21st Century Comprehensive Plan: Form

By Ryan Holeywell

For years, comprehensive plans — whether they're produced by municipalities, regional organizations, or other entities — have had a pretty standard format: They're placed in a three-ring binder that sits on the shelf. An identical PDF will usually appear on a government website.

Today, for better or worse, that's still the standard. But in a few places, planners are taking a different approach.

Take Charlotte, North Carolina. When officials there won federal funding to develop a regional growth plan, they knew they had to do something different from the status quo if they wanted their work to be relevant.

"We didn't want just a paper copy of something," says Michelle Nance, AICP, planning director of the Centralina Council of Governments, which represents the greater Charlotte area. "A PDF is static. It just didn't seem right for us, with the variety of communities we've come to represent."

When CCOG set about developing an ambitious new growth plan — spanning 14 counties across two states — it took a different approach: the plan, which debuted in March 2015, is entirely digital, living online at connectourfuture.org.

Visitors can examine regional priorities like "improve air quality" or "increase transportation choices," then drill down to learn more about the strategies the region is implementing to achieve them. The site also has a dashboard where visitors can see the area's progress on a slew of different metrics using data pulled into an easy-to-understand graphic interface.

The hope is that the format will make it easier for different constituencies to focus on their specific priorities. "Because each of our communities is very different, we knew we wanted it to be interactive," Nance says. "It had to be relevant to so many different types of users."

Oklahoma City's new comprehensive plan homes in on seven big ideas. The website was designed with help from Sasaki Associates. Screenshot via Oklahoma City, planokc.org.

A new movement

Across the country, planning departments are starting to rethink the way they present their work, realizing that cumbersome PDFs may be alienating their communities.

"This is definitely something I've been thinking a ton about over the last few years," says Manisha Gadia Bewtra, AICP, analytical services manager with the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, which serves the Boston area. "Why are we doing things in a way that doesn't help people consume information?"

Bewtra and a growing number of other planners are increasingly frustrated with the limitations of old-school PDF and paper documents. Her organization recently helped develop a plan for downtown Lynn, Massachusetts (dtl.mapc.org/WhatWe Learned/Downtown_Planning.html) which had no print component whatsoever. The move initially required officials to embrace a new way of thinking, but ultimately, it made for an easier, more coherent presentation of information, Bewtra says.

"One thing I'd say to planners," she says, "is that they shouldn't be afraid to do experimentation."

Ease of use

Communities switching to digital plans see several benefits. For starters: It's good public relations. PDFs come off as dated. A smartly designed website, meanwhile, can provide help with branding. Web-based plans can also be more accessible to the public, since they're most likely to be discovered through Internet searches (generally, information within a PDF is hard to find unless you know where that file is located). "If something's not on the web," Bewtra asks rhetorically, "does it really exist?"

A digital plan can be easier to navigate, says program planner Geoff Butler, AICP, of Oklahoma City. He also believes that his city's council members and planning commission members — who all have tab-lets — are more likely to regularly use his city's new comprehensive plan if they don't have to carry it around in a cumbersome binder. "You can do two clicks and see what the city's doing about transit and all the initiatives around it," Butler says. "It's a big, thick document if you go through the printed version." Planokc (planokc.org), the city's first comp plan since 1977, was approved last July.

Navigability and portability not only help elected and appointed officials stay informed themselves, but is also a great outreach tool. So, when Joe Constituent asks what the city is doing about transit, an official can just pull out his or her phone, click on the "transit" icon, and show him.

‘One thing I'd say to planners is that they shouldn't be afraid to do experimentation.'

—MANISHA GADIA BEWTRA, AICP, ANALYTICAL SERVICES MANAGER, METROPOLITAN AREA PLANNING COUNCIL, BOSTON

GIS software firm Esri is experimenting with creating 3-D models of cities that can be displayed online within communities' comprehensive plans. This is a screenshot of its template for Boulder, Colorado. Image courtesy Esri.

Next generation tools

But where the movement is really poised to shake things up is by giving developers, planners, and citizens access to next-generation tools.

"We want to move away from the comprehensive plan as a static PDF," says Shannon McElvaney, global community development manager at GIS software company Esri. "What I see in the future for the comprehensive plan . . . Is live data feeds that can be used in your planning efforts."

In Boulder, for example, Esri has created 3-D representations of city plans that could be included in its comprehensive plan, which is currently being updated. "It's been really well received by the public," McElvaney says. "Anybody doing planning and development can look at the context of where they're building."

