Robert Shipley

Visioning in Planning: Is the Practice Based on Sound Theory?

Visioning became widely used in the planning process during the 1980s and 90s. In its simplest form it is the notion of creating images of the future to serve as goals or guides for planning decisions. For many people the idea of visioning became synonymous with or closely linked to public participation. While hundreds of communities have undertaken visioning, there has been little or no examination of the theoretical underpinnings of the practice. Practitioners of the technique, whether consultants or municipal planners, seem to have worked largely from a set of tacit assumptions about the usefulness of the practice. This study examines literature from various disciplines, refers to planning documents and reports on interviews and questionnaires in order to articulate the underlying assumptions or theory-like statements about visioning and then to measure those assertions against existing research. The resulting analysis shows that while there is a basis to support some of the assumptions about visioning there are also profound weaknesses in parts of the underlying theory. The paper is intended to help both advocates and critics of visioning, as well as those with a more general interest in planning, to better understand and assess visioning and other techniques that enter the professional lexicon.

Making it Count A Review of the Value and Techniques for Public Consultation

Public consultation has become a major part of planning in the last forty years and much has been written on the subject. This article reviews the writing generated over the past two decades and breaks it into sections respecting the theory and rationale behind consultation, the conceivable approaches to engage the public, and the means available to analyze and evaluate consultative efforts. Conclusions relevant to academics and practitioners are drawn as are suggestions from the authors concerning the principal gaps that needed to be filled in order for planners to have reliable tools to evaluate the effectiveness of consultative processes.

Does Adaptive Reuse Pay? A Study of the Business of Building Renovation in Ontario, Canada

Older buildings are important aesthetic, cultural and economic resources but in many jurisdictions hundreds of historic buildings have been demolished because developers and bankers argued that the cost of adapting them for new uses is too high. Still, a growing number of reputable developers are completing exciting projects featuring innovative building renovation. However, when particular development projects are presented to decision makers, generally only the developer/lender’s cost analyses are presented and, therefore, they are unable to make truly informed judgments. This study examines the business of heritage development, which consists of building renovation or adaptive reuse, in order to determine the characteristics of success. In Ontario, Canada, there exists a group of dynamic and creative investors with a passion for older buildings. Some reuse projects are more costly than new building but not all and the return on investment for heritage development is almost always higher. This has important implications in Ontario where recent legislative changes have finally given local councils the authority to prevent the demolition of listed buildings, but the lessons for other jurisdictions are also important.

The Origin and Development of Vision and Visioning in Planning

Vision and visioning are terms now used around the world in planning practice and theory. They refer to a variety of strategic planning techniques and are used in more general discussion of planning. The terms are used by planners as though their meanings were clear but the concepts have not been critically examined. This study traces the origins of the words and the development of the concepts prior to their introduction into planning discourse. The intent is not to narrowly define the terms, which have a wide range of possible meanings, but to provide practitioners and researchers with a background to assist in making their own evaluations of vision and visioning as they are presently applied to planning.

Heritage Designation and Property Values: is there an effect?

This paper describes research that was designed to examine the assertion that historic designation of properties, under the heritage legislation in Canadas largest province, has a negative impact on the values of those properties. The actual selling price of subject properties was used to establish their value history trends, which were then compared to ambient market trends within the same communities. Almost 3,000 properties in twentyfour communities were investigated, in what is believed to be the largest study of its kind ever undertaken in North America. It was found that heritage designation could not be shown to have a negative impact. In fact there appears to be a distinct and generally robust market in designated heritage properties. They generally perform well in the market, with 74% doing average or better than average.The rate of sale among designated properties is as good or better than the ambient market trends and the values of heritage properties tend to be resistant to downturns in the general market.

Visioning diversity: Planning Vancouver's multicultural communities

Abstract The roles and responsibilities of planners in managing culturally diverse cities are beginning to be recognized. “Visioning”, as planners have used it in recent years, has the potential to help realize “multicultural planning” insofar as it involves broad public parti-cipation and represents diverse interests. How the City of Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada has involved ethno-cultural groups through a visioning process is examined. Information for this study was gathered through a critical review of planning documents related to Vancouvers “Community Visions Program” and key informant interviews with staff and community participants, including those of visible minority background. Results indicate that visioning, as it has been used in Vancouver, is a useful technique in carrying out multicultural planning. However, there appears to be more general satisfaction with the inclusive visioning process than with the end results. If planners are serious about engaging in a multicultural planning process, they will need to guarantee some tangible results that can be seen in the community and that acknowledge and respect cultural diversity. “No culture can live, if it attempts to be exclusive.” (Mahatma Gandhi)

Good governance principles for the cultural heritage sector: lessons from international experience

