A community’s plan and design impact many parts of everyday life for its residents. Natural and constructed features can enhance connectivity or create barriers to connectedness. Let’s take a closer look at community planning to better understand some of the forces at play when trying to bring value to your community.

The layout of a community never used to cross my mind, but now it does.  It is one of the biggest impact drivers of community, and to most people it is completely hidden or thought of as immovable.

Growing up I drove down the same roads, past the same buildings, over the same interstate and river daily for years without ever thinking about how they impacted my community members’ abilities to connect with one another. I also never spent much time reflecting on how my neighborhood’s home design facilitated and prohibited interactions with neighbors.

Let’s consider two significant aspects of our community’s layout that enable and hinder community connection. Let’s also explore ways to respond to them that lead to better neighborhood integration.

Natural Features

Natural features of a community often influence its organization and development more than most people realize. Older towns often used waterways or water-side areas to establish business and residence. Similarly, towns with flat and accessible areas often saw agriculture and possibly railroads enable a town’s establishment. More recently hills and valleys, water features and forests are expensive to build roads over or through, so many major roadways skirt these obstacles. Less land often leads to higher urban development today (e.g. Japan or major urban hubs), whereas more land around cities often leads to expansion into suburbs and urban expansion outward instead of upward.

There are clearly many ways the geographic surroundings can influence how buildings. roads and towns are established, as well as how commerce and residential development happen. These are important to consider as we look to connect with our neighbors and community.

In my community there is one main road on top of the main hill in our community going East to West where a majority of retail businesses exist, and it’s a thoroughfare into the city. It’s a defacto dividing line between the two high schools in our area. The road serves as a high point from which roads pass through hilly terrain one way to the river, and from it go many of the side roads where residents live. This means that business is predominately in one area, residential housing is denser on one side of the road, and the larger parks and less residential housing are on the other. There’s nothing wrong with this, but it often leads to many unintended consequences as they relate to connecting with other community members.

On a positive note this observation led our community to develop a sidewalk program that seeks to connect residents to this main community corridor through a multi-year sidewalk construction initiative. Also, it has led to more consistent bus routes coming to our community. Conversely, it often keeps residents from going across the road to another place in the township.

Planned Features

Planned features are meant to reflect that a community often has features made intentionally during its design and administration. For example, is the community primarily commercial or residential? Is there heavy manufacturing or retail services? Are there tax incentives for certain industries? Is there a major attraction located in the community (e.g. athletic stadium, concert hall, university, amusement park, etc.)?

All these features impact how people living in the community interact and connect.

Planned features usually come about because there was a vision of a better future with the planned feature in existence. That vision usually has underlying assumptions of what would bring value to that place, which is something to consider as you interact with you community.

Influencing planned features is possible. Participation in committees and events that influence planning is one way to get involved. Also, electing officials with aligned community vision is another way. Look around at the buildings, infrastructure and regulations in your community to see why they are there, what they bring to the community, and how you can use them to connect with others and bring value to the people around you.

Respond with Intent

How a community’s planning and design influences connectedness is unique to each place. Common themes exist. As a community-focused person in the Walk the Block Community, it’s important to notice the features impacting your community and ask important questions. What are impactful features? What can be influenced and what can’t? How do these features bring and separate people and things in our community?

Identifying a specific feature that is a great enabler or barrier to community, and leaning into maximizing the benefit or minimizing the negative impact, can be great ways to help the community come together and grow stronger!

Let us know how you’re impacting your community’s planning and design to bring value to the streets where you live.

Join our Community

Get ideas about how to build a stronger community, be encouraged and inspired about what others are doing, and how you can get started bringing value to where you live! Sign-up for our newsletter.