Esri is also experimenting with how to more dynamically represent form-based codes that may appear in general plans and other documents. Those visualizations could be accessed from any web browser.

And in Houston, the city's first-ever comprehensive plan (planhouston.org) includes a tool that allows visitors to input an address or draw a polygon on a map and see all the existing plans — produced by the city or other entities — that include that location. So far the tool contains more than 200 plans.

Making the switch

Communities that embrace the new method frequently tout their ability to continuously update a plan so that residents can see progress or so that plans can be tweaked more quickly.

"Given the constant development pressure the city is under, it gives us the ability to respond more quickly to development issues," says Vince Papsidero Jr., FAICP, planning director in Dublin, Ohio, which is among the communities taking this next-generation, digital focus to its comprehensive plan update.

In Houston, the plan is online, along with an annual implementation document (which was set to go live last month), that outlines how, exactly, Houston will achieve its goals. Residents will also be able to view various indicators. "We want to remain flexible," says Jennifer Ostlind, AICP, deputy assistant director of Houston's planning department. "We know priorities change. We have a framework. So in that sense, a website is much easier to update regularly."

Yet the ease of updates comes with an obligation to keep the web-based content fresh.

"It requires a big commitment," notes Jeff Reichman, principal at January Advisors, a consulting firm that helped with the digital presentation of Houston's new plan. "Any time you set up a new website, you're committing to keeping it up to date. People don't want to see old information."

A study released last year by Planetizen found that 53 percent of the planning department websites they looked at had been visibly updated in the last 30 days. At the other end of the spectrum, 18 percent hadn't posted new information in six months.

Reichman can't say exactly how often cities should update the information on their plan's webpage, but it's important to keep it fresh by communicating community members' input and highlight planning department work related to the plan.

Reichman and his team also had to coordinate closely with Houston's IT staff on how to present the plan. The city planning staff wanted the digital plan to look different from that of other city-produced webpages to convey the idea that it was something new. That meant a whole different set of procedures to build and maintain the site.

But others say creating and maintaining an online plan doesn't have to be a cumbersome process. "This is something the average planner with a little bit of web design training can undertake," says Bewtra, the Boston planner. "Obviously people understand there are things you can do with a large budget . . . But you can do quite a bit with a lean budget as well."

Potential pitfalls

Still, roadblocks can arise. Bewtra says there's a risk that the type of visually appealing widgets used to provide live updates within a plan could become defunct or face glitches over time. Stakeholders need to clearly decide who's responsible for website upkeep.

She also notes an even broader concern: the risk that the web just feels more ephemeral than print. "You can't anticipate completely how information will be viewed in the coming years," she says. In other words, planners need to figure out how to archive and maintain their web-based plans for posterity.

Case in point: The last time Boulder updated its general plan, it presented the information online with lots of hyperlinks and searchable functionality. But when the city later revamped its entire website, much of that work vanished. "That's one of the challenges you find with things being fully embedded," says Lesli Ellis, aicp cep, Boulder's comprehensive planning manager. "If you make changes to your system, you have to have update the plan too."

Reichman said one easy way to avoid this is to give the plan its own website that's separate from the rest of the city website. Plan Houston's website is supported by the same staff that maintains the city's website, "but it's not folded into the same Internet behemoth," Reichman says, which may protect it from any wholesale changes that occur to the city's website in the future.

Print lives on

Despite the shift to online presentations, print documents aren't dead quite yet.

The Centralina COG, for example, is among several planning departments that developed a magazine- style document to share with stakeholders and local elected leaders who "like to show it off," says Nance, the council's planning director. Those types of resources are also useful for community members who aren't comfortable with the Internet but still want to be informed about planning. "There are some folks who just don't operate that way," she says.

In Houston, the planning department knew from the onset that it wanted its plan to be housed online. But the city staff soon realized there wasn't an exact legal mechanism in place for the city council to approve a website. It had to develop a more traditional PDF as well, simply so the council could have a document to vote on.

And in Oklahoma City, even though the vision was always to have the plan appear on a dynamic website, the process began with creating a traditional print document as a way to help planners think about how to organize it. "It's distinct," says Butler of a physical document or a static PDF. "You know the beginning and the end and you can send it through the planning commission and city council."

Ryan Holeywell is senior editor for Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research.