Purpose – The collapse of some prominent corporations over the last ten years has been attributed to poor governance. Not-for-profit agencies are now examining their own governance policies and practices in an attempt to prevent the calamities that have plagued the private sector. Because heritage sites, conservation organizations and heritage-based tourism are significant factors in the social life and economies of many countries, the proper management of cultural heritage initiatives is vital. This paper seeks to undertake the development of a set of good governance principles applicable to the oversight and operation of cultural heritage institutions. Design/methodology/approach – The fifth World Parks Congress, in South Africa in 2003, encouraged the development of governance principles for protected areas based on the UNDP document Governance for Sustainable Human Development. Using these standards as a reference for the cultural heritage setting, UNESCO and ICOMOS charters and conventions, along with documents from National Trusts in specific countries are examined with regard to their relevance to good governance. Findings – A set of good governance criteria and principles including legitimacy and voice, direction, performance, accountability, and fairness, is developed. Practical implications – The paper addresses governance issues and principles relevant to non-governmental and public sector governance in the cultural heritage sector. Originality/value – The paper draws on principles of good governance from several international heritage related agencies, trusts and organizations to develop a set of principles that can be recommended for use in the cultural heritage sector.

Can Vision Motivate Planning Action

IntroductionMany planning exercises today begin with visioning or they express a vision atsome stage. There are jurisdictions that actually require a vision statement in plans.There are no exact agreed-upon definitions, but generally a vision describes adesired future and can take a simple form or can require an entire, complexdocument to describe. However, there has been very little critical study or follow-up evaluation of plans to establish the efficacy of visions and to examine visioningfrom either a practice or theoretical perspective. Do visions actually exert amotivating influence? Here we preview the results from what may be among thefirst attempts to conduct controlled experimentation aimed at understandingwhether and how visions have their intended effects in planning. The experimentsfocused on how visions are communicated and acted upon and draw on a numberof theories and approaches from organizational psychology.Official plans at all levels of many organizations and governments call for theexpression of a vision. In some planning jurisdictions, for example in the UK,vision statements can be a statutory requirement (Roberts, 1996; Peel & Lloyd,2005). Very few planners have not heard of these words, but what do the termsvision and visioning really mean, where did they originate, do they actually helpus reach planning goals, and if so, how do they work?Here we set out first to describe briefly when and how visioning came intoplanning practice and what are its roots. Next we will explain what plannersseem to be doing when they undertake visioning and create visions and we willdescribe some of the problems that appear to be occurring in practice. We willthen provide some theoretical analysis that might help explain how vision andvisioning function as motivating stimuli in planning. For a better understandingof the roots of visioning practice, and for analytical approaches, we will look tothe fields of social and organizational psychology. Finally we will outline theresults from what may be among the first attempts to conduct controlledexperimentation on visioning in the planning milieu. The experiments focusedon how visions are communicated by presenters and engaged by members ofthe community receiving the communication. This work shows that seeminglyminor variations in what is presented in a vision can have a demonstrable

Visioning: Did Anybody See Where It Came from?

Vision and several related terms are now common in planning discourse. This article surveys a wide range of planning-related periodical literature and analyzes the history, rise, and geographic distribution of the use of the terms vision and visioning. Vision has evolved from a product, a pronouncement about the ftiture made by special people, into a visioning process in which whole communities participate. Vision has also come to have a metaphorical as well as a literal meaning. Pitfalls and cautionary points for planners are discussed because little critical thought has accompanied the professions adoption cf vision and visioning.

Evaluating municipal visioning

Until about 15 years ago, the term ‘vision’ was used in planning almost exclusively to describe the innovative ideas that individuals such as L’Enfant, Howard, Wright and Le Corbusier proposed as idealised future city forms (Shipley, 2000). While that traditional idea of the visionary persists (Wells, 2002), over a decade ago the planning profession began to use the words vision and visioning in several new ways. For example, when individuals are described as ‘having vision’, it refers commonly to how leaders inspire others with their thoughts or viewpoints about desired futures. Planners also began to talk about ‘community visioning’, which purports to describe a new method of soliciting stakeholder input for the creation of collective plans (Shipley & Newkirk, 1999). There was virtually no mention of visioning in these contexts before 1990. However, by the middle of the decade articles concerning vision and visioning appeared often in planning journals worldwide. For instance, the April 1995 issue of the American Planning Association’s (APA’s) Planning had three items on visioning, while Britain’s Planning Week for the same date also included several articles related to visioning. Similarly, three of the eight feature articles in the September issue of Plan Canada involved vision. The growing acceptance of visioning in planning practice is illustrated well in the APA Annual Awards for planning. In 1989, one plan involving vision received honourable mention; however, since 1993 two or more vision-oriented plans have been recognised every year (Shipley & Newkirk, 1998; Enlow, 2003). Community visions have been described as pictures of the future and of a particular place (Regional Municipality of Waterloo, 1992). They are thought to be dynamic ways for people to express their goals, descriptions and images of their community far into the future (Klein et al., 1993). Visioning exercises have been used in hundreds of locales across Canada, the USA, the UK, Australia and Africa as part of the processes for developing official plans and plans related to more specific land uses and activities, such as parks and transportation (Newman, 1993; Neill, 1999; Weinberg, 1999). The effort to create a plan for the World Trade Center site after the September 11th terrorist attacks involved 257 workshops where about “19,000 ideas generated in sessions were logged into a