City City Bang Bang

This paper addresses the lack of civic engagement in the city planning process and explores tools that can be used to engage residents in novel ways. The aim of this project is to reach residents where they are, not depend on their ability to come to city hall and engage in the traditional structure set out by local government. Knowledge is situated in the context of the community, therefore we are utilizing mobile, pop-up engagement methods. It is the hope that these tools will invite marginalized and underrepresented communities to participate in the planning process, by means of engaging them in conversation bringing awareness of ways to participate in decisions being made at a local level. The solutions will rely on the approach of getting residents involved early on in the design process as co-designers of their shared community. We layout our proposed strategy of implementation which we hope to test in order to better understand successful and unsuccessful ways of engaging traditionally unheard voices in city planning. In this paper we also explain the principles behind our design criteria in order to show the justifications we used to make the guiding decisions for our project and its goals.