Guide to Conducting
a Successful Charrette "
Walkable Communities, Inc., is pleased to provide this
guide for 5-day charrettes to assist your community in creating visions or plans.
Charrettes can be planned for any length of time, from one day to two weeks. More complex
and significant projects require at least 5-day programs to bring the strong, positive
outcomes expected. The Walkable Communities, Inc. consultant staff will work with your
local community leaders staff to create strong, common visions that will be useful in
developing corridors, village centers, or community plans. This guide includes the
following sections: Introduction, Charrette Participants, Suggested Schedule, Scope of
Services, Budget, Other Services and the principle Walkable Communities charrette team
members.
Part One - Introduction
What is a Charrette?
A charrette-style workshop
is a visually engaging, interactive, and collaborative series of public workshops, focus
groups, field condition inventories and design sessions. It offers opportunities for
friendly, informal discourse and debate among community citizens, and the process achieves
workable visions and solutions for specific neighborhoods or a whole community. Town
building charrettes require a minimum of five days. Preferably they include seven days of
work product development. Shorter length charrettes may be used for easily addressed
issues.
Charrettes Build Ongoing Support for Community Development.
A further intent of the charrette-style workshop process is the
development of a cadre of citizens and business leaders who learn ways of supporting
long-term town building. A sense of ownership in neighborhood and town development evolves
from most charrettes.
Charrette Products.
Charrettes can be used for
anything from reaching consensus on long-term visions for town development, to finding
workable agreements on single projects. Charrettes identify short-term and long-term
problems and issues, that are important to residents and business leaders. Charrettes also
identify opportunities and needs. They turn town planning from a reactive to a pro-active
process. Charrettes build both immediate and long-term solutions. Participants usually
require an immediate result. Short-term steps are outlined as part of the work product.
Implementation strategies are also suggested. Policies and principles are established for
future decision making and town development. For charrettes to be successful, everyone
taking part must be active and listen to the concerns and issues of others. The community,
as a whole, comes first. Project recommendations must be based on seeking outcomes that
improve conditions for the greatest number of people and provide for the long-term health
of the community.
Some short-term losses or inconveniences by individuals must be anticipated, if
long-term growth and development is to occur. The charrette process combined with other,
local, follow-up actions will lead to more successful decisions and a healthier community.
Principles Applied To Decision Making.
Walkable
Communities, Inc. offers technical aid and process assistance to create a common community
vision. Such a vision should help resolve key land preservation, community development,
economic health and transportation systems management issues. The outside assistance will
work best if a broad group of people and interest groups take part. Each group and
individual must agree to work together to reach a workable, collaborative and meaningful
community vision.
In summary, here are some essential principles on how to proceed:
(1) All visions are based on 20-year, future outcomes.
(2) Vision comes before planning.
(3) All groups need to be part of the visioning process.
(4) All citizens and residents will be impacted by these decisions.
(5) Pro-active planning needs to take place before anything is built.
(6) Reactive planning is futile and leads to muddled, senseless places and unhappy
people.
(7) Every business and every citizen of every age and ability is considered in the
outcome.
Organizing the Children’s Charrette.
A
number of charrette activities tap into the unique abilities of children. Walkable
Communities teams like to include children, because they are the ones who will benefit
most from successful charrettes and community visions. Children have insights that adults
often lack, and their visions and summary reports and to the adults sometimes help
consensus building on issues that can be mired in self-interest. You will need to make
arrangements (time and place) for activities with the town’s children. Here are some
suggested activities and steps.
- Third or Fourth Grade Classroom Activity - Please make arrangements in advance for two
of our team members to meet with children for a 40-50 minute activity. A classroom setting
is ideal. The teacher should be present. We will be asking the children how they got to
school that day, asking them why walking and bicycling are important to them, and asking
them what could done to make walking better in their town. We will also ask the children
to take paper and markers (or crayons) and draw maps from their homes to school. We
discuss the results of this brief session at the end of the charrette.
- Eighth Grade Classroom Activity - Please make arrangements in advance for two of our
team members to meet with children for a 40-60 minute activity. We will need to organize
the class into groups at tables with 4-6 students per table. Large 1:100 scale maps of
town, tracing paper and marking pens are needed. We will ask students to give us their
advice on where parks, trails, stores, and new public buildings and facilities should be
located and to summarize their ideas on map overlays of town.
- Children’s Mini-Charrette - Please arrange through several local churches, parks
and recreation or other community programs to recruit 15-25 children that can work on more
extensive town development projects. Children will be interviewed, assigned to small work
groups according to age. They will help map the town of their dreams. The children will
present their findings to the adults on the evening of day five of the charrette. We will
need to recruit one or more adults who work with Parks and Recreation or church groups to
be present to assist with the program. One or two of our staff will oversee this
mini-charrette.
Part II Charrette Participants and Suggested Schedule
Recommended Participants. The sponsoring
community must do most of the lead work and most or all of the follow-up work to a
charrette. The charrette staff, like doctors, are there to identify symptoms and
opportunities. Experience has shown that knowledge of local conditions and needs and the
spirit and passion to create better communities, already exist in the towns that we
assist. Our role, as facilitators, is to tap into the wealth of local knowledge, to remind
people that they know best what to do, and to give them the courage to move forward.
Successful charrette plans or visions require a "buy-in" from all players in the
community. Here are some suggested interest groups to include and involve.
- Community Development
- Economic Development
- Parks & Recreation
- Transportation and Transportation Services
- Emergency Responders
- School Administrators
- Church Leaders and Social Workers
- Children and Teenagers
- Neighborhood and Political Leaders
- Others
We urge communities to invite additional local talent.
Local Design Team Volunteers. We urge local
citizens to join the team. These people must have talent and time and be willing to work
on products such as renderings, drawings and sketches to help create community vision. If
you have other consultants, such as transportation or environmental engineers, planners or
development staff, who you wish to be trained or gain experience from the input of
citizens and work groups, they are welcome to join the charrette design team as
volunteers. With past charrettes we have found the people from the following professions
willing to contribute time to the charrette process:
- Architects
- Civil and Transportation Engineers
- Landscape Architects
- Neighborhood and Business Leaders
- Environmental Scientists
- Computer Graphic Specialists
Common Charrette Participants. This list is not
exhaustive. Please add to it and attempt to get the broadest representation of folks to
take part in one or more sessions:
- Town/City/County Staff
- Local Merchants/and or Chamber of Commerce
- Downtown Merchants' Associations
- Other Business Leaders
- Manufacturers, Distributors, Other Related Businesses
- Neighborhood Associations
- Economic Development Groups
- Conservation & Environmental Organizations
- School & Youth Organizations
- Bicycle, Walking, Other Outdoor Organizations
- Health & Fitness Organizations
- Civic & Garden Clubs
- City Council & County Commissioners
- Planning Commissioners
- Emergency Responders
- Church Leaders and Social Workers
- Groups representing people with disabilities
- Neighborhood Leaders
- Regional Transportation Representatives (including area MPO)
In some cases prominent leaders or staff from nearby communities, who need to working
with your community on regional issues, can benefit from participation in the charrette.
This benefit is especially true on key economic and transportation issues. Be sure to
invite those people you feel you will want to work with most in the future.
Note: Would the community like us to make presentations to local civic clubs during our
stay? We could ask for problem identification from these groups and possibly distribute a
survey form at these meetings. If you are interested, please schedule presentations.
